Due to the ever-changing digital marketplace and growing competition, it’s important to remain competitive. And this is where SEO comes in handy. It has a vital role to play in the success of any website. As such, it’s a factor you cannot ignore; instead, you need to take it seriously. Search Engine Optimization is crucial to the success of all online businesses.
And over 60% of marketers agree that their primary focus is SEO services when it comes to inbound marketing. Therefore, you can have the best website, but if the SEO is not up to date, it will never compete. With that said, you can maximize your SEO efforts by tackling its technical aspect. And here’s how to perform a technical SEO audit:
Start with Website Crawling
Website Crawl is one of the most important aspects of SEO audit. This action will help you identify significant errors on your sites. And some of these errors include poor images, broken links, bad keywords, and page title errors.
To manage this effectively, consider online tools like Semrush, DeepCrawl, and Spyfu. They’ll highlight these errors and provide reliable recommendations on what needs improvement. To maximize on a crawl, consider the following tips:
- Restrict Indexation
- Eliminate duplicate content
- Fix Redirects
- Allocate URL Parameters
Conduct a Google Search
Conducting a Google Search is an important part of performing a technical SEO audit. It’s resourceful when planning an effective approach. Through this search, you’ll be able to tell how your site ranks. As a result, you’ll know where it’s appropriate to start with technical SEO. Areas you can look into include the position of your site on the Google result page and the rank of your pages on relevant sites.
Further, use the root domain to discover the exact pages on your site being crawled. If you discover these pages, there’s no cause for an alarm. They’re an indication of where the problem might be on your site.
Have one Browse-able site version
Having multiple versions of your site is a bad move. And this is because it will send mixed messages to the search engine. As a result, it won’t know which site to crawl and display to the prospective audience. Because of this, your site will experience poor ranking even when it has resourceful content.
Also, there’s debate on HTTPS vs. HTTP in various SEO communities. But the version that seems to win the day is HTTPS. From findings, sites with SSL protection are ranked better by Google SEO than those without. And this is a trend that seems to grow gradually. For instance some Web browsers like Google Chrome label sites without SSL as not secure.
Orchestrate On-Page Technical SEO audit
Site evaluation, especially after getting the crawl results is one of the strenuous and overwhelming tasks. Luckily, you can make it simple by handling one thing at a time. For instance, start by identifying duplicate pages, title tags, and headers. In this case, use Copyscape or any other online tool to assess technical SEO problems stemming from duplicate content. Thereafter, you can look into key ranking criteria that Google uses. They include:
- Meta Descriptions
- Title Tags
- Page Title
- Keyword placement
- Clear hierarchy
External and Internal Links Management
Websites with well-organized hierarchies have a better SEO ranking. As such, it pays to manage your external and internal links for intuitive navigation by visitors. Sometimes, you may move or delete site pages causing broken links that can irritate visitors.
Thankfully, you don’t have to do this manually. With help of online tools such as Integrity, you can identify and manage broken links. Since Google uses External and Internal links differently during ranking, it’s important to manage both to improve SEO.
Examine the Site Speed
Online users are impatient, and it’s something that Google knows. That means, your audience will not be patient to wait for a page that takes longer to open. And the longer it takes for your page to load, the more prospects you’ll lose. With that said, it’s important to examine your website speed.
And this is where tools like Ubersuggest can be handy. You’ll be able to examine the loading speed of your site on both mobile and desktop devices. If the rank is poor, consider improving the site speed. You can rely on PageSpeed Insights for this action.
Maximize your site’s Analytics and Metrics Comparison
In this step, you’re establishing whether you’re receiving live metric data from the analytic service you’re using. It could be Google Analytics or any other analytic service. If the metric data report is live, that means the code installation was a success. However, if the result is otherwise, then the code installation was poorly done and needs fixing.
To those using Google Analytics, consider situating the tracking code on every webpage header. With the analytics services up and running, now source the metric data from your site root domain search and then compare the two.
If anything the number of pages on both the metric data and room domain search must be similar. If the result is otherwise, then you have pages that are nonresponsive to the crawl request. In this case, address the situation promptly.
Backlink Audit
It’s no surprise that backlinks are one of the essential aspects of technical SEO audit. They ensure that the search engine can discover how valuable your site contents are to online users. As such, it’s worth noting that crawlers look for more than just hyperlinks when it comes to off-site SEO.
In addition, some site crawls are a result of brand mention. Therefore, you need to monitor both off and onsite activities. To carry out a backlink audit, consider help from tools like Ahrefs. They’ll help you in assessing the types of backlinks leading to your site.
Conclusion
Technical SEO is the most crucial out of the three SEO aspects. Whether you have a striking off-page SEO or on-page SEO, it’s all in vain when you’re lagging at technical SEO. Therefore, it matters when it comes to your online business success. While the technical aspect can sound overwhelming, tackle one step at a time and you’ll succeed.
