7 Step Guide to a comprehensive technical SEO audit

With ever-evolving & expanding competition in the digital marketing landscape, success befalls only to those who are ahead of the game.

Search Engine Optimization in 2019 is an effectual weapon that levels the business playing field, much to the delight of small businesses. As, nowadays even startups stand shoulder-to-shoulder with market giants, thanks to the limitless capabilities of SEO.

Search Engine Optimization in recent years has grown on to become a solid means to increase web visibility, drive organic traffic, generate leads & sales.  A recent survey revealed that 61% of marketers trust SEO techniques for inbound traffic.

In this digital era, having a website is no big deal, but making it SEO optimized lays the strong foundation of your business. Doing so, you’ll rank your website high on top-ranked search engines like Google, Bing, etc. For that to happen, a technical SEO audit is indispensable.

To make sure your SEO strategy is heading the right direction, you need to conduct a thorough technical SEO audit. The audit will provide you with valuable insights, how your website is ranking-and- what tweaks you need to make for further ranking improvement.

Yes, a technical SEO audit can be complicated and time-consumption, but here in this post, we’ll be putting forth steps involved to conduct the audit easily & quickly.

But, before we go any further, it is imperative to know what a technical SEO audit is?

It is a process when an SEO professional looks into the technical aspects of a site. Or,  in simple words, determine the SEO health of the website, and what necessary steps you need to take in order to improve it.

Step 1: Website Crawling

Start your technical SEO audit with the crawling of the website, and this is like a rule of thumb for SEO experts worldwide. For crawling, there is a myriad of credible online tools like SEMrush, DeepCrawl, etc.

These online crawlers help in determining many factors such as broken links, poor quality images, issues with page titles, and wrong targeted keywords. The crawler will analyze the content for plagiarism, unlinked links, and too many redirects.

Step 2: Review Sitemap

Once you are done with site crawling, now the second step is reviewing the sitemap. The sitemap is fundamental to your SEO success. It provides search engines complete information about the site's structure. And, allows search engine crawlers to discover the recently created or updated web pages.

So, to get your SEO right, you must have a sitemap. Further, it is crucial to check it out during a technical SEO audit. If you haven’t done sitemap reviewing ever, it is best to hire a reliable digital marketing agency.

Attributes of a Typical Sitemap:

• Sitemap Must Be Clear, with No Scope of Errors

• Sitemap Must Be Concise

• Sitemap Must Be Up-To-Date

• Register Your Sitemap to Google Search Engine Console

Step 3: Analyze The Internal Links

Most of the marketing pros will agree on one thing that having a well-structured, logical hierarchy in your site can significantly impact the SERP rankings. So, it is of paramount importance to check both the internal & external links during a technical SEO audit.

Webpages those are deleted now and then contribute to broken links.

Here, are a few facets you must look into during website internal link audit:

• Orphan Webpages

• Broken Links

• Click Depth

Step 4: Site Speed

Site speed, today has a massive impact on how search engine crawlers and Internet users see your website. While site speed is a critical ranking factor, a recent study also published that the probability of bounce raises up to 90% if the site takes just five seconds to load. So, in a nutshell, checking site speed during a technical SEO audit cannot be underpinned.

Step 5: HTTPS Content

Did you know that 70% of  Google SERP page one results are all HTTPS?

If your site has an HTTPS, then you must check for prevalent errors when conducting a technical SEO audit. These include: links, canonicals, and redirects, and mixed content:

Step 6: Check The Site Metrics

First, you need to check whether Google Analytics are reporting accurate insights. If not, then check for the analytics code embedded at the backend of the website.

Google Analytics provides valuable information such as bounce rate-, must be as low as possible. A high bounce rate suggests that Internet users are not finding your site to be relevant.

To reduce the bounce rate improve the quality of content on the site, along with other factors like site speed.

Step 7: A Backlink Audit

Backlinks are vital to triumph of any SEO strategy; that’s why conducting a comprehensive backlink audit is a no-brainer. The backlinks tell search engines, how valuable the content is on the website.

To have only relevant links coming to your site, you must perform a backlink audit using any online tool. This will give you a fair what sort of backlinks you are getting. Plus, you’ll have a better understanding of how you should about your link building strategy.

Recrawl The Website

When you are done with fixing errors or recommendations, you come across during a technical SEO audit. Ask Google to recrawl your site.

For recrawling the website, go to the Google Search Console and then head to “Crawl.” After that, tap on “Fetch As Google.” There, you have to enter the website URL that needs to be recrawled, and lastly, tap "Fetch." When Google bot fetched the site,  you need to "Submit To Index" for recrawling request.

Wrap Up

What you think is the real game-changer when doing SEO? Share your views in the comment section.