Starting a Comprehensive Technical SEO Audit
The online marketplace is a highly competitive environment often marked by the persistent struggle for visibility and prominence. Fulfilling the crucial goal of being visible to your target audience involves keeping track of your website’s technical health. A comprehensive technical SEO audit allows you to evaluate your website’s current performance, identify issues and weaknesses, and devise strategies for improvement. Essentially, the underlying aim is to maintain an optimal user experience for visitors while also ensuring that search engines can easily interpret your content.
Key Steps in Performing a Comprehensive Technical SEO Audit
1. Crawlability and Indexability Audit
Before your website can rank organically, search engine bots need to crawl and index your site. Hence, a crawlability and indexability audit forms an essential part of a comprehensive technical SEO audit.
Firstly, you will need to check whether search engines can access and understand your content. For this, you can use Google’s URL Inspection tool or other professional SEO tools like SEMRush or Screaming Frog SEO Spider. With these tools, you can also check for crawl errors that may hinder visibility to search engines.
The next step is to ensure that your site map is updated and properly formatted in XML. Your site map acts as a roadmap to your site’s content and lets search engines understand your site structure.
Another vital aspect under this audit is robot.txt files, which provide instructions to web robots about which pages or files they can or can’t request from your site. Thus, by reviewing and testing your robot.txt file, you can ensure there’re no vital pages being blocked.
2. Site Architecture and Internal Linking
The structure of your website and the way you use internal linking significantly impacts the user experience, consequently affecting your SEO rankings. Therefore, reviewing your site architecture and internal linking contributes a significant portion of your SEO audit.
A clear and simple site structure makes it easy for users to find the information they need quickly, reducing bounce rates. It also helps search engines to understand the relevance and relationship between different pages on your site.
A well-optimized internal linking strategy also improves the user experience and helps search engine bots find new pages. Thus, ensure that your high-quality pages are linked from your homepage and there are no dead links or broken redirects within your site.
3. Page Speed and Mobile Responsiveness
Google’s search algorithm uses page speed as a ranking factor for both desktop and mobile searches. Therefore, optimizing your website’s load time is a critical component of a technical SEO audit.
There’re numerous tools available such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights that allows you to test your site’s load speed. The goal should be to achieve the highest possible score on these tests, with anything above 90 being considered excellent.
The audit should also review your site’s mobile responsiveness since more than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. Google uses a mobile-first indexing strategy, which means it primarily uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Hence, failing to have a mobile-friendly website can drastically impact your search rankings.
Wrap-up
Performing a comprehensive technical SEO audit is the initial step to improving your website’s SEO rankings. Identifying and addressing technical SEO issues leads to a better user experience, boosting organic visibility, and hopefully, more conversions. Regular audits help maintain the health of your site, ensuring you stay ahead of any potential issues and changes in search engine algorithms.
Remember, good SEO is a journey, not a destination. Just as your website evolves over time, so should your SEO strategy. That’s why a comprehensive SEO audit is not a one-and-done task—for best results, make it an integral part of your growth strategy.