Technical Website Audit 101: What it is and How to Do it

Whether we’ve been SEOs for a few days or many years, we’ve all been there: staring at a website while aware that there are problems hindering its performance and preventing it from the top of search engine results pages.

Upon first glance, it is possible to identify a few changes that should be made: Perhaps the homepage’s title tag violates SEO best practices, or the navigation appears to require two hands to use. But there’s always much more to it.

Good technical SEO is just as important to complete search optimization as good content and user friendliness. Making sure your technical SEO plan is flawless is mandatory if you want your website to operate at its best for search engine rankings. A technical SEO audit and checklist can be useful.

Google or Bing search engine algorithms send crawlers to your website to examine the HTML code, JavaScript, performance, structure, and other factors. This indicates that for a website to be effectively optimized, more than simply keyword density and quality content are required.

Although many internet marketers and business owners are aware of the potential value of SEO, technical SEO auditing can be challenging for those without specialized knowledge.

Making a technical SEO audit checklist to evaluate the condition of your website is an excellent method to figure out what you need. However, let’s first review what a technical audit of a website is in order to better understand the following checklist.

What is a Technical Website Audit?

When it comes to how visible your website is in search results, technical SEO is crucial. In order to achieve this, some elements of it enhance the ability of search engines to crawl, comprehend, and index your pages, while others put an emphasis on user experience.

Prior to extensive search engine optimization (SEO) or a website redesign, a website audit is a review of page performance. By doing an audit of your website, you can find out if it is optimized to meet your traffic goals and learn how you can make improvements to it to do so.

An examination of a website’s technical components to determine whether they adhere to best practices for search engine optimization is known as a technical SEO audit.

This refers to the technical elements of your website that directly influence search engine ranking factors like Google or Bing. A basic Excel file can be used to complete the audit checklist.

What are the Different Types of Website Audit?

Let’s discuss some of the various types of audits you may conduct before we get into the things you should be looking out for while you audit your website. Here are a few audits that marketers frequently conduct.

  • SEO Link Audit
    This kind of audit examines the backlinks leading to your website to look for any potential problems or opportunities. This audit will optimize your site to rank for your desired keywords by examining your links.
  • Competitive Website Audit
    A competitive website audit keeps tabs on your rivals’ online tactics to show you what business prospects your brand might be overlooking. In essence, a competitive audit enables you to identify what strategies are effective for rival businesses in your industry so that you can apply those strategies to your own business.
  • Social Media Audit
    Social media may also have an effect on how well your brand performs online. A social media audit should be done if your social media presence isn’t driving more visitors to your website.
  • Lead Conversion Optimization Audit
    A lead conversion optimization audit examines the potential and problems related to conversion on a website. You must examine how and from where traffic to your website is coming in this audit. For this step, Google Analytics is a great tool.
  • SEO Website Audit
    An SEO website audit assesses every factor that can affect how well your site performs in search engine results pages, in contrast to an SEO link audit, which examines the links connected to your website. Links are part of this, but it also encompasses things like keyword usage, content, metadata, page speed, user experience, and video optimization.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to the procedures used to design and optimize a website so that search engines can quickly crawl, index, and display it. The puzzle of SEO is made up of several pieces, including technical SEO.

Technical SEO is the work you need to perform to make sure your website exhibits the technical characteristics that search engines prefer in search results, such as a secure connection, a responsive design, or a quick loading time.

In other words, technical SEO focuses entirely on enhancing a website’s technical components in order to raise the ranking of its pages in search engines. The three pillars of technical optimization include making a website quicker, easier to crawl, and more intelligible for search engines.

The majority of marketers and business owners use technical SEO to increase the likelihood that their website will rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs).

How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit?

Your website needs to be trustworthy, reliable, and able to deliver information swiftly and securely while also making it as simple as possible for crawlers to recognize it as such, and to initially locate your website. The technical SEO audit comes into play here.

Using SEO audits is a terrific approach to develop concrete strategies for beating out the competition, finding and fixing departure points from your website, and improving client experiences. Technical SEO audits, on-page SEO audits, and off-page SEO audits should all be done frequently.

There are three key factors to look at during an SEO audit:

  • Back-end factors, such as hosting and indexing
  • Front-end factors, such as content, keywords, and metadata
  • Link quality and outside references

All of these elements are essential to your website’s performance with search engines and visitors. Make sure to focus the technical parts of SEO before moving on to other aspects.

Here are some steps to performing a technical audit of your website:

  1. Use a Site Audit Tool to Run Your Website’s URL
    You must first locate a website auditing tool that will enable you to assess your website’s performance before you can move forward. You may assess how well your page is doing and receive precise recommendations when you run your site using site audit software.
  2. Look for Technical Issues
    The technical issues that affect performance, SEO, mobile, and security can have a detrimental effect on how your customers use your website. A website audit is a terrific approach to discover why visitors aren’t staying on your site for very long or why there are so many abandoned shopping carts.
  3. Recognize SEO issues
    You should now consider SEO-related concerns in order to raise your search engine rating. This will entail reading through image alt text and meta descriptions, among other things.
  4. Examine the UX and Design
    How well is this layout serving your clients? Some software provides heatmaps of the elements of your design that users are more likely to notice and are reading. You may find out how your visitors are being affected by the overall design and user experience through this kind of study.
  5. Evaluate Website Material
    You can evaluate website content, such as blogs, website pages, etc., with the use of a website audit. How well your present pages are performing will be important to know. Ask yourself whether your content is doing well in search results and whether your on-page SEO efforts are in line with your traffic volume.
  6. Create a Checklist of Site Issues and Suggested Fixes
    Finally, it’s crucial to have a spot where you can publish a summary of all your results while doing a website audit. List the site’s problems and suggested remedies so that you can alert the right teams.
  7. The Technical SEO Audit Checklist
    When it comes to how visible your website is in search results, technical SEO is crucial. In order to achieve this, some elements of it enhance the ability of search engines to crawl, comprehend, and index your pages, while others put an emphasis on user experience.
    By going more deeply into the technical details, you can make sure that your website satisfies Google’s requirements and meets all the key benchmarks.
  8. Optimization for Speed
    The speed of your website is crucial for user experience and a significant ranking element. To evaluate the performance of your pages and address any problems that are found, use PageSpeed Insights.
  9. Core Web Vitals
    Google highlighted fundamental web essentials as a component of their top page experience signals last year. These concentrate on how quickly, interactively, responsively, and steadily the website loads.
  10. Indexing Problems
    Verify that Google is indexing every page you want to be available. The Index Coverage report in the Search Console can be used to accomplish this. There, you may discover which pages are displayed and whether any blockers are present.
  11. Redirects
    Examine the redirects you have on your website and confirm that they are all required. Redirects can slow down websites and make them operate worse.
  12. Canonicals
    Duplicate content is a widespread problem, particularly on WordPress and e-commerce websites. It can be brought on by tracking cookies, content syndication, URL parameters that specify a product’s size, color, etc.
  13. Information Architecture
    For both people and robots, the structure of the content on your website is crucial. You should flatten your information architecture and make your pages easy for people (and bots) to traverse so that nobody “gets lost and confused” on your website.

The Bottom Line

There are always adjustments that can be made to your website to improve its SEO. Multiple times throughout the years, search engines have updated their policies. To maintain your places in the SERPs, you must keep up with these updates.

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