A technical SEO audit thoroughly analyzes your website’s search engine optimization condition. Conduct the audit monthly, quarterly, or annually depending on the client’s needs. Essential aspects in checking a website’s SEO health are its backlinks, download speed, 301 redirect and 404 broken links, sitemap, canonical URLs, etc.
A technical SEO Audit may contain a review and evaluation of the ranking performances of chosen keywords in SEO campaigns. Having a regular check-up for your website is essential in ensuring that your links are working correctly, and all of the elements are doing their assigned task of optimizing your site for top search results.
Here are the components of a technical SEO audit that are essential for your company’s growth:
Sitemap
Usually, the first thing checked is whether the website has its sitemap. Then, you can go to Google Search Console and see if you have submitted the sitemap and whether the pages are indexed.
You can revise your sitemap and include only active web pages that you want search engines to index and users to search online. Then, resubmit your sitemap and test whether all page links are working. However, search engines will take at least a day to cache your pages fully. And recommend it to your target market, Digital Authority Partners said.
To create a sitemap, list all your website pages in a notepad or similar application. Use a “no follow” tag if the page is very similar to one of your pages. Also, if you have an HTTP and HTTPS version of your website, indicate which one the crawlers will recommend to users.
Links
Check different links in the technical SEO audit, such as internal and external links. Internal links are those hypertexts that lead users to another site. External links are sites that mention your company and direct users to your web page.
External links are also called backlinks, and search engines place high importance on this as one of the ways to rank high in search results. In addition, backlinks provide insights to search engines on how reputable your site is.
Some strategies to improve your links are guest posting and partnering with trustworthy sites that can complement your products or services and not directly compete. You can also check your site’s redirect 303 links and broken links via the Google Search Console. Try to reduce your redirect links and resolve all of the broken links.
Duplicate Content
Search engines have their values also. For example, they penalize websites that steal other people’s works. Sometimes, it is not your intention if you have written something that resembles another person’s previous published content.
The way to check if everything is original is to run the content in a Duplichecker application or other plagiarism software. Plagiarism is simply taking another’s article without giving proper credit. So practice mentioning the author’s name and the year the article is published.
The best way to prevent duplicate content is to write original content, use proper paraphrasing, summarize when mentioning ideas from others, and correctly credit the original author. Then, regardless of whether you are sure about having original content, run everything in the plagiarism checker.
Download speed
Users nowadays need a maximum of one second to wait patiently for the website to download its content. You can check your site’s speed in Google Search Console. You can also use other software apps for testing your site’s performance.
Fix your download speed as search engines check which websites have the fastest speed in making their sites available for use. Therefore, the quicker your web pages can be, the higher the SEO score you can have.
One of the factors affecting download speed is the size of your photos. You can compress your images so your website won’t take long until all elements have settled. Also, run tests on your website on how many seconds it has for the site to become interactive.
The conversion rate of keywords
A technical SEO audit won’t be complete unless your chosen keywords rank high in search results for your chosen keywords. This conversion is because you pay so much for an SEO service – to give you a high positioning level on the internet.
You can go to Google AdWords and check the performance of your keywords. Aside from conversion rate, you can see click-through rate reports and cost per click. Auditing for this helps determine whether your SEO campaigns are successful or need revision.
If your chosen keywords are attracting your target market, you can see your website on the first page of the search engine results page. However, suppose the report shows that your keywords have a low conversion rate. In that case, you can opt for related words that people are more familiar with and are typing in search bars.
You can use Google Trends to see alternative keywords that can yield a higher conversion rate for your site.
Final Words
Conducting a technical SEO audit for your website is a routine maintenance activity needed for you to evaluate the performance of your campaigns. An audit report will yield insights for your business, such as whether the key performance indicators are showing up and are helping you reach your sales goal.
Your company should care about having a regular technical SEO audit because you can lose money when you do not monitor your digital marketing campaigns. Though running a technical SEO audit has its own cost, the rewards outweigh the cost. After learning what works better for your brand, you can draw new insights upon reading the report and chart new heights for your company.
Contact a digital marketing expert today to get started with fine-tuning your strategies in SEO and evaluate whether your techniques are still up to date or need revision following the search engine’s new algorithm releases.
