Why Perform a Technical SEO Audit on your Website?
A Technical SEO Audit is a deep analysis of your website to explore how search engine and visitor-friendly it might be.
An SEO audit is one of the tasks I like to start every SEO campaign with. It can provide a baseline for future activity and recommendations on a site after considering what is uncovered in the audit. It’s a deep-level drill down into a site; to a degree, an assessment of the health of a site. Auditing a site takes a look at the things working well and the things that may need more work.
What Problems Does an SEO Audit Try to Resolve?
An SEO Audit asks and answers a large number of questions about your website, such as:
- How well the site might work on mobile devices since so many people are now connecting to the Web with phones and tablets?
- How easy is it for search engines to crawl and index the pages of your site?
- Whether URLs on the site structured in a search-friendly manner that avoids having the same content at more than one URL?
- If duplicate content may impact how your pages are listed in search results?
- Whether Schema.org vocabulary is used on your pages to define what data appear upon those pages to help search engines understand what those pages are about?
- Whether the Site is represented in Bing and Google search results well with sitelinks and an engaging and informative knowledge panel?
- If the site has a bricks-n-mortar location, does it appear in local search results at the search engines?
- What best practices should be followed when creating or updating the content on your site?
- How might the site’s structure be impacting the rankings of pages on the site?
- What’s the best way to organize the content on your pages for your intended audiences?
- What improvements to pages on the site can improve the experience of visitors, such as Page Speed changes?
What Is Included in an SEO Audit?
Included in a Technical SEO Audit are practical and specific recommendations to improve the quality of your website and information on best practices from an SEO stance.
To find out how we can work together, contact me today and tell me more about your business and your site.
A Technical SEO Audit may include a review of these aspects of a site, including what is working well and what might need more work:
SEO Audit Executive Summary – an overview that includes priorities for changes to a site based upon making changes, what those changes may impact, and the likely impact of implementing the changes.
1. Site Architecture
Canonical URLs (Best Page Addresses)
Domain Access
Links Home
Capitalization in URLs
Print Versions Duplicates
Canonical Link Elements
Internal Redirects and Broken Links
Robots.txt File
Meta robots noindex/nofollow
Category/Site Structure (URLS and Information Architecture)
Choosing File Names
Custom Error Page
HTML Sitemap
XML Sitemap
2. Technical/Server Issues
Mobile Friendly Pages
Search Friendly Links
External Links
Duplicate Content
Java Script
Dynamic Pages
Page Load Times
Cookies
3. HTML Use/Analysis
Title Elements
Meta Description Elements
Heading Elements
Image Optimization
Anchor Text
Schema and Markup Structured Data Usage
Sitelinks and deeplinks
Knowledge panels
4. Indexed Links Baseline
5. Indexed Pages Baseline