Imagine tiny crawling bots moving from page to page, website to website, checking, understanding, and indexing information. That’s how Google and other search engines find the answers to users’ questions. It is also basically how Google finds your website.
However, this basic idea is not as easy as it looks. You need to optimize your website to help Google do its work. Using SEO tactics can help you with website optimization, but you must begin with a technical SEO audit before anything else.
What Is a Technical SEO Audit?
Digital Authority Partners said websites need a technical SEO audit to check all their technical aspects and ensure that it is following SEO best practices. The technical parts of a website refer to all factors that Google and other search engines use for indexing and ranking.
What Does Technical SEO Audit Do?
A technical SEO audit ensures your website’s technical aspects are updated and relevant. An updated site is optimized for search. Thus, you won’t miss out on valuable online traffic. Here are more reasons to begin a technical SEO audit.
- Check if the content is visible.
An audit finds out if your website is visible to your target audience and search engine crawlers. It’s checking the different parts of your website, including your homepage, product pages, landing pages, and category pages.
Audit checks for unrenderable links, web content, and navigation bar components. If these elements are problematic, bots won’t see them also. An audit also examines if the cached version of your website has missing content elements or if there is incorrect page rendering. These elements affect how bots find and index your pages for easy retrieval.
- Look into canonicalization
If there are many versions of a web page, Google will choose one to index. The URL that Google selects will be canonical, and this is what the search engine will show when a related keyword is searched.
The canonicalization process is triggered by signals like canonical tags, duplicate pages, redirects, internal links, and sitemap URLs. Canonicalizing, pages into a master version helps search engines recognize that these URLs are not duplicates.
You can improve indexing and allow search engines to understand your website better by canonicalizing pages. Canonicalization is therefore crucial in a technical SEO audit.
- Consider Manual Actions
You can find Manual Actions from Security & Manual Actions on the left navigation panel of the Search Console. Manual Actions on a page or site mean that a Google human reviewer has found that your website violates the Webmaster Quality Guidelines and has imposed a penalty against your website.
You may not know if your website is underperforming or has violated Google’s quality guidelines. So check Manual Actions reports. Such reports often cover illegal attempts to exploit Google’s search index. These reports may also be due to black-hat optimization strategies like keyword stuffing.
If you think a Manual Actions report was an error, you can always request a review. A request can take a few days to complete, but you can override a Manual Action if proven erroneous.
- Check the site’s mobile-friendliness
A technical SEO audit examines your website’s performance on mobile. A well-designed version of your website on mobile is crucial for long-term relevance.
A website that is “mobile-friendly” covers a variety of factors, but one way to quickly find this out is to use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool. You may also check your website on a smartphone to determine its loading time, clickable components, full webpage viewing, etc.
- Check Sitemap Visibility
Use sitemaps for quick SEO indexing. Your sitemap provides information about your web pages and web files and the relationship between these components. It lists your pages more efficiently so that Google can easily crawl and index your content.
An outdated site map can negatively affect your rankings, so always make sure your sitemaps are regularly or automatically updated with no redirects, non-canonical URLs, and 404s.
- Consider Your Schema Markup
An audit checks for any structured data and ensures these are working perfectly. Structured data is also known as schema. It improves how your website appears on SERPs and can help boost your click-through rate.
You can use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to check schema markup and make it work for you. This tool will determine any issues that can affect schema use in SERPs. You may also check schema markup on Search Console’s Enhancements by including “Unparsable structured data” in your reports. Negative reports mean that your schema is working and there are no issues.
Why Perform a Technical SEO Audit?
Whether you’re hiring an SEO agency or you want to examine your website performance, a technical SEO audit puts you on the right track. An audit will reveal your website’s weak and strong technical points allowing you to formulate the best strategy in the future. Here are more benefits of a technical SEO audit.
- Easy Indexing: Technical SEO audits improve how Google and other search engines index your site for easy retrieval during a search.
- Diagnose SEO Concerns: Audits determine issues affecting how your site is optimized for search. You should deal with any problems at once.
- Improves Your Ranking on SERPs: With an optimized website, you can guarantee higher rankings on the search and improved visibility for your business, products, services, and brand. To check the ranking of your website in search engines, you can use the Rank tracker tool by Sitechecker. One of the advantages of this tool is the constant monitoring of SERP positions.
- Improves Website Organization: An audit gives you a clear idea about your website performance and organizes data to benefit your audience and customers.
Final Words
As much as possible, conduct regular technical SEO audits to update your website’s performance. With an optimized website, you’re helping search engines find you online and your customers to find your business, services, and products. When prioritizing technical SEO, you can promote your brand with better visibility on search engine results pages.
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