How to Complete a Technical SEO Audit in 8 Steps?

There are three mainstays of organic SEO: on-page optimization, off-page optimisation, and technological optimization. Technical SEO is the one that gets the least attention, perhaps because it is the most difficult to implement well. Marketers used to be able to ignore the difficulties of technical SEO, but now that the field is so crowded, it's crucial to have a site that is easily crawlable, loads quickly, and is safe if you want to do well in search engine rankings.

Given the breadth (and depth) of technical SEO, it would be impossible to cover all the bases in a single article. It will, however, cover the six cornerstones of technical SEO that you need to pay attention to if you want to boost your website's performance and maintain it running smoothly and healthily. Once you control these six things, you can go on to more complex technical SEO tactics.

What does it mean to do a technical search engine optimization audit?

The basis of each website is its technical SEO. The technical features of your website must be analyzed regularly, and a technical SEO audit is an essential part of this process.

Audits may determine whether or not a website has been optimized for Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the like. This includes fixing any problems with crawl ability and indexation that hinder search engines from including your site in their results (SERPs).

While doing an audit, you examine every facet of your website to ensure you haven't overlooked anything that might hurt the optimization process. Sometimes just tweaking a few things may make a huge difference in your rank.

There are several technical concerns, such as hreflang mistakes, canonical difficulties, and mixed content problems, that an audit may help you spot.

What does a technical SEO audit entail?

When SEO experts do a technical SEO audit, they look for and fix issues that slow down, slow down, or otherwise hinder a website's speed, performance, or usability. SEO professionals may get valuable insight into technical problems they may not have been aware of by participating in regular, even daily, technical SEO audits. Search engine optimization (SEO) experts and marketing groups conduct technical SEO audits using technologies like Google Search Console, Google PageSpeed Insights, web crawlers, mobile crawlers, and indexing tools to enhance their websites' search engine rankings.

The time to do a technical SEO audit

Regular technical SEO audits should be performed. Daily audits are essential for firms that rely on technical SEO to increase revenue via increased website traffic and customer conversions. On the other hand, SEO audits performed once every two weeks or once every month should be enough for personal websites and blogs.

Whether beginning work on a new site, freelancing for a new client, or joining a new company, you should conduct a thorough technical SEO audit in addition to doing routine maintenance. When your rankings have plateaued or dropped, a technical SEO audit can help you get back on track.

The 8-Step Process for Doing a Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO audits are notoriously difficult. Unless your company website is really basic, was created from the ground up by an SEO specialist, and has never seen a technological glitch in its entire existence, you will eventually run into some trouble.

Audits may be like an expanding puzzle that takes days or weeks to solve, particularly for more sophisticated sites like those with many pages or those in many languages.

1] Get your site indexed by search engines

The first step is to create a project in Ahrefs' Site Audit, which is included in Ahrefs' free Webmaster Tools.

The number of URLs on your site, as well as whether or not they are indexable and whether or not they include any errors, may all be determined with the help of this scanner.

The audit tool produces a comprehensive report of its findings to assist you in uncovering and addressing any performance problems.

More complex problems may need more examination using tools like Google Search Console. In contrast, our audit tool excels at calling attention to the most pressing concerns, which is very helpful for novice SEOs.

You must first add your website as a project to your Ahrefs account so that Site Audit may analyze it. If you don't want to use Google Search Console, you may upload a DNS record or an HTML file to prove ownership.

2] Finding problems with crawl ability and indexing

It's possible that search engines won't index your site properly if it contains pages that can't be crawled. Users won't be able to find your website until it is indexed.

If you want your site to appear in the SERPs and be ranked for relevant keywords, you need to make it easy for search bots to crawl and gather data from it.

3] Verifying the Page's Functionality

The basics of your page should be double-checked. On-page concerns, such as those with meta descriptions, may not seem important to certain SEOs, but I consider them essential for proper SEO housekeeping.

John Mueller, a Google employee, has said that using more than one H1 tag on a website isn't a problem. Nevertheless, let's compare SEO to a scorecard.

4] Recognizing appearance problems

When talking about SEO, image optimization is frequently forgotten. Yet, there are several upsides to optimizing images, including as

• Enhanced download times.

• Google Images is a great way to gain more visitors to your site.

• It's a more interesting experience for the user.

• Ease of use increased.

You may find the primary audit report under Site Audit > Reports > Pictures if you're having problems with your images.

5] Examining Internal Connections

Most people associate "links" with backlinks when discussing search engine optimization (SEO), how many to make, how they should be constructed, etc.

Few understand the critical role that internal links play in a website's success. Contrast this with external links, which are the peanut butter to internal links' jelly. Do you need both or just one? Sure. Do you think they always complement one another? Sure thing!

An improved experience for both search engines and human visitors may be achieved via internal links, which also aid in developing external connections.

6] Taking a look at some other sources

Links to other websites (or "external links") are embedded inside your pages but go to a different domain. As a result, every external link pointing to your site was placed there by another website or backlink.

7] Quickness and efficiency of the site

Since Google confirmed that site performance on mobile devices is a ranking factor, this issue has become prominent in the SEO industry.

Google has started using speed measures called Core Web Vitals (CWV) to rank sites since May 2021). They quantify interactivity using a metric called First Input Delay (FID) and utilize the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) to gauge how taxing it is on the eyes.

8] Make sure your site is accessible on mobile devices

As a result, more people than ever before are constantly connected to the internet through their mobile devices. Datareportal's 300-page analysis reveals, for instance, that mobile shopping now accounts for 60% of the industry.

It is not surprising that Google has been trying to move towards mobile-first indexing for the last several years.

Conclusion

These are the barest essentials of technical SEO; any competent digital marketer will ensure they are in place for any website under their care. The depths to which technical SEO may be explored are very intriguing. It may be unsafe initially, but once you've completed your first audit, you'll be eager to learn more about how your site may be enhanced. Every digital marketer wanting to ensure their website is optimized for search engines should start by following these six steps. Most significantly, you may begin using any of them without spending a dime.