How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit
Technical SEO audits analyse your websites technical components, undercovering issues that could impact your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). These audits should be carried out regularly, ensuring your website is easy for search engines to crawl and index. This also improves user experience (UX), helping to boost engagement and conversions.
Before carrying out a technical SEO audit, you need to know what technical SEO is. It is a process of optimising your website, ensuring search engines can find, crawl, and index your website pages, while improving user experience. Google, and other search engines, all rely on complex algorithms to assess various aspects of your site, including site speed, structured data, and mobile-friendliness. When these are addressed, search engines can understand the structure and content of your website, helping to improve your ranking in SERPs.
How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit
There are a number of steps you will need to take to carry out a technical SEO audit correctly, these include:
Every technical SEO audit starts by crawling your site. Search engines have already done this for you, as long as you submitted a sitemap to Google Search Console, giving the search engine enough time to crawl your website. The crawl data can be found in the Search Console under the Crawl stats report in Settings.
The report generated offers valuable information such as the total number of crawl requests Google has made, along with response times and download size. Pay very close attention to any 404 errors, 500 errors, and non-200 status codes. Investigate these pages and see what action needs to be taken.
In the Google Search Console, you will find your pages report, which is a full report on all the pages Google has crawled and indexed on your website, along with any errors. This enables you to identify why pages aren't indexed and what pages have potential problems, making it harder for Google to crawl and index. You will need to click on each reason to see what pages are affected, along with their reasons.
Once the issues are fixed, return to Google Search Console and request the search engine to index the pages, encouraging Google to re-crawl your pages and start showing in results.
The third step is to ensure your website is HTTPS secure. HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, encrypting the data that is transferred from the user's browser to your website. This protects sensitive information, helping to build trust with your website visitors. We do know that HTTPS is now a ranking factor and it needs to be implemented correctly.
A slow loading website can result in a high bounce rate as visitors get frustrated and head over to one of your competitors websites instead. This can negatively impact your SEO efforts. Google uses Core Web Vitals to analyse your website speed, identifying overall user experience. You can find these statistics under PageSpeed Insights.
Common reasons why your website is not loading in less than three seconds, which is the recommended loading time can include large image fires, JavaScript and CSS, and slow server response times
Now that Google has confirmed that they are using mobile-first indexing, it's essential your website is mobile-friendly. Mobile-first indexing means that Google considers the mobile version of your website as the primary version, using that to crawl, index, and rank your pages. You can use the PageSpeed Insights report to ensure you are viewing the mobile version of your website, reviewing the metrics displayed under performance.
Your URL's should be well-structured to help search engines understand your website content and hierarchy, making it easier for users to navigate your site seamlessly. URL's should be short and descriptive.
The Genie Crawl team recommends you carry out a complete technical audit on your website at least twice per annum with regular check-ups on a monthly basis. As changes are implemented, you need to monitor your performance with Google Search Console and Google Analytics, tracking the improvements in terms of ranking, traffic, and user engagement. Do you need help with a technical SEO audit? Do you have any questions regarding the auditing process? Contact the expert team at Genie Crawl now.
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