SEO Technical Audit Tips by SEO Company India

Various issues can severely impact your website’s ranking in the search engines. Even if you great content with accurate information, but you don’t have technical SEO right, your website may also incur penalties.

According to the crux of the Google Webmasters Guidelines, your website should be easy to access, accurate, ad, and user friendly. Crawling and indexing are the main factors of technical SEO. It means your site should be more accessible for search engines to crawl. It means that you improve the site load time, check the robot.txt files,  and work on fixing the redirects.

How Do I Check My Technical SEO?

The main elements of technical SEO include:

• Mobile optimization

• Page load speed.

• Duplicate content

• Schemas

• Crawl errors

• Link health

• Image issues

• URL structure

• Check canonical issues for duplicate URLs

• 404 pages

• 301 redirects

• Site architecture

• XML sitemap

• Schemas

• SSL encryption (HTTPS site in place of HTTP site

• Enable AMP for optimized content delivery on mobile

• Add structured data markup to your website

• Register your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

 

How Do I Check My Technical SEO? (Planning a DIY Check)

There are three kinds of errors you need to look for in your technical SEO audit.

1. Backend errors

2. Front end errors

3. Outside references and link quality

It can be well understood that a technical SEO audit is a complex process. Fixing it is even more complex. So, you require making a broad and versatile strategy based on the 80/20 principle (getting 80 % outcomes with 20 % efforts).

First of all, you have to carry out the site audit, crawl your site. It means that you need to identify the problems like indexing, thin content, duplicate content, unlinked pagination pages,  and excess redirects. Your website not being SSL certified can negatively impact the trust of your audience. 

Do a check either using a tool or manually to determine if only one version of your website is browseable. 

Use Copyscape to carry out on-page duplicate content checks. Also, ensure HTML meta tags are well optimized. The same goes for meta descriptions (check pixel length and keyword optimization). Overall, your primary keyword should appear in the

• Title 

• Alt tags 

• URL 

• Subheadings (h2, h3, etc.) 

• Meta descriptions 

Check Site Structure

• Your website should have a clear hierarchy.

• Canonical links for similar URLs can be complex issues that need a deeper strategy for canonicalization to fix them. If you have more than one more or similar URL for your website, it is necessary to redirect the traffic on all these similar URLs to the preferred URL. E-commerce sites with similar products or websites that are expanding their services can face this issue mainly. Talk to or experts to learn more about multiple URL or canonical indexing issues.

• You also require to manage internal and external links to ensure that visitors can easily navigate your site.

• Make sure you check and fix all deleted or moved pages. Otherwise, you may end up annoying your visitors for the same. Xenu Sleuth is the tool you can use to check the integrity of your pages. There are other good tools as well.

Site Speed

You need to check page load issues (your website should not take anything more than 3 seconds to load).  Also, check your bounce rate.

External Link Profile and Authority

Crawl your site for brand mentions to understand what is going on outside your website that could impact its ranking.

Assess your backlink profile to analyze what value it offers and the areas where it gives high-value links. Analyzing your competitor’s backlinks will help you more.

Do Extra

• With a social media strategy to back your website, you can enhance your website’s technical SEO by improving its indexing.

• Thoroughly check competitor’s keywords on different keyword-finding tools.

Additional Tips

• It pays to stay well organized when carrying out a complex process like a technical SEO audit.

• It will also help you catch unprecedented algorithm changes.

How do You Perform a Technical SEO Audit in 15 Steps? -Basic Checklist of What We Do

Checking and Fixing Indexation and Crawlability Issues

With the Site Audit Tool, we check

• The robots.txt file

• Subdomains

• The sitemaps

• Indexed and submitted pages

 

Addressing Site Architecture Issues

We analyze the following parameters in general.

• Site Structure

• Breadcrumbs Analysis

• Ease of navigation

• Internal linking

• Site Hierarchy

• URL Structure

• Sitemap Fixes

• robots.txt Fixes

 

Auditing Canonical Tags and Fixing Issues

• Ensure one canonical URL per page.

• Use HTTPS domain protocol as the preferred website.

• Note how URLs end: With or without trailing slash.

• Specify to the search engine which URL you want indexed-www or the non-www.

• Mention the absolute or preferred URL in the canonical tag, not a relative URL.

• The URL mentioned in the canonical tag should not have any redirects. It must have 200 OK status.

• Only tag legitimate duplicate content.

• Exact duplicate pages must have the same canonical tag.

• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) should have canonical tags.

 

Internal Linking Issues on Your Site

Internal linking issues can be of two kinds.

• Navigational: (header, footer, or sidebar links)

• Contextual: (within page content)

Internal Linking score is impacted by

• Orphaned pages

• Pages with high click-depth.

During internal linking, the relevance of anchor text is essential. Apart from this, technically, we ensure:

• Indexable pages are linked

• Linked pages should not have redirects

What Should be Included in a Technical SEO Audit?

Checking and Fixing Security Issues

Your site should be SSL certified—other things to check.

• Expired certificate

• The certificate must be registered to the right domain name

• Active and latest security protocol version

• Check non-secure pages with password input

• Your server should support SNI.

• HSTS server support

• Mixed or unsecured content

• Internal links to non HTTPS pages:

• Redirects or canonicals from HTTP versions to HTTPS URLs

• Checks sitemap.xml:  for HTTP links

Check and Improve Site Speed

We use the Core Web Vitals extension and check the following

• Large HTML page sizes

• Uncompressed pages

• Uncompressed JavaScript and CSS files

• Uncached CSS files and JavaScript

• Voluminous CSS  and JavaScript size

• Numerous  JavaScript and CSS files

• Non-minified JavaScript and CSS files

• Slow average document interactive time

• Redirect chains and loops

Common Mobile-Friendliness Issues

• AMP HTML issues

• AMP template issues

• AMP layout or style issues

 

Determine and Fix Code Issues

There can be errors in page and site code in:

• HTML

• CSS (.css)

• JavaScript (.js)

• Meta Tags

• Twitter Card markup

• Schema.org

 

Find and Correct Duplicate Content Issues

SERPs should not display an incorrect version of your page.

What is done?

• Addition of canonical tags to duplicate pages

• Creating  301 redirects to your HTTPS pages from your HTTP pages.

Spot and Fix Redirect Errors

• 3xx errors

• 301

• 302

• 307

• 4xx errors

• 403

• 404

• 410

• 429

 

Next, we carry out Log File Analysis.

 We ensure that your website has the correct access.log format. To determine this, we upload the file in the log file analyzer and run a check. We analyze the report for:

• Bots: Requests from different search engines.

• Status Codes: Different HTTP status codes are found per day.

• File Types: Different file types crawled every day.

 

International SEO

We do this:

• Check if Hreflang is in place.

• Carry out keyword research for additional countries

Local SEO

We update the page for

• Google My Business (GMB)

• Citation management

• mobile-friendliness

• Local Link Building

On-page SEO

This is a part of a technical SEO audit. Typically, we will check optimization parameters of

• Meta title tags.

• Meta descriptions

• Content

These should be well-optimized for quality and keywords.

You can get an insight into the SEO audit process in brief. Click here to know What is SEO Audit Process?

What are SEO Audit Tools

Here are some of the best tools for Technical SEO Audit

• Screaming Frog. 

• Google Webmaster Tools

• IIS SEO Toolkit

• BuiltWith

• GTmetrix

• Reverse IP Lookup

• Semrush Site Audit.

• Pingdom DNS Check

• Copyscape

• Xenu Sleuth

• Integrity

 

If you get more information on technical SEO audit or the general SEO audit princess or get it done for your website, call the experts at the top SEO Agency in India, your very own SEO Experts Company India. We’ll handle the complex thing while you can focus your energy and time on core business issues.