Finding and solving the technical SEO points that matter
A technical SEO audit is an essential part of SEO and content marketing strategy. It helps to analyse your website in terms of its optimisation and it will help you get the most out of your website’s potential for ranking higher.
The process helps to discover SEO issues, giving you a process which can improve your SEO performance and gain more organic traffic from Google and other search engines.
To make sure you understand all of the SEO issues on your site, there’s a checklist that I follow. It contains all of the important elements for improving technical SEO.
In order for Google to index your content, it must first be able to see it. There are a variety of crawl issues that can cause Google to be blocked, and solutions such as internal linking, robots.txt and analysis of javascript will help to uncover issues.
The content on your pages, including the page titles, are essential for ensuring that you make the most of your SEO and improve your Google rankings. These are evaluated, including an evaluation of duplicate content that might have built up over time.
As an internal linking expert, I ensure that your site is well structured so that – no matter how many pages you have – Google can evaluate each of them and understands the content on them.
In 2021 site speed became a relevant ranking factor, and is currently one of the key elements where a website will fail, especially if it’s not been technically assessed for a number of years.
Google likes to know the originator of content on your site, and new URLs which might contain parameters can cause duplicate content. Canonical tags help Google to see the originator of the content on these URLs. In addition, redirections and other website response codes are evaluated.
It’s essential to know that your site performs well against the competition, and benchmarking is key to understanding this. Your keyword rankings are evaluated, along with the sites you would like to be winning against.
In order to improve your SEO performance, my technical SEO audit checklist is followed. Built over nearly a decade, it contains the elements to check in order to discover technical SEO issues. There are a variety of SEO audit tools which I use too.
Every SEO expert will have heard of and used Screaming Frog. For over a decade, it’s been a leading tool used by nearly every SEO agency to discover everything from broken links to site structure issues.
Googles own tool – previous called webmaster tools – helps to evaluate the pages and discover indexation issues, sitemap problems and ranking. It also lists the backlinks which you have, and the anchor text they use.
One of the earliest tools, ahrefs is used by every SEO specialist in order to check backlinks and the important pages which are delivering organic SEO traffic.
SEMrush helps to find keyword gaps and perform effective competitor analysis and benchmarking. It also has tools to discover technical issues and even site speed.
Your audit data is presented in a simple to understand form that you can pass to your developers or content writers, or you may choose to take some other services from myself in order to improve your SEO.
An SEO audit is the best way to discover the SEO strategy which will work for you; does your site require improved content, technical SEO (like site structure) or link building? Is it missing alt text across the site, or are meta descriptions ineffective? Are there broken links that need fixing? Is important structured data missing?
Once you have a list of SEO issues to fix, it becomes simpler to prioritise. You will also understand the most important elements to fix to get the most improvement in the shortest time. The site audit becomes your development and content improvement list.
