It's 2022! techniques evolve and algorithms change. Performing a technical SEO audit is necessary to improve the SEO of your website. This is a key to being successful online. SEO is the basis of any digital marketing strategy.
But where to start ? Start by evaluating the current SEO of your site.
The most direct way is to do an SEO audit. Find out how your current site is performing and assess what you can do to improve it. It might sound like a lot of work and maybe a bit too technical for beginners, but I'll walk you through exactly what needs to be done.
With the help of a few tools, you can do this quite quickly. The time it takes is minimal compared to its impact. But before you get there, you need to understand the fundamentals of technical SEO auditing.
What is a technical SEO audit?
Want your content to be relevant to the people who show up on your site?
Granted, old SEO tactics won't be enough. Gone are the days of stuffing keywords, setting up multiple pages for different keyword variations, and trying to use multiple microsites to drive traffic.
Over the past decade, the criteria and ranking factors have changed dramatically. Sites that adapt to mobiles and optimize themselves for user needs are preferred. Search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) have algorithms that crawl your website and compare your website to different ranking factors indicating usefulness and relevance.
Each accessible page on your site is crawled to determine if your site offers useful and legitimate content. While crawling your site, search engines also check how secure, fast, and easy to use it is. And then each page receives a ranking, which determines how well it appears on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) to people searching for related keywords.
SEO
However, SEO is constantly evolving. Each search engine has its own algorithm. These are improved or regularly modified with updates. But algorithms aren't the only thing you need to worry about. Your competitors are running for a higher ranking than you. Old content needs to be updated to stay relevant. And as the rules change, you need to be able to adapt to new SEO tactics and avoid red flags. Worse yet, something on your website could be horribly broken, disrupting the flow of qualified traffic to your site.
This is why a regular technical SEO audit is necessary to keep up with search engine demand. When you do an audit, you are checking the health of your website. Since algorithms and research technology can change at a rapid rate, you want to perform mini-audits monthly. But they shouldn't replace a full SEO audit. These should take place every 4-6 months or after a major change to your website.
Personally, I like to do full SEO audits quarterly and monthly mini-audits. Before we begin, let's consolidate the most important parts of SEO auditing.
What are the key elements of a technical SEO audit?
There are three key factors to consider during an SEO audit:
- Main factors such as hosting and indexing
- Front-end factors such as content, keywords and metadata
- Quality link, internal linkage and external references
Sometimes you won't have time to address every pain point. So when deciding which audit information warrants action, I like to use the 80/20 rule. The most important part of SEO for your site is the part that your inbound traffic actually sees. However, everything is swept away if your site is not mobile-friendly. With the introduction of the mobile-first index, you need to make sure that you understand your site's performance on mobile to ensure proper placement on the SERPs.
Due to 60% of all searches done on mobile, Google has adjusted its algorithm to start crawling mobile sites.
Keeping that in mind (and checking that your site is optimized for mobile) will help you gauge where you stand after your hour-long mini-audit is over.
Here are the eight steps to follow to complete your SEO audit in less than an hour.
1. Start your technical SEO audit with an analysis
The most important part of the SEO audit is the analysis. Before you do anything else, run a scan of your website. You can use tools like:
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- DeepCrawl
These are some of the top tools in the industry that will give you a great foundation to get started. Keep in mind that the free version of Screaming Frog has limitations, including a maximum crawl limit of 500 URLs.
Not only do crawlers find various errors like broken links, bad keywords, poor images, and page title issues, but they also identify duplicate content, unrelated pages, and excessive redirects.
How to configure your crawl?
For this example, I'll be using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool. For my test site, I will be using Kissmetrics. First, download Screaming Frog and open the app.
Explore the criteria for the scan by clicking Configuration and Spider in the toolbar. If you are a paying customer, you can change the analysis criteria.
The scan is useful for identifying duplicate content, unrelated paging pages, and excessive redirects. You can also get an idea of your “crawl budget” from the Google Search Console. The crawl budget shows which pages Google crawls and how often it crawls your site. What does all this mean? It gives you insight into how the Googlebot crawls your site. You can identify duplicate pages (more on this later), restrict pages that don't really need to appear in search (i.e. your privacy policy), fix redirects and assess broken links.
Manually test your site
By doing a little research on Google, you can quickly gauge how well your website is ranking. How many of your pages are showing up in relevant search results?
Does your site appear first when you search for it by name?
Overall, where does your site appear in the results?
To find out which pages are actually crawled, you can use a "site: root domain" search to see what appears. Missing pages don't automatically mean your site isn't crawlable, but it's helpful to understand what's going on behind the scenes. Your website also doesn't need to be at the top of your searches. It will ideally appear in the middle of the first page or so.