On-page SEO, off-page search engine optimization, and technical SEO can be described as three fundamental pillars of SEO. Of the three, technical SEO is often overlooked because it is the most difficult to master. But, with all the increase in search results, marketing professionals cannot afford to avoid technical SEO challenges. Having your site easily crawlable, quick, and safe is more important to ensure that your site is well-run and well-ranked in search engine results.
Since technical SEO is a vast area (and expanding), This article won’t provide all the information needed for a comprehensive tech SEO audit. It will, however, cover the six most important elements of technical SEO that should be considered to boost the performance of your website and ensure it stays well-maintained. When you’ve got the six fundamentals covered, it’s time to proceed to more advanced SEO techniques that are technical.
What is an SEO audit?
The term “technical SEO” refers to optimizations that help your site be more efficient in crawling and indexing your site so that Google can provide the correct content on your site to the users at the appropriate moment. Here are a few of the things the tech-related SEO audit includes:
- Site architecture
- URL structure
- How your website is constructed and coded
- Redirects
- Your sitemap
- Your Robots.txt file
- Image delivery
- Site errors
Technical SEO Vs. On-page SEO, in contrast to on-page vs off-page SEO
Today, we’ll review the six most essential items you need to look for in a detailed review of your SEO’s technical aspects.
Checklist for auditing SEO’s technical aspects
Here are the six steps that we’ll be covering in this step-by-step SEO SEO auditing guide.
- Check that your site is crawlable
- Is our website is indexable
- Check your sitemap
- Ensure mobile-friendliness
- Speed of page check
- Duplicate content
Let’s begin!
Check to see if your site’s crawlable
It’s useless to write pages with excellent content if your search engine can’t crawl and index the pages. Thus, it would help if you began by looking over the robots.txt file. It is the first step for any software that crawls websites when it visits your website. The robots.txt file defines which areas of your website should be crawled and which shouldn’t. It accomplishes it via “allowing” or “disallowing” the actions of specific users.
To find your robot.txt file, go to yourwebsite.com/robots.txt
This robots.txt file is publicly accessible and is accessible by adding /robots.txt at the end of the root domain. Here’s an example of the Hallam website.
We can observe that Hallam requests URLs that begin with /wp_admin (the site’s backend) that are not crawled. Specifying where you will not allow these agents to crawl saves bandwidth, server resources, and your crawl budget. It is also essential not to prevent robots from crawling crucial areas of your site through the mistake of “disallowing” them. Since it’s the first page the bot encounters while crawling your website, it’s recommended to link to your sitemap.
You can modify and test the robots.txt file using Google’s robots.txt tester.
You can enter any URL on the website to see if it’s crawlable or if you have any warnings or errors in your robots.txt file.
Although Google is doing an okay job in transferring most essential features of the previous tool to Google’s updated Google Search Console for many digital marketers, the new version has more minor features than the earlier version. This is especially relevant to technical SEO. As of the date of this article, the crawl stats section in an old version of the search console remains accessible and essential to comprehend how your website is crawled.
The report contains three main graphs based on data from the past 90 days. The number of pages crawled each day, kilobytes of data downloaded per day, and the time spent downloading the page (in milliseconds) summarize the crawl rate of your site and its relation to search engine robots. It is essential for your site to nearly always have a high rate of crawling which means that your site is visited often by search engine bots and is a speedy and easy-to-navigate site. The goal is consistency in these graphs. Any significant changes could be due to broken HTML or outdated content, or even your robots.txt file causing too much disruption to your website. If the time you spend downloading a webpage has vast numbers, it could mean that Googlebot is spending too much time in your site’s crawling process and indexing it at a slower rate.
It is possible to see crawl issues from the cover report of the latest version of the search console.
The specific websites are suffering from crawl problems by clicking through these links. It is essential to ensure that the pages you’re looking at aren’t crucial for your site and resolve the issue causing it as soon as possible.
If you discover significant errors in crawling or changes in the crawl stats and coverage report, you should investigate further by analyzing log files.
Verify that your website is indexable
After we’ve determined that Googlebot is crawling our site, we have to know if the pages on our website get indexed. There are a variety of ways to check this.
Report on the coverage of Search Console
In this Google Search Console coverage report, we can examine the current status of every page on the website.
In this report, we look at:
- Errors: Redirect errors, 404s.
- With warnings Pages that have been indexed but have warnings attached to them
- Valid Pages that have been successfully indexable.
- Excluded pages aren’t indexable, and the reason for this is like pages that redirect or are blocked by robots.txt.
It is also possible to analyze specific URLs by using an inspection program for URLs.
Utilize a crawling device (like Screaming Frog)
Another way to verify your site is indexable is to perform an index crawl. Handy and flexible software for crawling is Screaming Frog. You can also choose the paid version that costs PS149 per year and has no limit on crawls, more stuff, and APIs.
- Indexability This will show which URLs are “Indexable” or “Non-Indexable.”
- Indexability Level It will indicate why an URL isn’t indexable.
The Google Analytics tool is an excellent method to audit your website in bulk to find the indexable pages and thus show up in the results of searches that aren’t indexable. You can sort the columns to search for irregularities; using the Google Analytics API is an excellent method of identifying the essential pages to determine their indexability.
Search on Google
Within the Search bar, type in your domain name and enter. The search results will display every page of your site indexed by Google. Here’s an example of this:
Utilizing this tool can give you an idea of the number of web pages Google currently holds. If you find a significant gap between the number of pages you believe you have and the amount of pages indexing, it’s worthwhile to investigate further.
Maybe large sections of your website not indexed as they should?
Recheck your sitemap
Your XML sitemap provides an image of your site for Google and other crawlers for search engines, and it helps crawlers discover and rank your site’s pages.
There are a few essential aspects to take into consideration when creating an effective sitemap
- It should be in line with the XML sitemap protocol.
- Only contain canonical URLs.
- Don’t add “noindex” URLs.
- Incorporate all new pages whenever you create or update them.
If you’re using Yoast SEO or the Yoast SEO plugin, it will create the XML website map on your behalf. When you’re using Screaming Frog, their sitemap analysis is quite thorough. Check that your sitemap contains the most critical pages on your site aren’t containing pages that you do not would like Google to crawl, as well as being formatted correctly. After doing all that, you must update your sitemap in your Google Search Console.
Check that your website is mobile-friendly in a technical seo audit
In the year 2000, Google announced last year the roll-off of indexing mobile-first. This means that instead of using your desktop version of your page to rank and index the page, they would use an app that is a mobile-friendly version of the site. This is part of staying on top of the way that users interact with content on the internet. Therefore, ensuring your site’s mobile-friendly design is more essential than ever.
Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is a free tool that you can use to test whether your website is mobile-friendly and easy to use.
It is essential to check your website manually well. Utilize your phone, browse your site, and look for any issues in the conversion pathways that are key to your website. Verify that all contact forms, telephone numbers, and essential service pages are in good working order if you use a desktop. Right-click and look at the page.
If you cannot build your site to work with mobile devices, you must address this issue immediately (see this article for the 2021 update regarding indexing mobile-first). Many of your competitors have already thought about this, as well. The longer you put it off, the further off you’ll be. Don’t lose out on traffic and possible conversions by putting it off any longer.
For more information on this particular aspect of SEO, visit our blog post on mobile-first indexing
Audit page speed
The speed of your website is becoming a ranking element. Making sure your site is quick, responsive, and user-friendly is now the name of Google’s new year in 2019.
You can test your website’s speed using a variety of tools. I’ll discuss a few of the most popular ones below and offer some suggestions.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is yet another valuable and no-cost Google tool. It will give you scores between “Fast,” “Average,” or “Slow” on both mobile as well as desktop devices and provides suggestions to improve the speed of your website.
Check your homepage and the core pages to find out what areas your website comes in the wrong direction and how you can enhance the speed of your site.
It’s crucial to realize that when we talk to digital marketers regarding page speeds, they don’t only mean how fast the site loads for the user but also how simple and quick it is for crawlers to navigate. This is why bundling and reducing the size of the CSS or Javascript files are good. Do not rely solely on the page’s appearance in the eye of a naked person. Use online tools to thoroughly analyze how your page loads for both humans and search engines.
Google has a second free tool for speeding up your site that focuses on mobile devices, proving how crucial mobile-friendly site speed is for Google. Try Test My Website from Google:
Google Analytics for Technical SEO
You can also utilize Google Analytics to see a detailed analysis of ways to enhance the speed of your site. The on-site section speed within Analytics is located under Behaviour > Site Speed. It is full of valuable information about how certain pages perform across different web browsers and different countries. Comparing this with your pages’ views to ensure that you’re prioritizing the primary pages is possible.
The speed of your page’s load depends on various aspects. There are several simple fixes you can examine after doing your homework for your site, such as:
- Optimizing your images
- Repair bloated Javascript
- Reducing server requests
- You must ensure that caching is efficient.
- Please take a look at your server; it has to be fast
- You might want to consider making use of the Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Review of duplicate content for Technical SEO
It’s time to examine any duplicate material on your website. Most people working know that duplicate content is an absolute no-no regarding SEO. While there’s an absence of Google penalization for duplicate content, Google does not like exact versions of the same content.
A quick test that you can perform with Google search parameters. Enter “info:www.your-domain-name.com”
Take a look at the end of search results; in case you have duplicate content, you could get the following message:
If duplicate content appears on this page, it’s worth conducting a crawl with Screaming Frog. It can be sorted according to Page Title to see if your website has similar pages.
Do a SEO audit on technical SEO
They are the foundations of technical SEO. Any digital marketer who is worth their salt must be able to implement these basic principles for every site they run. It’s fascinating to see how far you can dig into technical SEO. It can appear overwhelming, but after you’ve completed your first review, you’ll be eager to discover what other enhancements you can make to your site. These steps are an excellent starting point for any digital marketing professional looking to ensure their site is working correctly with search engine optimization Edmonton.