8 Steps To Perform an SEO Audit Without Dying Trying

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An SEO audit helps teams understand behind-the-scenes issues that affect search engine rankings, such as site speed, indexing, and backlinks. It is important that SEO specialists have a complete view of all the elements that affect page rank so that teams can take the best course of action to improve their rankings.

Carrying out daily technical SEO audits is crucial to building an excellent SEO strategy, it is a kind of daily practice that every team must have so that their websites work correctly and above all that they have optimal performance against the competition. But if you’re just starting out, starting work with a new company, or want to learn how to complete a technical SEO audit, it can be overwhelming.

In this article, we’ll go over 8 steps to help you complete a technical SEO audit, increase web traffic to your web pages, and build your confidence as an SEO specialist.

1. Crawl your website

Use a tool that scans your website to check how many URLs there are, how many are indexable, and how many have problems, including issues that are hindering your site’s performance.

2. Detect indexing problems

If the website has pages that Google can’t crawl, it may not be indexed correctly. Here are some common indexing problems to look for:

• Indexing errors

• Robots.txt errors

• Problems with the sitemap

The easiest way to check your site’s indexing is to use the Coverage Report in Google Search Console. It will tell you which pages are indexed and why others are excluded so you can fix them. You may need to optimize your crawl budget to ensure that your pages are regularly indexed.

3. Check the technical elements on the page

Although on-page elements are often left out of a technical SEO audit, attending to them is considered basic cleanup that needs to be addressed. Here is a list of on-page elements to review during a technical SEO audit:

• Page titles and title tags

• Meta descriptions

• Canonical tags

• Href language tags

• Outline Markup

4. Identify image problems

Image optimization is another often overlooked aspect that is crucial for technical SEO audits. Making sure images are free of errors can help a site rank in many ways, including improving loading speeds, increasing Google Images traffic, and improving accessibility.

Be sure to identify technical imaging issues such as:

• Broken Images

• Image file size too large

• Links from HTTPS page to HTTP image

• Missing alt text

5. Analyze internal links

Next, it is important to analyze internal links. Identify the 4xx status codes that need to be redirected. If there are orphan pages with no internal links leading to them, identify and address them.

6. Check external links

Next, move on to the external links. External links are important because they make a website more credible to users and search engines. Make sure all backlinks are active and don’t lead to broken pages, and check that all pages have outbound links.

7. Measure site speed and performance

Google Search gives higher ranking positions to websites with good performance and fast load times.

Here’s how to use Google PageSpeed ​​Insights to check site performance:

• Go to the Google PageSpeed ​​Insights page.

• Enter the URL of your web page in the box.

• Click Analyze and view your results.

This tool will provide you with an overall score, field data, suggestions, and other diagnostic information that can help you improve your page speed.

8. Make sure your site is mobile friendly

Finally, make sure the site you’re auditing is mobile-friendly, responsive, and cross-browser compatible. Google favors responsive web pages that load easily and are easy to view, regardless of the user’s device.

SEO technical audits help optimize websites to make them easier for users and indexing bots to understand. Carrying out a technical SEO audit involves many elements, but this eight-step process can help you streamline your workflow so you don’t miss anything, it’s important that you perform them regularly and can spot potential issues and fix them, so your site is always optimized.