The importance of Technical SEO Audit is now a widely discussed topic. Want to know why? I’ll tell you.

As society continues to adopt digital solutions with the advent of mobile phones and inexpensive laptops, businesses are beginning to focus much of their investments on tools to create websites, video content, and engaging visuals.

Statista estimated the total number of active websites in 2021 to be roughly 1.88 billion, which keeps increasing daily.

Against an ocean of these unique IPs, it is challenging for your website to rank at the forefront of the Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP).

And according to Neil Patel, a renowned SEO expert, the further you get from search engines’ front page, the fewer organic leads your website gets.

Of course, you can stand at the top of this ranking game and get more clicks by properly optimizing your website.

That is why most online businesses prioritize SEO auditing just as much as they value their products.

This article outlines six major steps to conducting a technical SEO Audit. But first, you need to understand what this term means.

What Is Technical SEO Audit?

A Technical SEO Audit is an essential segment of the whole SEO strategy responsible for discovering and fixing possible problems affecting your website’s ranking on search engines like Google.

There are many factors that search engines consider when determining how and where to rank your business online.

These include your sitemap, page speed, backlinks, SEO keywords, and many others.

Generally, you can divide all these SEO checks into three categories:

• Technical SEO: Sitemap and indexing, hosting, and loading speed.
• On-page or Content SEO: Keyword research and site content.
• Off-page SEO: Backlinks and other external links to your website.

By identifying your website’s bugs and lapses, you can invest resources where necessary and ensure your business has a continuous flow of quality organic leads.

6 Easy Ways To Conduct A Technical SEO Audit Successfully

A standard technical SEO Audit takes less than an hour to complete.

Importantly, you don’t need to spend money unless you want to employ the help of a professional or pay for a premium auditing tool.

Follow the steps below to get started.

Crawl Your Website

Every Technical SEO Audit starts with crawling your website.

You need to determine the health status of all the pages you manage and identify possible issues affecting them.

A perfect tool for this is SemRUSH. It is handy for identifying broken links, duplicate pages, excessive Redirects (301 and 401), and backlinks.

Check your website’s speed on mobile devices and laptops using tools like Google PageSpeed.

The whole process should take less than 30 minutes if you are a code geek and barely an hour if you are not.

Once the whole auditing is done, chart your reports and fix issues.

Optimize Sitemap

Sitemaps reveal your website’s structure to Google and other search engines.

With a Sitemap, these search engines can effectively crawl and index your site pages.

If you don’t have a sitemap, use tools like Slickplan to get one.

The next step is to visit Google’s search console and locate the sitemap section. Input the generated sitemap and save.

Another method is to include it in your robot.txt file. For this, you might need to contact a web developer.

There are other things to know when optimizing your sitemap.

Some search engines like Google will not crawl your website if it has more than 50,000 URLs on a single map.

Only include essential pages in your sitemap and keep it short.

Fix Content Structure & Click Depth

Search engines use different algorithms to determine if your website is worth showing others.

Content structure is one of the factors considered by these algorithms.

Especially for bloggers, using headings (H1 to H6) is essential.

It shows search engines that your content is well organized and won’t irritate your readers.

Another factor is the click-depth of your website. Click Depth means how far a page is from the homepage.

The maximum recommended click for each page on a website is 4.

Beyond this, search engines will find it difficult to crawl and index these pages.

An example of a perfect click-depth is www.domain.com/xyz/ or www.domain.com/xyz/posts.

Tools like SemRUSH and Screaming Frog can provide the click Depth of each page on your website.

Remove Broken Links & Optimize Number Of Redirects

Broken links can result from several factors like incorrect URLs and removed web pages.

This can lead to a bad user experience, and search engines don’t like them.

Often, fixing broken links by redirecting them to an available page is a good solution.

However, this can lead to a bulky build-up of Redirects on your website.

Excessive redirects mean sparse crawling, slow loading speed, and the possibility of not having the majority of your website indexed.

The best way to fix broken links is to optimize them at the source by either correcting the URL or improving the page.

Optimize Site Speed

The optimum page speed for every website is a commonly debated topic.

However, some studies show that 53% of mobile device users lose interest in pages with more than 3 seconds of loading time.

For programmers, a little tweak here and there can increase your site’s speed, but if you are using WordPress, some premium tools like WP Rocket will do the trick.

Some things you should consider when optimizing your website for speed include image caching, lazy loads, and code minification.

Manage Your Backlink Profile

Backlinks are the number of external references made to your website.

Although Google has not disclosed how it calculates page authority, experts believe external linking to your website is crucial.

When Google sees your website as an authority in a specialized niche, it tends to rank your content higher on the SERPs than those websites that are not.

This is not the only factor search engines use in ranking your page, but it is as important as a bulk of many other factors.

Track your competitor’s backlinks using tools like Ahref and outperform them by reaching out to reputable sources who can link back to your website.

Conclusion

Technical SEO Audit is an indispensable tool every online business needs to employ.

Due to the rapidly growing competition in the digital market, more visibility for your brand means more sales and conversion.