What makes a technical SEO audit crucial?
A technical SEO audit is the process of checking the technical aspects of your website to make sure it’s following best practices for SEO optimisation. It enables your business to ensure that search engines can crawl, index, and rank pages on your site so that you can rank well on search engine results pages.
An audit involves analysing all elements of your website that affect how search engines crawl and index your site. This includes an entire site crawl to highlight any potential issues that may stop search engines from indexing your site or issues affecting the user experience.
Technical SEO audit services are a great way to have your website examined to ensure its foundations are very much technically sound. Which can support overall SEO performance and growth.
Why should every business perform regular technical SEO audits?
SEO success depends on a chain of interconnected events working in your favour. The first step is to make your pages accessible to search engine bots, which will show them to users searching for your product or service. Once that has been done, you need to draw users into clicking on your link and engaging with your page.
Each stage of developing an SEO strategy has its pitfalls and opportunities that can help you when climbing the ranks on SERPs and regular technical SEO audits can help to identify any underlying technical issues affecting your website that stop you ranking well and ensure any negative implementations are rectified to avoid larger issues down the line.
By working with a technical SEO consultant to do this, you can ensure that you stay on top of your businesses SEO, improving your organic visibility and increasing profits.
What are the immediate benefits of a technical SEO audit?
Identifies SEO problems and gaps
Technical SEO can fix a lot of SEO problems your website might have. But it needs to pinpoint those problems first. A technical SEO audit will dive into your sitemap, HTTPS content, internal links, backlinks, and versions of your website.
Some of the issues you may encounter are a bad website structure, broken links, and duplicate content. These issues stop search engines from crawling your website properly to understand its content.
Identifying these means they can be fixed easily.
Enhances website security
Technical SEO uses secure socket layers (SSL) to protect websites from hacking. This little detail also stops unwanted pop-ups from showing up on your pages.
Pages that use SSL get good rankings on SERPs, as it’s a requirement set out by Google.
Visitors to your site will know if it’s using SSL just by looking at the URL. If it contains HTTPS:// this means it’s secure and can give users a sense of safety knowing that your website is secure.
Creates a better user experience
Slow loading pages is one of the main things that ruins a user’s experience. And while it’s true that some users don’t mind waiting, statistics show that most people will not.
People want convenience, and websites that are slow to load or don’t perform to their expectations will quickly be closed in favour of one that works better.
Search engines look for your bounce rate (the number of people who leave your website after an amount of time). If you have a high bounce rate, it tells them that visitors find something un-appealing about your site, and this can have a negative impact on your ranking.
A technical SEO audit can identify slow loading speeds quickly and take steps to mitigate it so that people stay on your website and have a positive user experience. This will lead to your website being seen as a trustworthy source, helping with your rankings and conversion rates.
Which key elements are examined during a technical SEO audit?
Technical SEO services should cover off the core six factors: crawlability, indexability, page speed, user experience, and on-page optimisation.
Crawlability
Your website won’t be ranked if search engines can’t crawl it. An SEO consultant will look to ensure that:
- Your URLs return a 200 OK status with no errors
- Your URLs are set properly
- Your URLs can be indexed
- Your linked URLs are error-free
- Your pages load correctly
- Your pages load at the right speed
- Pages in your XML sitemap are properly defined and load without error
- Any redirects reach their intended destination without error
Indexability
Making sure search engines can crawl your website is the first step to a thorough technical SEO audit, but if they can’t index what it’s crawled then you’re back to square one. Here at Egnetix Digital we would search for:
- 4xx client errors
- 5xx server errors
- If your server denies access to any URLs
- Incorrect use of nofollow tags
- Use of JavaScript instead of CSS for site navigation
- Generic 404 pages
Rankability
Appearing higher on SERPs requires good quality content that is optimised with ranking factors strong enough to beat the competition.
While Google uses over 200 ranking factors for assessing your content, for technical SEO content and links are the most important factors. When both of these are well optimised, you are in good hands.
We will look at your content during the audit, analysing it for reliability, keyword optimisation, and user experience.
Page Speed
Page speed is a huge ranking factor for Google, and while how a page loads on a desktop is important, how it loads on a mobile is even more so.
During a technical SEO audit, we will look at how long your page takes to load to ensure we can spot any potential slowdowns before they start to dampen your SEO rankings.
User Experience
While it’s not a direct ranking factor, user experience can seriously affect your ranking.
A poorly put together site will struggle converting users than a modern, well put together site with clear calls to action.
Checking your site’s bounce rate and average time users spend on page will give us a good understanding of the user experience so we can improve it and help with ranking factors.
On Page Optimisation
While rankings for long-tail keywords can be done fairly quickly, ranking for more competitive short-tail keywords takes more time and effort.
We will review your content including:
- Keyword targeting
- Page Titles
- Meta Descriptions
- Headers
- Content
- Inbound and Outbound Links
How often should you conduct a technical SEO audit?
There is no right or wrong answer here, however at Egenetix Digital I recommend performing a technical SEO audit once a quarter. We use a range of industry-leading platforms for quicker analysis and will work with you on a monthly basis to ensure the smooth running of your website and that it’s performing well for all areas of SEO.
The long-term value of regular technical SEO audits
Good technical SEO can boost your rankings, but technical SEO errors can bring them down quickly. Broken links, user experience issues, and poor page loading speed are just some of the main ones that can bring your SEO efforts down significantly.
By regularly conducting an SEO audit once a quarter, we can help you to uncover any errors before they become a problem. We work with you to devise a plan of attack so that we can take the measures to tackle the issues and prevent them from happening in the future.
Need help with your website’s technical SEO? Contact us today to see how we can help.
Who are Egnetix Digital?
Egnetix Digital is a SEO consultancy based in Kent, boasting over a decade of expertise. Specialising in advanced technical SEO services, we are committed to boosting the online performance of businesses across various industries. Our strategies focus on refining site architecture and optimising on-page elements to secure and sustain top search engine positions. If you need an SEO partner skilled in transforming complex digital challenges into growth opportunities, enhancing your business’s visibility online, reach out to Egnetix Digital today.