Learn how to carry out a technical SEO audit in 9 steps

Learn how to conduct a thorough technical audit of your website

Are you wondering why you should perform technical SEO audits for your website?

I'm going to tell you why it's important. 

Because of the ever-increasing competition in digital marketing, you need to stay at the top of your game.

Referencing is a An important factor in the success of any website and cannot be ignored.

The SEO is very important for the success of any online businesse. In fact, around 61% of marketers say that SEO is their main goal when it comes to inbound marketing.

You may have built your website well, but if SEO is not up to par, your site will not be able to be competitive and therefore visible.

To ensure that your SEO is optimal, you need to perform technical referencing audits.

They will give you an idea of how your website ranks and what you need to do to improve your search engine rankings

While this may seem difficult and time consuming, it doesn't have to be.

You can easily carry out a technical SEO audit in a short time. And that short period of time can have a big impact.

Before we dive deeper into the subject, let's first look at what exactly a technical SEO audit is.

What is a technical SEO audit?

You need to ensure that your content and website rank well in Google's search engine results (SERPs).

The days of keyword stuffing and backlinking from micro-sites are over. You need to improve your game and adapt your SEO strategy to the latest developments.

How can conducting a technical SEO audit help your website rank better?

A technical SEO audit is a process during which you check the technical aspects of SEO for your website. It is essentially a matter of verifying the health of a website and determining what corrections should be made to improve it.

Search engine robots scour the web to find pages and websites.

The robots then check your pages based on various ranking factors before ranking your website in the search results.

SEO is constantly evolving and your competitors are also keeping up with these changes.. That is why it is important for you to stay up to date to stay relevant. If you don't assess the health of your website, you risk losing traffic to your competitors.

As search algorithms and technology change frequently, it's a good practice to carry out monthly mini-audits.

You should also ensure that you do a comprehensive technical SEO audit every 4 to 5 months.

READ MORE: 12 Semrush Alternatives You Can't Skip

What are the factors that affect the SEO performance of your website?

The main factors that affect the SEO of your website can be divided into three different categories.

• Technical factors: These are technical aspects such as hosting, indexing, page loading speed.
• On-page factors: These include factors such as site content, target keywords, and related terms.
• Off-page factors: These are backlinks and external references to your website from other websites.

You should audit each of these factors at regular intervals. This will allow you to always be aware of changing conditions in the sector.

One of the most important factors to consider is the compatibility of your website with mobile phones. Given that approximately 60% of searches are done on a mobile, Google has begun to place greater emphasis on mobile-friendly websites.

What are the steps to follow to perform a technical SEO audit?

Now that you know what a technical SEO audit is and what parameters are included in it, let's see how you can do one.

1. Start by exploring your website

Any technical SEO audit should start with the crawling of your website. For this, you can use tools such as

• SE Ranking,
• ‍Semrush,
• ‍Spyfu
• or Ahrefs.

The tool On-Page SEO Checker by Semrush also provides you with actionable recommendations to improve your site's SEO strategy, backlinks, technical SEO, and content quality.

Les Crawlers help you find errors such as:

• broken links,
• poor quality images,
• page title problems
• problems with the wrong keywords.

They can also help you identify the duplicate content, excessive redirects, and unlinked pages.

You can also consult the Google Search Console to know the level of exploration of your website.

Crawl is basically how many pages Google crawls on your website and how often it does so.

Reviewing this exploration will give you an idea of how the Google robot explore your website.

How do you get the most out of these explorations by Google robots?

Follow the steps below:

Remove duplicate content

Duplicate pages can easily waste your crawl budget.

You can use tools like Screaming Frog to find duplicate pages. These pages generally have the same title and meta description tags.

Remove as many duplicate pages as possible. However, if you need to keep them, block them for search engine robots.

Restrict indexing

Some pages, such as the privacy policy and terms and conditions, do not need to appear in search results.

You can block the indexing of these pages.

Provide URL parameters

Google may end up crawling the same page twice.

You can add URL parameters to Google Search Console to tell it whether or not the pages are the same.

This problem generally arises for e-commerce sites that can get a lot of duplicate content problems for variants of their product. Example: 10 different colors for the same pair of shoes (same description, same characteristics or page structures)

NOTE: The URL Settings tools are no longer available if you use the Google Search Console with a domain property:

To work around this issue, you can open a new “URL Prefix” property.

Fix redirections

Each redirect that the Google robot follows is a potential problem during this and future explorations.

If there are a lot of 301 or 302 redirections, robots may stop following them and not reach the landing page.

You have to Reduce the number of redirects during the technical SEO audit for optimize the exploration of your website.

Search on Google

Another thing you can do is to manually search for your website on Google.

To do this, you can go to Google and type in “site:domain name” and search to see the results.

This will show you how many of your pages are showing up in the search results.

If there are missing pages, that doesn't mean your website can't be crawled.
However, it can give you an idea of what might not work or if you missed important pages in your sitemap.

Check your SEO score

Websites like SEO Site Checkup Give you what we call the SEO score of your website.

This score is a score out of 100 that indicates the strengths and weaknesses of your site.

This score can help you determine what to do next in your technical referencing audit.

This check can help you determine which keywords you use the most.
It can also help you to tFind broken links and coding errors. You can also check if the Site map And the robots.txt are available for your website.

If there is malware or phishing activity on your website, this is taken into account when generating the score.

Submit your sitemap to Google to speed up indexing

Specifically ask Google to explore your site map, using the “Ping” feature, by entering the following URL:

‍

Using this option, you will then be taken to the following page:

Your sitemap is ready to be analyzed by Google! 👍

2. Analyze the sitemap

Your website's sitemap is extremely important.

It can tell search engines about the structure of your site and help them discover new pages.

He is It is essential to have a sitemap to implement your SEO strategy. For this reason, you should check it during the technical SEO audit.

Make sure your sitemap is:

Without any errors

There should be no errors in your sitemap.

Redirects and URLs that may block indexing should be removed. If they're not, search engines could end up ignoring your sitemap.

Concise

The sitemap should be fairly concise.

If it contains more than 50,000 URLs, Google won't explore it.

That's why you should keep it short and contain all the important pages.

If you have more URLs than that, it's possible to use a Site map “parent” pointing to several other sitemaps for a single website.

Update

All of your latest content should be added to your sitemap as it is published. This can help search engines discover new content more quickly.

Register your sites in the Google Search Console

You need to let Google know about the existence of your sitemap. You can do this in two ways:

• manually in the Google Search Console

• or by specifying its location in the robots.txt file.

3. Check the searchable versions of your website

You need to ensure that only one “version” of your website can be viewed.

Does your website have different versions?

If that's the case, you You will end up sending mixed signals to the search engine. The crawlers will no longer know which version is the correct one.

If the search engine doesn't know what the versions of your website are, it won't know how to present them to Internet users. This can significantly affect your search engine rankings.

This type of error may be due to the fact that the mobile and desktop versions are competing or possibly due to the duplication of HTTP and HTTPS versions.

The technical SEO audit should make it possible to ensure that only one of the versions of your website is navigable.

It's a great idea to make sure your website uses HTTPS. Even Google makes sure people know which sites are secure and which are not.

Now you can find the “Not secure” label next to websites that use HTTP.

4. Check internal links

A logical hierarchy in your website can do wonders for your search engine rankings.

For this reason, he is necessary to check both its internal links and its external links.

Sometimes web pages can also be removed or moved, which can also lead to broken links that degrade your SEO if you're not careful.

What internal link factors should you check?

Here are a few things you can check about your internal links during the technical SEO audit:

Analyze click depth

The click depth tells you how many clicks away from the home page a particular page is.

You need to make sure that this number is as low as possible.

To find out, you can use WebSite Auditor and go to:

• ‍Site structure,
• then in Pages.

One of the columns will show you the click depth.

Broken links

Broken links can ruin your SEO strategy.

They can even disrupt visitors and are therefore bad for your website.

• You can consult the dashboard All resources within WebSite Auditor, then click on Internal resources.
• Sort the list by the HTTP status code to find broken links.

READ MORE: The Best Tools for Repairing and Fixing 404 Errors

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Orphan pages

These are pages that are not linked to any page on your website and can be difficult for search engines to find.

• You can find orphan pages by going to Site structure within WebSite Auditor, then in Pages.
• Click on the option Rebuilding the project and in step 2, click Search for orphan pages.

5. Website speed

The speed of your site is an extremely important parameter when it comes to SEO.

People don't like waiting for websites to load and the longer it takes, The more likely it is that visitors will bounce back (leave your website).

Therefore, no technical SEO audit is complete without testing the speed of your website.

What is the relationship between page load speed and bounce rate?

If your website takes longer than 5 seconds to load, the probability of rebound increases of 90%.

Google will soon take into account the site speed to determine your ranking.

For this reason, it is important that you check the speed of your site and reduce it. You can use GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights for that.

They will show you the Your website's loading speed and its performance compared to other sitesS.

6. Verify HTTPS content

Circa 70% of the results of Page 1 of the Google search are all in HTTPS.
If your website already uses HTTPS, you should look for common HTTPS issues in your SEO technical audit.

What are the most common HTTPS issues for most websites?

Here are a few things you should check on your HTTPS site:

Links, canonics, and redirections

All links on your website, as well as canonical links and redirects, should point to HTTPS pages.

You can have HTTP to HTTPS redirects on your website, but it's not ideal to get users through redirects.

Redirections can also be a problem for crawling in the future. 

Mixed content

The mixed content problem occurs when secure pages load insecure content like images and videos.

This may reduce the security of the page. It can even prevent browsers from loading the entire page or insecure content.

To verify this problem,

• In WebSite Auditor, go in Site Audit.
• You need to find the option HTTPS pages with mixed content issues and check it to find mixed content.

You can also view the complete list of non-HTTPS resources on your website via WebSite Auditor. Check the internal resources and sort them by URL.

You will be able to see the HTTP pages first. For each HTTP page, check the complete list of pages that link to it. It also shows the location of the link, so you can easily fix things.

7. Use Google Analytics to compare metrics From the website

You need to check if your Google Analytics service is reporting accurate data in real time.

If it does it correctly, the code has been installed correctly.

This should be verified during the technical SEO audit. The tracking code of Google Analytics should be placed above the header of each web page or installed through Google Tag Manager (much more optimized 🔥).

Once the service is in place, you can check the data by comparing it to the results of the “site:domain name” search.

The number of pages should be similar in both cases. If the number is not similar, it means that some pages are not accepting crawl requests properly.

Google Analytics also helps you check your bounce rate. This Rate should be as low as possible.

Why is it important to have a low bounce rate?

Un bounce rate High indicates that people cannot find what they are looking for on your website.

To reduce this rate, you must in particular: optimize your content and page load speed.

You can also use the MozBar to check the SEO details of various pages on your website during the technical SEO audit. It can highlight the different types of links such as follow, no-follow, external and internal.

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The MozBar also indicates The authority of the page of each page.

This is a number between 1 and 100 that indicates how well the page can rank in the SERPs.

Such a tool can facilitate your audit process.

8. Do a backlink audit

Backlinks are essential for the success of your website.

So it is not surprising that they are part of the technical SEO audit. They show search engines how valuable your site's content is for users.

However, crawlers don't just look for hyperlinks as part of off-site SEO.

The Google robot also checks for brand mentions on your website. That's why it's important to know what's going on on and off your website.

You can audit backlinks using tools like Ahrefs. It can give you an idea of the types of backlinks that point to your website.

What else can Ahrefs help you with?

Ahrefs helps you identify areas that need to have more high value-added links.

• You can even check how many backlinks your competitors have and try to beat them.
• You should also check what keywords your competitors are ranking for.

To do this, you can use Ahrefs (or Semrush) and see the backlinks that go to your competitors for relevant keywords.

That way, you can compare your backlinks to theirs and see how you rank above them in search engines.

You should also check which social media platforms are frequented by your target audience. Those who like your content may want to link to it. This can help you get more details about the best backlinks strategy to adopt.

Social media can also help you help increase brand awareness, which, in turn, can facilitate searches for your brand name (BRAND SERP or SERP “Brand” in French)

They help you increase traffic and mentions. The most interesting thing is that it is even easier than creating a backlink creation campaign..

READ MORE: Practical techniques to improve your brand's SERP results

9. Re-Crawl your website

Once the issues identified during the technical SEO audit have been resolved, you can ask Google to crawl your website again.

This final stage of the technical SEO audit ensures that the changes you have made are taken into account with immediate effect.

To do this, you need to go to Google Search Console, then to the section Crawl and click on Fetch As Google. You need to enter the URL that should be retrieved and click on Recover. Once the Google robot retrieves your page, you need to click Submit to Index to ask Google to retrieve it.

You have the option of submitting the exact URL or the URL along with all linked pages. In the latter case, Google will use the URL as a starting point for indexing the content. It will then follow all internal links to explore your website.

Ready to perform a technical SEO audit?

A regular technical audit of your website is essential for the success of your SEO strategy. Frequently testing all technical parameters for errors can help you easily identify and rectify them.

You need to make sure that your website loads quickly and that the internal links are well done. Broken links and unnecessary redirects should be spotted and removed.

A backlink audit can also help you determine which parts of the website need to be pushed further. It can also help you discover your competitors' backlinks.

In your opinion, what is the most important factor for the SEO success of your website? Let us know in the comments.