The term “technical SEO” refers to a specific area of SEO that covers optimizations that increase rankings on search engines by making your site more accessible for crawlers. Examples include:
- Make sure you have checked the robot.txt files.
- Make sure that redirects work correctly.
- Improving your site’s loading time.
In essence, it’s ensuring that your website will be viewed, crawled, and placed on the search results page in search results.
Search engines like Google prefer websites that comply with the webmaster’s guidelines. The principles that guide the content on your website must be reliable, simple to access, and user-friendly.
If your site loads slowly or has a non-responsive design, or does not have a secured connection, the content may not comply with these standards. It is where the technical SEO audit comes into play since it will help you improve the technical attributes of your website to boost the amount of organic traffic.
What is a Technical SEO Audit?
It is essential to ensure that your website and your content website appear high on the results of searches (SERPs) in the Google Search Console. It is long gone are the days of keywords being stuffed into your content and backlinks via micro-sites are over.
You must increase your efficiency and keep your SEO strategy aligned with the latest advancements in Google’s Google Search Console.
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How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit
SEO guidelines are continuously changing. When an important search engine alters the algorithm it uses, SEO is required to change. The good news is that the rate of change in SaaS technical SEO tends to be less frequent.
In the end, it’s not like search engines and readers suddenly decide they’re okay with slow speeds. Instead, you’ll observe the speed that is considered acceptable decrease over time. Your website needs to be faster to keep pace with SEO requirements.
Your website should be mobile-friendly. It will increase in importance in the future as well. It should function without mistakes, duplicate content, and poor-quality images. Search engines must also be adept at crawling it.
These are the most critical aspects of your success with websites and search engines. If you are looking to prioritize all of these aspects in your SEO efforts, ensure you address the technical aspects first.
1. Duplication of Content
Content duplication is a significant issue that many websites face because more companies use dynamically-built websites, CMS, and global SEO.
This same content can cause crawlers of search engines to be confused and prevent the right content from reaching your intended audience. Duplicate content affects your ranking; however, Google could be penalizing your website. Your site could be unable to rank in the SERPs altogether.
The solution is to search your website for duplicates and then use “crawl directives” to make Google aware of the importance of different URLs. You can tell Google what directories and folders are not worthy of crawling with robots.txt. This file lets you control how Google’s bots crawl your site and index your websites.
2. Speed of Your Website
Your website’s speed site is a significant factor in your SERP rank. Since faster websites provide users with a more enjoyable experience, slow websites are penalized and cause them to slide down the ranking.
Users typically shift to a different site when their initial choice is loading too slowly. If the server’s response time is more significant than two minutes, Google restricts the number of crawlers delivered to your website. It means that fewer pages will be crawled!
To find specific problems with speed on your website, Utilize specialist SEO software such as Google PageSpeed Insights. It is crucial to test both the mobile and desktop performances. This tool tracks the speed of your site.
Optimizing images on your website, using caching in your browser, and optimizing CSS and JavaScript can be beneficial to the speed of your site. Ask your web designer to figure out the best solution for your website’s particular page performance issues.
3. Broken Links
Both search crawlers and visitors can see excellent well-crafted content and has good external and internal links. Broken links can affect the user experience and indicate low-quality content, affecting your page’s ranking. A couple of broken links on a website with hundreds of pages is average and not a problem.
Although internal links must be checked for validity every time a page is modified, added, or redirected. However, The value of external hyperlinks must be regularly monitored. Regular website SEO audit service is the most efficient method to fix broken links. Additionally, you can employ SEO software to help identify and repair broken links simpler.
4. Missing Alt Tags & Broken Images
Alt tags can be described as HTML elements that define the content of images. If an image element on your site fails to render correctly, the alt tag associated with the picture will describe the content and purpose.
It also helps search engine crawlers understand the page’s information, enhancing the necessary word. This property tells an algorithm what the image’s subject matter is that aids in the indexing process of a webpage for search engines.
It is a straightforward method to increase the SEO quality of your site through the use of images that enhance the user experience. Issues with image optimization are frequent, but you can save them for later unless your website relies heavily on images.
Alt tags that aren’t there and pictures that don’t work are the most frequent problems. The two most frequent issues that business owners need to be aware of are missing alt tags and damaged photos.
Images damaged and lacking alt tags are common occurrences during SEO audits of websites. Regular audits of your website to examine the content of your photos are part of the SEO normal operating procedures. Make it simple to keep up-to-date by ensuring alt tags are applied to images across your site.
5. No Meta Description
Meta descriptions are brief content blurbs between 160 and 120 characters that summarize the information on the page—these snippets of information aid in indexing your website by search engines. Additionally, the meta description that is written well will help determine users’ interest in the page’s content.
It’s an easy SEO component. However, many websites don’t have this essential information. Meta descriptions, just like the content on your site, must be optimized in line with what the user reads on the page. Therefore, make use of relevant keywords in your text.
If you see pages that do not have meta descriptions, perform an SEO site audit using SEO software. You prefer to find the pages that are missing meta descriptions. Please find out the worth of the page and rank it accordingly.
Meta descriptions on pages should be evaluated concerning their performance and their value for the business. A site audit could identify pages with meta descriptions with errors. Pages with high value that are close to getting the position you want them to be should be the priority.
Every page undergoing an update, edit, or alteration should also be updated with a meta description in tandem. Meta descriptions should be precise and unique for every page.
Conclusion
Issues with technical SEO aren’t easily discernible at a glance. If you suspect one of the above issues is being observed on your site, It’s time to investigate your SEO strategy and site. It may be time to perform an SEO error correction.
An ongoing technical SEO check of your website is essential to achieving your SEO strategy. Regularly testing all technical parameters for any errors will assist you in identifying and correcting the issues quickly.
You should ensure that your site loads quickly and that the internal linking is appropriately done. Broken links, as well as unnecessary redirects, should be identified and eliminated. An audit of backlinks can aid in determining which elements of your website need to be further pushed. It could also help identify the backlinks of your competition.
SEO error fixing and site audits can be highly efficient. However, they take time and require expert guidance to ensure success.
