As an SEO consultant, conducting a comprehensive technical audit of a client’s website is one of the most important services you can provide. Ensuring their site architecture, internal linking, page speed, and other technical factors are optimized for search engines can have an enormous impact on rankings and traffic. However, many consultants only scratch the surface with a technical SEO audit. To provide maximum value to your clients, you need to dig deep into their sites and uncover issues that could be hampering their visibility and performance. Take Webbyacad blogs help to fix your issues.
The following eight steps will allow you to perform an in-depth technical SEO audit for your client’s website. By methodically working through each stage, you can diagnose problems, spot opportunities for improvement, and develop a tailored list of recommendations to boost their rankings and traffic through technical optimizations. Your clients will appreciate your thoroughness and attention to detail. And the insights you gain will help strengthen your SEO expertise.
Crawl the Client’s Website and Analyze the URL Structure
To perform a comprehensive technical SEO audit for a client’s blog, you must crawl the site and analyze its URL structure.
- Use a crawler like Screaming Frog to crawl the entire website and export the URL data. Review the URL structure and check that each page has a unique URL with the target keyword in it if possible. URLs should be simple, consistent, and contain relevant keywords when possible.
- Ensure all pages can be accessed. Check for 404 errors and fix any broken links or redirects. These issues prevent search engines from accessing all of the client’s content.
- Evaluate page titles and meta descriptions. Page titles should be unique and concise, ideally under 65 characters. Meta descriptions should be 160 characters or less and contain relevant keywords. These elements are critical for on-page SEO.
- Check that images have alt text. All images should have alt text, as it provides context for search engines and improves accessibility. Alt text should contain target keywords when possible.
- Ensure a logical internal linking structure. Internal links should connect relevant content and use anchor text with target keywords. An internal link profile with lots of links, especially from authoritative pages, helps search engines discover all of the client’s content.
- Review page load speed and mobile-friendliness. Fast, mobile-optimized pages lead to better user experience and search ranking. Use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Mobile-Friendly Test to evaluate the site.
By thoroughly auditing the technical components of the client’s blog, you can uncover issues preventing the site from reaching its full SEO potential and develop solutions to resolve them. Conducting regular technical SEO audits service helps ensure the blog is in line with current best practices and access to both users and search engines.
Check Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, and Header Tags
To perform a technical SEO audit of a client’s blog, checking page titles, meta descriptions, and header tags is a crucial step.
- Page titles (also called title tags) should be unique and contain the target keyword for each page. They should be less than 70 characters to display properly in search engines.
- Meta descriptions are short summaries of the page content, displayed in search results. They should be unique, contain the target keyword, and be between 150 to 160 characters. Meta descriptions encourage clicks by summarizing what the page is about.
- Header tags (H1, H2, H3) organize content and signal to search engines what the page is about. The H1 tag should contain the target keyword and there should only be one H1 tag per page. H2 and H3 tags break up the content into logical sections.
- Image alt attributes provide a textual description of images in case the image does not load. They also contain keywords and make content more accessible. The alt attribute should be relevant to the image content and contain keywords when appropriate.
- A robots.txt file tells search engines which pages or sections of your site to not crawl or index. Check that there are no issues preventing pages from being indexed.
- A sitemap helps search engines discover all the pages on your site. Submit a XML sitemap to the major search engines to ensure all blog content is indexed.
By optimizing these on-page elements, you can improve the technical SEO of a blog and help search engines fully understand the content to rank pages higher in results. Performing regular audits of these factors is key to maintaining optimal technical SEO.
Technical SEO Audit FAQs
What is a technical SEO audit?
A technical SEO audit evaluates the behind-the-scenes elements of a website that can impact search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine rankings. It analyzes page speed, HTML markup, URL structure, images, and more. The goal is to identify any issues that could be hindering the site’s visibility in search results and provide solutions to resolve them.
Why is a technical SEO audit important?
A technical SEO audit is critical for achieving and maintaining high search rankings. If there are technical errors or inefficiencies on a site, search engines may have trouble crawling and indexing its pages. This can result in pages not showing up in search results at all or ranking lower than they should. A technical audit helps diagnose and fix these issues to allow search engines to fully access, understand, and rank the site’s content.
What does a technical SEO audit evaluate?
A comprehensive technical SEO audit will analyze elements such as:
- Page speed and mobile-friendliness: Slow load times and a poor mobile experience can negatively impact rankings.
- HTML markup: Proper use of title tags, meta descriptions, image alt text, and semantic HTML markup helps search engines understand page content.
- URL structure: A clean, logical URL structure with keywords in URLs aids crawlability and rankings.
- Image SEO: Optimized image file names, alt text, and compression improve page speed and rankings.
- Internal linking: A strategic internal link structure helps search engines crawl the entire site.
- robots.txt and sitemap.xml files: These files direct search engines to important pages on the site.
- Duplicate content: Identifying and removing or properly redirecting duplicate content prevents search engines from indexing the same content multiple times.
- 404 errors: Fixing or removing 404 error pages reduces crawl errors and improves the user experience.
A comprehensive technical SEO audit will evaluate all of these elements and more to identify issues holding a site back in search rankings and provide actionable solutions to resolve them. Conducting regular technical audits helps ensure long-term SEO success.
Warming Up
With these eight steps, you now have a comprehensive process to perform a technical SEO audit 2023 for any website. By crawling the site, analyzing redirects and duplicate content issues, optimizing page speed and mobile-friendliness, auditing internal linking and content, evaluating XML sitemaps and robots.txt files, checking indexing issues, and monitoring rankings and traffic, you can identify both quick wins and long-term opportunities to improve technical SEO.
Implement the recommended fixes and updates to provide an improved user experience, strengthen your organic search presence, and achieve higher rankings and more targeted traffic over time. A regular technical SEO audit is well worth the investment for any business that depends on search engine traffic to drive growth.
