Technical SEO Audit: How to Check Your Website for Technical Issues?

What Is an SEO Audit?

The purpose of an SEO audit is to get a complete picture of your website from a search engine optimization perspective. A good audit helps you prioritize what needs fixing and also ensures you’re on track with best practices—all so that you can improve your rankings and increase traffic from organic search results. An SEO audit encompasses technical, on-page, content and backlink analysis, often provided by different specialists who focus in one area or another.

However, you must remember that it is not a solution to your problems. The purpose of the audit is to name them and create a list of tasks necessary to be implemented on the website so that it can enjoy a high ranking position. So it is a kind of instruction.

Types of SEO audit

1. Manual audit – all activities are performed manually, which is extremely time-consuming, but at the same time the most detailed.
2. Automatic audit – a tool that independently checks the technical parameters of a website, less valuable than a manual one.
3. Manual-automatic audit – a combination of both methods, the results are then the most complete.

Benefits of conducting an audit

By taking a close look at your website’s technical foundation, you can see whether or not your site is set up in a way that makes it easy for search engines and visitors to find and enjoy. Auditing your site will help you identify issues with accessibility, content organization, performance, crawl budget and security. This information can help shape a clearer idea of how well search engines are able to understand what’s on your website — both from an internal and external perspective. In turn, these insights can help inform decisions about where to focus time and resources when making improvements.

When should the audit be performed?

All companies and websites should have a technical SEO audit performed on their site at least once every quarter. The ideal time to perform an audit is at one of three times, when your website traffic is highest.

The audit should obligatorily be carried out during:

• taking over the site from another owner,
• major updates of algorithms,
• changes to the website structure,
• changes the marketing and promotional strategy,
• the imposition of a penalty by the search engine.

On-Site Audits

When you’re looking at on-site optimization, start by checking your site’s crawlability, speed, and security. Then test each page title and meta description against a site like Open Site Explorer. If they don’t match up with your target keywords, fix them. Make sure you have a robots.txt file that allows Googlebot access to all pages on your site. Also, make sure you’ve set up a sitemap and submitted it to Google Webmaster Tools. All of these things will help your website rank higher in search results—and better yet, they are free!

Off-Site Audits

Typically, your off-site audit will begin with a comprehensive look at your competitor’s websites. You want to see what competitors are doing well and not so well. Then you’ll want to do some competitive analysis of other websites in your niche. See how they’re ranking, check out their link profile and internal linking structure, figure out where they get their links from, etc. This is an important step because it helps you understand how Google views your competition. It also gives you insight into what types of things Google values when determining rankings, which can help inform your own website strategy.

The most common mistakes that are detected during an audit include excessive keyword density, URL writing errors, incorrect or unused HTML tags, incorrect meta tags and anchors, duplicate content, broken links, and slow loading speed.

Costs

As We mentioned, the audit differs depending on the elements tested. The process is different for a small local company compared to a large company. Expert audit starts from several thousand and above. You can also find the possibility of a free audit on the web. They can be used, but the number of their tools is very limited. They are characterized by a certain pattern and limited amount of data, so, however, nothing is as reliable as an individual assessment.

Summary

The best way to ensure your website performs well in search engines is through a technical SEO audit. The purpose of a technical audit is simple, it helps you identify opportunities to improve search rankings and makes suggestions on how you can improve your site’s performance. A technical audit doesn’t have to be complex – it should focus on critical errors that are easy fixes. This guide will give you step-by-step instructions on how an SEO expert would conduct a technical audit and what tools they would use!