As a web creator and maintainer, you understand the significance of SEO. To enhance your site’s ranking, attract relevant traffic, and increase conversions, conducting an SEO technical audit is crucial. This audit helps identify and rectify errors, ensuring that your client’s site is optimally prepared for SEO and your efforts in website building, maintenance, and content creation are not in vain. This post will outline the basic steps for executing an SEO technical audit and highlight key areas to examine.
On Page SEO
On-Page SEO focuses on the content and HTML source code of a web page. To enhance the ranking and drive relevant traffic, it’s crucial to optimize each page for search engines.
To keep a website in good shape for SEO, check for broken links, 404 error messages, broken pages, and thin content, and take necessary measures to resolve them.
Off Page SEO
In contrast to on-page SEO, off-page SEO focuses on improving a website’s rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs) through activities outside the website.
To increase the popularity, authority, and trustworthiness of your content, you can start by conducting a link audit and acquiring links. Analyze both your own backlink profile and that of your competitors. Add variety by incorporating both followed and nofollow links, with nofollow links not being followed by search engine bots but only accessible to human users.
Additionally, strive for a diverse link profile with different domain extensions, such as .edu, .gov, and .org, as opposed to a basic all .com profile. This shows search engines that your website is trustworthy.
Https
To ensure users can access your website, you must change from “HTTP” to “HTTPS”. This is because, without the change, visitors will encounter an error message. During this switch, check for any other status code errors and verify that the SSL certificate is accurate.
Metadata
In order to improve your website’s on-page SEO, it’s important to review and optimize the metadata or meta tags. These are brief descriptions of a page’s content, including the title, headers, and descriptions, that help search engines understand the purpose of each page. Ensure that each page has unique meta tags and image tags, as duplicate meta tags can negatively impact your website’s ranking. This is particularly relevant for e-commerce businesses with many pages.
Fill up your website with high quality content
Brands should prioritize creating valuable and useful content on their website and then promote it to potential authors who may share or link to the content in their own articles or social media. This not only leads to quality traffic but also aligns with Google’s focus on inbound traffic engagement and sharing.
Work with Schema Markup and Open Graph protocol
Incorporating Schema Markup and Open Graph Protocol into your code can enhance the way search engines interpret the elements and information on a page. This leads to more visually appealing and informative search results, as well as more attractive social sharing options. Additionally, these meta text elements may have an impact on Google’s knowledge graph, which powers its in-search answers.
Make sure your website is mobile friendly
To boost a site’s technical SEO and search engine rankings, it’s important to make sure that clients are using responsive design for mobile devices. You can assess a site’s responsiveness by utilizing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), which Google now considers as a factor in mobile ranking.
Double check the User Experience
Slow page load speed can harm user engagement and website traffic. Ensure that your pages load quickly and are easy to navigate, especially on mobile devices. Check if users are visiting multiple pages when they enter the site. Although an SEO technical audit covers a lot of ground, it is not as difficult as you may think.
With the right knowledge and experience, you can successfully conduct a basic audit on your own.
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