Introduction
Have you ever had that feeling of frustration when your website isn’t doing as well as you’d like in the SERPs? You’re not alone—many small businesses and e-commerce website owners struggle with the same issue.
The good news is that there are ways to increase your website visibility, and one of them involves conducting a technical SEO audit. Performing a technical SEO audit involves utilizing SEO technical audit tools and services to evaluate the structural aspects of your website for any possible issues. It also helps identify areas where improvements can be made to help boost your rankings in the SERPs.
In this article, I’ll guide you through best practices for conducting a advanced technical SEO audit so that you can get the most out of it and ensure improved visibility for your website.
What Is a Technical SEO Audit and Why Is It Important?
Have you been wondering what is a technical SEO audit is and why it’s important? In short, a technical SEO audit looks at the underlying infrastructure of your website to make sure that search engine crawlers have no difficulties exploring and indexing your content. This is vitally important for any website looking to improve its visibility in search engines, as without a good technical SEO audit, the other SEO efforts you make will be wasted.
A good technical SEO audit should cover all of the following topics:
- Site Structure: This checks links between pages, redirects, and the organization of content.
- On-Page SEO: On-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to the techniques used to enhance the ranking of individual web pages it involves optimizing various elements of a page, including the title tag, meta description, headings, content, images, URLs, and internal linking, among other factors.
- Content Quality: This covers duplicate content, spelling errors, and keyword density.
- Page Speed: Checks how quickly pages load and if any components are slowing them down.
- Mobile Optimization: Checks that your website is optimized for mobile devices so it performs well on all platforms.
- Security Issues: Checks for potential security issues like malware or malicious links that can harm your website’s reputation.
By properly executing a technical SEO audit with the help of an experienced professional like digital smart sites, you can improve the SERP rankings of your website.
How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit for Ecommerce Websites
An effective technical ecommerce technical SEO audit requires using the right tools and services. It’s essential to evaluate your website’s SEO performance to stay ahead of your competition in organic search engine rankings.
Audit Tools & Services
Fortunately, a number of tools and services exist to make the technical SEO audit process easier. These tools can help you identify website errors, analyze keywords, and optimize your web pages for maximum visibility. By paying attention to minor technical details, you will be able to avoid potential issues that otherwise could cost you valuable traffic. Here are some of the most commonly-used auditing tools:
- Google Search Console allows you to see what keywords are driving traffic to your website, so you can adjust accordingly and make sure relevant content is on your landing pages.
- Screaming Frog helps you find crawl errors like broken links or canonicalization issues so that you can fix them before they become serious problems.
- SEMrush is a comprehensive suite of tools that can help you with keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink audits and more – everything you need for an effective audit!
- Ahrefs provides an in-depth analysis of the keywords used on each page of your website, enabling you to determine which ones need tweaking or replacing. This tool also provides a complete overview of all inbound links pointing back to your site as well as their quality scores (which can be used as indicators of which links should be removed).
If you’re serious about improving your website visibility, then a technical SEO audit consultancy is a must. What Are the Best Tools for Performing Technical SEO Audits?
Depending on your budget, you may also consider hiring an experienced consultant or using a dedicated website auditing service like digital smart sites. The latter offer comprehensive features such as automated crawls and analytics dashboards that can help keep your website optimized without having to invest too much time in it.
No matter which tool you go with, the most important thing is that you understand how to use it effectively and make sure all potential issues are addressed before launching your improved website.
Keys to Making the Most of Your Technical SEO Audit Services
So you’ve decided to use SEO technical audit services—you’re on the right track, but how do you make the most of it? Here are some tips to help you get the best possible results and improved visibility:
Familiarize Yourself with Technical Issues
Make sure you understand the technical issues that could impact your website, such as page speed, duplicate content, poor mobile design, and redirect chains. If you understand what issues need to be addressed and why, you’ll be in a better position to ask questions when reviewing your own audit or talking with a professional service.
Analyze Your Competitors
Analyzing your competitors is key: it can be easy to miss something when looking only at your own website’s data. Look at what keywords your competition is using effectively and any changes that their website has made which have increased their ranking. This will give you an idea of what’s working for them and can help inform how you approach your own technical SEO audit.
Utilize Technical SEO Audit Tools & Services
There are a variety of tools and services out there which can help how to perform a technical SEO audit easier. These tools can identify broken links, analyze page speed, check for duplicate content, find low-hanging fruit opportunities as well as look at competitors’ data. Having access to this data can save you time by helping quickly find technical issues so they can be addressed more quickly.
Tips on How to Analyze & Optimize Your Website with a Technical SEO Audit
If you want to conduct a technical SEO audit of your website, there are some key tips you should keep in mind. Here are just a few of the best practices for getting the most out of your technical SEO audit:
Monitor Loading Speeds
Monitoring loading speeds is essential for any website—especially e-commerce sites and small businesses. You can use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to get an overall picture of how fast your page is loading, and pinpoint any issues that could be slowing down its performance.
Check Your Website Security
Another important part of technical SEO audits is making sure your website is secure. Use SSL certificates to ensure that all data sent between user browsers and web servers is encrypted and secure. Additionally, web application firewalls can also help you protect against malicious attacks and threats that can otherwise compromise website security, visibility, and rankings.
Ensure Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
Having a mobile-friendly site is one of the most important aspects for achieving good rankings in Google search results. Checking that your content can properly render on mobile devices should be part of every technical SEO audit. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to verify that your website’s pages are setup correctly for mobile users.
Optimize Metadata & Structured Data
Metadata plays an essential role in helping search engine crawlers understand what type of content is on each page, and structured data helps them better morph it into something presented in rich snippets or other SERP features. Make sure your metadata (title tags &meta descriptions) accurately describes the content on each page, as well as any schema markup you may have implemented on those pages.
A web audit service involves analyzing a website’s performance, functionality, and effectiveness to pinpoint areas in need of improvement and enhance the user experience. The goal is to evaluate the website thoroughly and identify any weaknesses that could be improved.
Common Technical SEO Audit Issues
If you’re looking to use advanced technical SEO audit tools and services to improve your website visibility, there are a few key areas you should look out for. Knowing what common technical SEO audit issues are can help you catch errors quickly and fix them efficiently.
Broken Links
It’s important to check all external and internal links on your website regularly. Broken links not only detract from user experience, but they can also negatively impact SEO rankings. Make sure any dead links are removed or replaced so that search engine crawlers don’t waste time on useless pages.
Missing Tags/Meta Descriptions
The content of each page should be easily identified by its meta tags, title tags and meta descriptions. If any of these elements are missing or incomplete, it may lead to a lower ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Make sure that all of your titles, descriptions, and headings are accurate and up-to-date to boost visibility and increase click-through rates (CTRs).
Low Performance/Load Speed
Page speed is one of the main factors that affect user experience and search rankings alike. It’s essential to ensure that all pages load quickly in order to keep visitors from bouncing away from slow loading times.
Conclusion
Technical SEO Audits are a great way to improve your website visibility and get more organic traffic to your site. By following the best practices for conducting an audit and using the right tools, you can make sure that your site is optimized for search engines and improve your SERP rankings.
Remember that a Technical SEO Audit is only part of the process. It’s also important to make sure you have well-structured site architecture, full of high-quality content and optimized for mobile devices. With the right research, analysis, and dedication, you can make sure your website is driving organic traffic and getting the exposure it deserves.
FAQs about Conducting a Technical SEO Audit
Maybe you’re new to technical SEO and don’t know exactly how to go about doing an audit. Don’t worry—we have the answers you need! Here are some frequently asked questions about conducting a technical SEO audit that could help:
Purpose of a Technical SEO audit ?
A technical SEO audit is an evaluation of website performance with the goal of making improvements to help improve search engine rankings and visibility. The audit focuses on elements of your website that affect its ability to be crawled, indexed and ranked by search engines. It should identify potential issues and provide strategies on how to fix or optimize these areas.
What are Some Steps in Conducting a Technical SEO Audit?
There are a few key steps involved in conducting a technical SEO audit:
- Analyzing how search engines crawl your site—using tools like Google Search Console
- Examining the structure and architecture of your content—making sure it is optimized for both users and search engines
- Assessing page speed and mobile usability—to make sure your pages are loading appropriately for users on any device
- Optimizing the HTML structure of your content for crawlers—such as using heading tags, meta tags and alt text properly
- Auditing internal links, external links, and backlinks—checking broken links, updating outdated links, setting up redirects as needed
- Reviewing Analytics data—tracking conversions from organic searches, identifying which pages need attention, etc.
By following these steps, you’ll be well on your way to conducting a successful technical SEO audit that can help improve the search engine visibility of a website.
What is a technical SEO audit in Tampa, Florida?
A technical SEO audit in Tampa, Florida is a technical SEO audit specifically focused on websites based in or targeting the Tampa, Florida area. This may involve evaluating local search engine optimization factors specific to Tampa, such as the website’s relevance to Tampa-based search queries and the presence of local business listings in the Tampa area.
What does it mean to buy a technical SEO audit?
The process for buying a technical SEO audit from Digital Smart Sites involves contacting them to discuss your business needs and website goals. They will then provide a customized proposal and outline the steps involved in the audit process. Once the proposal is approved, they will begin the audit and provide a detailed report with recommendations for improvement.
What are the differences between a technical site audit and an SEO site audit?
The main difference between a technical site audit and an SEO site audit is their focus. A technical site audit primarily looks at a website’s technical components, such as its structure and performance, to identify any issues that may be hindering its search engine rankings. An SEO site audit, on the other hand, evaluates a website’s overall SEO performance, including content quality, keyword targeting, and backlink profile. While both types of audits can help improve a website’s search engine rankings, they focus on different aspects of optimization.
Why should I perform a technical SEO audit?
Why perform technical SEO audit can help identify and address any technical issues that may be hindering your website’s performance and search engine rankings. By resolving these issues, you can improve your website’s visibility and attract more organic traffic.