How To Perform a Technical SEO Audit

SEO or search engine optimisation is the process of helping your content on your website, or in the form of blogs to succeed online. Carrying out an SEO audit is the process of looking at how your website is performing and how it can be improved. This may sound complicated so in this article we will look at how to perform a technical seo audit. 

What Is An SEO Audit?

Making sure your content is relevant to those visiting your site is what SEO is about. Building an organic traffic pipeline to ultimately build your business. Google and other search engines are constantly crawling through your website and comparing it to others. This is where you need to make sure that your website is performing well. 

An SEO audit will help you do that. By bringing together all your SEO components you are able to fix any underlying issues, as well as make improvements to better your overall ranking performance.

The Key Elements Of An SEO Audit

When performing a technical SEO audit you need to consider a few elements. The process below is the easiest, and most straightforward to help you on your way.

Begin Your Audit With A Crawl

The first step and the most important part of the SEO audit is the crawl. The crawl will involve looking at every element, page and content on your website. This will give you a good overview of how your content is optimised. As well as any duplicate content you may have. Very useful if you are putting out a lot of content in a short period of time.Using a programme such a screaming frog is great for this part of the audit. 

Screaming Frog analyses your URL, and takes into account your content on each page. It analyses H1’s & H2’s, meta tags, meta descriptions as well as internal and external links. It will give you a full overview and clearly shows the elements which are missing. From here you can start to fix what is required.

Outside of using Screaming Frog you can also use Google. By entering the site:your website name you are able to view all the pages on your website in Google. This will highlight any pages that are not there as they will not appear within your search.

Conduct On Page SEO Checks

Once you have conducted your initial crawl you now need to look at your on page SEO. A good place to start is with duplicate pages, headers and title tags. If you are publishing a lot of content in a short period of time it is good to check any duplicates. Any duplicates will affect your SEO, as the search engine will not know which piece of content you are looking to rank.

• Title Tags

You will want to make sure that each page has a title tag. Also with these title tags, you will want to make sure that the title tags are relevant to the content in order to draw in your audience.

• Meta Descriptions

A meta description will not directly affect your ranking, however ensuring your keywords are included in them is important. A meta description is a small snippet of your content, and will appear under the URL on a search engine. This is the first glimpse of your content to your audience. 

• Clear Hierarchy

Page hierarchy is important to SEO, and also the ease of use for your audience. Make sure that your content is organised into correct areas which may include main sections, and then broken down into subsections. This helps your audience when reading your content.

• Keyword Placement

Keywords are the backbone of SEO. Ensuring they are placed in the correct places, and also the correct amount of times help to increase your SEO ranking. Make sure the keywords are relevant to the content, and also use them wisely. This will help Google to understand who your content is aimed towards.

Manage Links

Internal and External links are also a major consideration for SEO. Being able to create a cross path internet is key for Google and other search engines. Hence the emphasis on external links. Internal links are also used to direct people to other pages on your site to keep that website flow working. 

As the internet is forever evolving it is important to make sure your links are valid. Pages are removed daily, so ensure your external links are not broken. The same goes with internal links, however it is also easier to track as it’s your own site. Broken links affect your SEO, and also impact your ranking.

Check Site Speed

When looking at how to perform technical SEO audit you need to consider your site speed.Site speed is a key component of the technical side of SEO. Having a slow website can impact your SEO ranking, and Google can tell how fast it is performing. As your customers do not want to wait around they see it as affecting your UX (User Experience). Images are one of the main attributes which affects site speed. The size of the image will determine how fast it loads, and can mean that page does not load at its quicker capacity. 

Use Analytics

When it comes to analytics you need to make sure that they are reporting live data from your website. They can come in two forms, one can be code or just installing a plug in. Both ways work, and you need to ensure that it is working. From here you can then check your bounce rate. 

A high bounce rate can negatively affect your SEO as it means people are not finding the correct content on your website. This means your content is not optimised to the correct audience. Having a low bounce rate however means that your content is optimised correctly, and you are attracting the right audience. 

To Conclude

How to perform a technical SEO audit can sometimes seem difficult, and be too technical for some. However, there are numerous pieces of free software you can utilise to help you along the way. SEO is integral to building your organic presence, and from here you can really pull your audience in. Carry out an SEO audit every six months to really help your content rank highly. 

Take a look at our Knowledge Hub for more information on SEO, and marketing as a whole.