Technical SEO Audit is a process of analysing and assessing aspects of a website that influence the ability of search engines to crawl, analyse and rank your site. This way, the appearance, speed and usability of your site will also improve in terms of its ranking with the major search engines.
Here’s a breakdown of the essential steps involved in a Technical SEO Audit:
1. Crawl Your Website
Start with site crawlers such as Screaming Frog, or Ahrefs, SEMrush and other similar tools to crawl your site. This will offer an extensive report on existing mistakes, link faults, redirections and other technological concerns. Pay attention to:
Broken Links (404 errors)
Redirect Chains and Loops
Crawl Depth and Orphan Pages
2. Check Indexability
Check which of the pages you desire to be seen by the search engine is indexed while the irrelevant or the one that contain sensitive information is not. Important steps include:
Reviewing Robots.txt File: Make sure there is no page ‘blocking’.
XML Sitemap: Ensure that your sitemap is current and properly submitted to virtually all search engines out there.
Noindex Tags: Triple check and ensure that vital pages on the site are not marked with “noindex”.
3. Analyse Website Architecture
The organization of your site should be fairly clear and uncomplicated for easy accessibility both by users and spiders. Focus on:
URL Structure: They also should not be too long, but be informative and have some relation to SEO.
Internal Linking: Consider important pages to share link equity and rank its promotions significance high.
4. Optimize for Mobile
Due to the importance of mobile searches, it is important to have mobile friendly site or at least mobile friendly version of it. Check with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see what is wrong. Ensure:
Responsive Design: Your site should look right for all devices.
Tap Targets: Link and buttons are supposed to respond to touches on small screens.
5. Speed and Performance
It is very important to note that one of the ranking factors is the page speed. When it comes to problems with load time there are services like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to turn to. Key elements to optimize include:
- Image Compression
- Reducing CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Browser Caching
6. HTTPS and Security
Make your website more secure and use https. Check for security vulnerabilities and make sure:
SSL Certificate: Your SSL certificate is well installed and the one being displayed is authentic.Mixed Content: Do not place any non-secure and non- HTTPS content on secure page.
7. Data/format, knowledge & schema.
Use semantics (schema) to facilitate search engine optimization(SEO) of your content. This can help more often rank for rich results and thereby increasing your visibility.
8. Check for Duplicate Content
There are some techniques that could be used to detect the cases of duplicated content which harm your website’s rankings. Check that the use canonical tags is correct to indicate the relevance of the version of the page.
9. Audit On-Page SEO Elements
Review key on-page elements such as:
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: These should be unique and should have relation to website’s niche and should be optimized with target keywords.
Header Tags (H1, H2, etc.): Structure information clearly and follow applicable hierarchy for its relation to content.
Image Alt Text: Add descriptive texts to images in order to make it easier for accessibility and SEO.
10. Review: Hampshire Reviewed and fixed the technical errors, as Hampshire has to face certain technical flaws as well as certain serious issues on the company would also be seen here.
At the end of your audit, make a list of doable remedies according to the problems detected. Avoid making lots of tiny changes most of which will not make much of a difference to the quality of your site’s search engine results.
Conclusion
A Technical SEO Audit is not a one-time task but should be conducted periodically to maintain optimal website health. Regular audits help keep your site up-to-date with evolving search engine algorithms and user expectations, ensuring sustained performance and visibility in search results.