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There are social media SEO tips to boost your online business. But when it comes to technical SEO audits, there are a lot of different ways to go about them. You can either do them alone or hire someone to do them. And let us explain how a pro does that!
The Most Effective Way to Do a Technical SEO Audit
It is no secret that analytics is vital regardless of what you do. And analyzing your website’s success is principally significant! Remember the high competitiveness of Internet representation. Hence, a technical SEO audit is necessary and must be your top priority often.
A technical SEO audit is an in-depth website analysis to find any technical problems. Those issues could hold back your site’s performance in search engine rankings. So, you can find and fix any potential issues using the SEO PowerSuite website spider. This instruction elucidates how to do a technical SEO audit in 10 steps.
1. Crawl Your Website
The first action is to crawl your website so that the SEO software can analyze all of your site’s pages. The program you use will take some time, but your software choice might make crawling fast. So, the app checks all resources, from Java scripts to how videos work. The software also takes into account your website’s structure and architecture. Note that there must be no disconnected pages! Such technical gaps immediately hinder your audit, as the crawler cannot reach some pages fast.
2. Check for Broken Links
A common technical SEO issue is broken links. These are links that no longer work and lead to error pages. Not only do they frustrate your website visitors, but they also tell search engine crawlers that your site is not well maintained. As a result, your site may get penalized in the search engine rankings.
3. Analyze Your Website’s Speed
The next step is to check your website’s speed. A slow website can lead to a high bounce rate, which tells search engines that your site is not the best option that bestows an excellent user experience. In addition, a slow website can also hurt your conversion rates! Visitors are less likely to wait around for a slow website to load.
Suppose that your website’s speed is excellent. It must have the capacity to function perfectly even when there are thousands of digital wanderers! When you launch an advertising campaign, can you ensure it remains? Note that such events bring more random guests to your site.
Moreover, the guests will not wait for more than two seconds. That is a rarity when users wait for long. As a rule, they switch to another website momentarily. So, the speed issue might erase the success even if the browser sees your site as good and suggests it.
4. Check for Duplicate Content
Another standard technical SEO issue is duplicate content. That is when you have the same or similar content on more than one page of your website. So, the system sees that there are similar pages and stops analyzing others. Duplicate content can confuse search engine crawlers and hurt your site’s ranking.
5. Optimize Your Website’s Title and Meta Tags
The next step is to optimize your website’s title and meta tags. Your title tag is the most important on-page SEO element. So, it is vital to make sure it contains your target keywords. Of course, they may resemble what your content says, which is how it must be. Hence, your meta tags should be accurate and might be repetitious. Still, they also must be descriptive.
6. Improve Your Website’s Usability
Another important factor in technical SEO is website usability. A well-designed website is trouble-free to use and navigate. It is also important to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. More and more people use smartphones (solely!) to surf the web, so your site must be responsive.
Plus, there should be no pages in the depths of your website. They all must be equally reachable. The golden rule of website navigation is getting the necessary information in two clicks. If one of the pages takes more than three clicks, be extra attentive to that component and enhance it first.
7. Check Your Website’s Image Tags
The next step is to check your website’s image tags. Ensure all your images have alt text so search engines can index them. Alt text is the explanatory component that appears when an image cannot appear. Screen readers also use it to describe images to people who cannot see.
8. Analyze Your Website’s Backlinks
Those are links from other websites to your website. They are important for two reasons. First, they help search engines find your website. Second, they help improve your website’s ranking. However, it is important to ensure that your backlinks are high quality. Low-quality backlinks can hurt your ranking!
9. Check Your Website’s XML Sitemap
The next step is to check your website’s XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is a file that contains a list of all the pages on your website. It helps search engine crawlers pinpoint and index your website’s pages.
10. Fix Any Other Technical SEO Issues
The final step is to fix any other technical SEO issues. Many other technical SEO issues can hurt your website’s ranking. So, running a comprehensive audit and fixing any problems you find is important.
Extra Tip: Do Audits Systematically!
One audit is always insufficient, like any other check that should be systemic. Suppose you have conducted it and fixed all problems. That might even boost your results positively. Nevertheless, never neglect the Internet’s volatility. One working link today will become broken tomorrow!
Conclusion
To summarize, technical SEO is vital for any website that wants to rank high on search engine results pages. A comprehensive technical SEO audit will help you find and fix any technical SEO issues holding your website back. Conducting a technical SEO audit is not a one-time thing! It is best to do it regularly to ensure your website is always optimized for search engines.