Why Are Technical SEO Audits Important & What Is Their Purpose?
Technical audits are a key part of SEO because they check to see if a website is technically sound and optimised for search engines like Google. These audits check for any technical issues that can negatively affect the website’s ability to rank well in search results.
Your company’s website can benefit from both search engine and user optimization. This means that the site’s structure and content should be optimised for both human visitors and search engine crawlers. Technical SEO audits can help achieve this.
Analytics & tracking
There are two key aspects of analytics and tracking — Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC). When it comes to SEO, it’s crucial that you have both set up on your website, and whether or not these are active will be flagged during our technical SEO audit.
Who We Are & How We Can Help?
At our B2B agency, we focus on one thing and one thing only — SEO marketing. That means that all of our blood, sweat and tears go into our SEO processes to generate the best results for our clients. And turns out we’re pretty good at it!
Why just SEO? Because we believe that search engine optimisation is one of the most powerful marketing channels for any business to develop sustainably year after year, and it is our mission to help our clients succeed. We’d rather be masters of one service than average at many.
The B2B Technical SEO Audit Process & Checklist
As we’ve mentioned before, it’s important to run a technical SEO audit, and we believe that it should be the first step that any SEO project should take. During this process, the behaviour of a website within a search engine will be analysed in relation to several factors — crawling, indexing and accessibility.
Here’s a general technical SEO audit checklist:
Identify technical issues
Check for broken links, errors and duplicate content
Check the website’s target keywords and ranking performance
Evaluate on-page elements
Evaluate the website’s accessibility and user experience
Check the website’s mobile optimisation
Evaluate the website’s performance and page speed
Verify the website’s security and privacy measures
Generate a report summarising the findings of the audit and provide actionable recommendations for fixing technical issues.
Content Audit
An essential part of any technical SEO audit, the content audit looks at the overall quality and relevancy of a website’s content, from blog posts to product descriptions and beyond. A content audit is a systematic examination of a website’s existing content designed to unearth weak spots and suggest ways to strengthen the site overall.
Here are the key aspects that a content audit considers:
01
Keyword analysis
An SEO audit would not be complete without doing a keyword analysis to determine which terms and phrases are most pertinent to the site’s purpose and intended audience. The auditor can improve the website’s search engine rankings by tailoring the content and structure to the terms people use to find the website’s goods, services, and information.
02
Duplicate content
The SEO value of a website suffers when it has too much duplicate content as it can cause confusion among search engines and lower the site’s overall authority and relevance. When the same information appears on two or more websites, this is known as duplicate content.
03
Amount of content
As part of a technical SEO audit, we will assess the amount of content on the website and evaluate whether it is sufficient to meet the needs of the target audience and support the website’s goals. Although the amount of content is important for a website’s SEO, always remember to strive for quality over quantity!
04
Content performance
Understanding how effectively the website’s content is resonating with its target audience is essential for any SEO audit, and content performance analysis is a key element of that. Our team will examine metrics like page views, time on site, bounce rate, and conversion rate to determine which pages and pieces of content are successful and which are not.
Phase 1: Foundations
Phase 2: Growth
Content Audit
An essential part of any technical SEO audit, the content audit looks at the overall quality and relevancy of a website’s content, from blog posts to product descriptions and beyond. A content audit is a systematic examination of a website’s existing content designed to unearth weak spots and suggest ways to strengthen the site overall.
Here are the key aspects that a content audit considers:
Phase 1: Foundations
01
Keyword analysis
An SEO audit would not be complete without doing a keyword analysis to determine which terms and phrases are most pertinent to the site’s purpose and intended audience. The auditor can improve the website’s search engine rankings by tailoring the content and structure to the terms people use to find the website’s goods, services, and information.
02
Duplicate content
The SEO value of a website suffers when it has too much duplicate content as it can cause confusion among search engines and lower the site’s overall authority and relevance. When the same information appears on two or more websites, this is known as duplicate content.
Phase 2: Growth
03
Amount of content
As part of a technical SEO audit, we will assess the amount of content on the website and evaluate whether it is sufficient to meet the needs of the target audience and support the website’s goals. Although the amount of content is important for a website’s SEO, always remember to strive for quality over quantity!
04
Content performance
Understanding how effectively the website’s content is resonating with its target audience is essential for any SEO audit, and content performance analysis is a key element of that. Our team will examine metrics like page views, time on site, bounce rate, and conversion rate to determine which pages and pieces of content are successful and which are not.
Crawling
This relates to utilising specialised tools to “crawl” a website to find any technical errors that it may have. Some of the tools we like to use are Ahrefs and Screaming Frog (and yes, that really is the name of it!).
Code responses
A code response is a message sent from a server in response to a request made by a client — i.e. a web browser like Chrome or Safari. It’s sent in the form of an HTTP status code, and each code provides information about the request’s outcome, such as “404 Page Not Found”.
Website architecture
The overall architecture of a website refers to its structure and organisation — including its hierarchy of pages, URLs and content.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a list of pages that are used to help users (and search engines!) find and understand the content and structure of a website. In many cases, you’d find the sitemap of a website at the very bottom of it.
Robots.txt
On the other hand, a robots.txt file is a text file on a website that instructs web robots (such as search engine crawlers) which pages or sections of the site to exclude from indexing or crawling.
Accessibility
Believe it or not, accessibility is a highly important aspect of a technical SEO audit. This is because the user experience of a website can greatly impact its search engine ranking.
Page titles & URL alias
In a nutshell, page title tags are HTML codes that give a webpage its name. Page titles are split into external title tags — found in the title bar and search engine results pages (SERPs) — and internal title tags — such as H1, H2, H3 tags and so on.
As for URLs, we should all be familiar with what they are — it’s basically a web address!
Meta descriptions
The meta description tag is an HTML element that is used to provide a concise summary of a page’s content. It’s a description of the page that appears in search engine results (SERP) and is meant to entice users to click through.
Schema markup
For search engines to better understand the content of a webpage, schema markups (a sort of structured data) can be added to the page. It improves a website’s SERP visibility by assisting search engines in comprehending the site’s content.
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