Any website’s success depends mainly on Technical SEO, a factor that cannot be overlooked. SEO is reportedly the main focus of 61% of marketers’ inbound marketing efforts. Your website might have been well-built with the assistance of seasoned web developers.
However, if the SEO is not up, your website won’t be able to compete in the search engine rankings. You must perform technical SEO audits to ensure your SEO is performing at its peak. They will provide information on how your website performs on different search engines and what you can do to raise your rankings there.
Good technical SEO is just as important to complete search optimization as quality content and user-friendliness. Make sure your technical SEO strategy is flawless if you want your website to perform at its best for search engine rankings. A technical SEO audit and checklist can be helpful.
To ensure that your technical SEO is finished, follow the instructions in our guide below. We created our guide using only free technical SEO tools so that you could easily understand every detail.
Meaning Of Technical SEO
A technical SEO is an examination of a website’s technical components to determine whether they adhere to best practices for search engine optimization. It refers to the technical parts of your website that directly impact search engine ranking elements like Google or Bing.
A simple Excel file can be used to complete the audit checklist. HTML components, appropriate meta tags, website code, JavaScript, and website extensions are among the many technical SEO components.
It is unnecessary to examine every component of an SEO campaign for a technical SEO checklist. Numerous SEO factors, such as content for on-page SEO best practices, keyword strategy, content, and more, should all be checked separately.
Purpose Of Technical SEO
The main goal of technical SEO is to aid in crawling and indexing your website by search engines so that you can increase traffic to it. For instance, “Just create good content” is meaningless if no one can access it.
A solid technical SEO foundation should complement good website content. Making SEO mistakes could hurt your company, so you must ensure all of its technical requirements are met.
Further, a technically sound site is easy to navigate and loads quickly, which keeps users on your site for longer. This is the goal, as you want to turn that traffic into leads and customers.
What Do We Check While Doing Technical SEO?
A technical SEO audit is a procedure where you examine the technical components of the SEO of your website. It assesses a website’s health and determines any potential improvements that could be made.
Search engine crawlers look for pages and websites on the internet. Technical SEO factors improve a website’s functionalities to raise the ranking of its web pages in the SERPs. Except for content optimization and link building, all on-page SEO activities fall under technical SEO.
What Metrics Do We Check While Doing Technical SEO?
How can you tell if what you are doing is effective? Answering that question is challenging since SEO can take months to start paying off. Answering that question is challenging since SEO can take months to start paying off.
Moreover, we desire to discover what SEO metrics track and how you can find them. And how to intensify what is currently producing the best results for you.
Page load speed, pages indexed, crawl errors, and mobile friendliness are some of the most common technical SEO metrics.
Here are the top 10 SEO metrics to keep an eye on.
1. Page Load Speed
2. Page Indexed
3. Crawl Errors
4. Mobile Friendliness
5. Indexed Pages
6. Mobile Responsiveness
7. Page Speed Insights
8. Use SSL
9. Create An XML Sitemap
10. Find & Fix Broken Links & Image
1. Page Load Speed
When it comes to SEO, your site speed is a crucial factor. People dislike waiting for websites to load. The more time they waste, the more likely it is that they will grow impatient and depart.
Thus, a technical SEO audit would be incomplete without a speed test of your websites. What connection exists between bounce rate and page load speed? Site speed will soon be taken into account by Google Analytics when determining your rankings.
To reduce the speed issue of your website, you must evaluate it. One tool for this is Google PageSpeed Insights. You will see how quickly your website loads and compares to competing sites. The tool’s best feature is that it demonstrates how to increase speed.
2. Pages Indexed
Searching through individual pages for keywords and topics would be a prolonged process for search engines to identify relevant information. Google indexes a page if it has been visited by the Google crawler (“Googlebot”), analyzed for content and meaning, and stored in the Google index. To enable super-fast responses to queries, Google indexes pages to know how search engines organize information before a search.
Pages must follow Google’s webmaster guidelines to get indexed in Google search results. While most pages are crawled before indexing, Google may also index pages without access to their content.
3. Crawl Errors
Search engines encounter crawl errors when they try to access a page on your websites but are unsuccessful. The process of a search engine using a bot to try to visit each page of your website is known as crawling.
One of the first steps is to run a crawl report for your website. A crawl report, or site audit, will help and provide insight into your site’s errors.
Then you will face your most pressing technical SEO issues, such as duplicate content, low page speed, or missing H1/H2 tags that can create crawl errors for the site.
You can automate site audits with various tools and work through the list of errors or warnings created by the crawl bot. To keep your site clean and without mistakes with optimization as much as possible, this is a task you should work through monthly.
4. Mobile Friendliness
Mobile-friendliness measures how well a website is designed and optimized to load on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. Generally, mobile-friendly means that your website performs well on a mobile device.
A mobile-friendly website is essentially one that is scaled down to fit properly on a mobile device. It appears to be a very small version of your website. Although there is a lot of pinching, zooming, and scrolling, the website still displays and works.
Even though the user experience might not be ideal, your website can still be viewed.
5. Mobile Responsiveness
Mobile SEO is optimizing websites for search engines while ensuring they display perfectly on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Due to the growing popularity of portable devices, web administrators must pay close attention to their mobile SEO strategies.
It indicates that the website will adapt to the device’s screen sizes while maintaining the consistency of its content display. Users must pinch, zoom in, or zoom out on a website that is not mobile-friendly to read its content.
A responsive design prioritizes users, makes it simple for users to interact with your site, and signals to Google that your site is optimized for search on all devices. Additionally, planning your web design from the beginning will enable you to create a fully optimized structure that is simple to access on any device.
6. PageSpeed Insights
Users place a high value on page speed because faster pages are more productive and provide a much better user experience. More than 25% of users will abandon a page that takes longer than three seconds to load and choose a different search result.
Users place much importance on page speed because it is more efficient and provides a superior on-page user experience.
Over 25% of users will click away and select a different search result if a page loads more slowly than three seconds. The goal of SEOs is not to make websites bounce more often!
Mobile users anticipate quick load times as well. In the same survey, 73% of users said they had experienced a website that took a long time to load.
The conversion rate is also impacted by page speed. For instance, Walmart has reported that its conversion rate increased by 2% for every additional second of page speed.
7. Use SSL
SSL secures internet connections and keeps hackers from reading or altering data sent between two systems. When the URL in the mark of address bar has a padlock icon next to it, SSL is used to secure that particular website.
SSL certificates must be installed if you manage a mail server or internet-facing service containing sensitive data. Because your sensitive data won’t be intercepted or altered, you will feel more secure and at ease.
A web server (website), a browser, and a mail client are typical examples of clients for which Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is standard security technology.
8. Create An XML Sitemap
You should make an XML sitemap, which is a file that lists all the content on your website in XML format so that search engines like Google can quickly find and index your content. Furthermore, it provides search engines with information about how frequently you update your website and which links on your website are more crucial than others.
Although XML sitemaps won’t improve your search engine rankings, they make it easier for search engines to crawl your website. As a result, there will be increased search traffic and better SEO rankings as they can find more content to start displaying in search results.
9. Find And Fix Broken Links & Images
A link to a 404 error or an underloaded image icon is all it takes for an image to be broken. Not only are 404 pages and low-quality photos ugly. They undermine conversion and incite rejection.
Broken image links harm user experience and hurt your website’s search engine optimization. Users will find your website in the search results more readily the better your site’s SEO.
If money is tight, Google Search Console measures their website’s search traffic, checks whether their website is currently indexed, and corrects problems like broken links and images that reduce their site’s visibility.
