What is a technical SEO audit and why is it so important?
How do you know what SEO issues are lurking within your site? The answer is a technical SEO audit. A website audit performed by an experienced technical SEO agency will help you uncover any hidden issues that could be negatively impacting your site’s indexing, crawlability and even your rankings. There are many SEO and digital marketing actions to undertake to be successful in achieving your SEO goals, and a technical audit is the first step in accomplishing that.
Technical audits can make a huge difference to a website’s ranking power. Most of the time, these fixes are quick and simple to make, so you can focus your efforts on delivering more on-page and off-page optimisations. Find out what key areas a technical SEO audit can help uncover and why regular reporting will help keep your site competitive in the SERPs.
Uncover Technical Errors with a Technical SEO Agency
Treat Google like an over-analytical human who can dig deep! Your website needs to be using validated, secure code that can be logically read by Google’s search bots. Technical errors that can be uncovered in an audit include redirect chains, links to 3XX/4XX/5XX pages, whether your canonical and hreflang tags are set up correctly or even if your pages are blocked by Google’s bots. All these issues alone can have a serious impact on the SERPs so it’s important to uncover and fix them promptly.
Website security is another key technical area an audit will evaluate – an important one considering the rise in cybercrime. Google has made this clear that website security is a priority for them, which means it has a strong influence on the ranking factors. As a minimum, a website needs to have a valid SSL certificate, which most comprehensive web hosts now provide as part of their service.
Optimise Your Content Marketing
We’ve all heard the marketing saying ‘content is king’ so it’s no surprise that a recent Content Marketing Institute report found that 84% of B2B companies invest in outsourcing their content-creation tasks. As content is the greatest factor in good rankings, it’s important this investment into content marketing is optimised to deliver maximum ROI.
Utilise the technical SEO audit to check for duplicate content issues that can cause penalties from Google, pages below the recommended 350-word count, and those with the incorrect use of headings, such as too many or no heading one or two tags.
As well as a website audit, a technical SEO agency like Motion Marketing can delve even further into content analysis, extending the reports to ensure your content marketing is optimised for your focus keyword and LSI topics. This helps with generating high-quality, high-intent and relevant traffic to your site.
A New Google Algorithm Update for Page Performance
Alongside website security, page performance and loading times are another priority Google is keen for all websites to achieve. An upcoming Google Core Web Vitals algorithm update that is set to launch in June 2021 will introduce new ranking factors linked to the quality of a website’s user experience, including responsiveness, loading speed, and visual stability.
This upcoming update makes it even more vital for your website audit to identify issues that could be harmful to your site’s loading time, such as non-compressed or minified JavaScript or CSS files and measures against Google’s core web vitals Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
Optimise Your Meta Tags and Headers
Meta tags are included in the HTML markup of a webpage and include structured data for search engines to understand the page content. Optimising your meta tags, such as the title and description, can help boost your page rank for the focus keyword and topics you are targeting. But with so many pages on a website, it can be difficult to keep track of those that can be improved.
A technical SEO agency can evaluate the website audit to check for descriptions and titles that are duplicate (unique meta tags gives your site more opportunity to be found by the right audience) and even if they are the correct length to show in a mobile/desktop view.
Analyse Every Image
Well-designed imagery on a site can significantly improve the overall user experience. However, as page loading times are becoming more important, new methods of loading these images need to be implemented that maintain quality but reduce the file sizes. A technical audit can scan all imagery on a site, analysing for large file sizes, broken or missing image links and even for missing image alt tags.
Is Your Sitemap Logical?
Understanding how your internal links are spread across your site can help with improving sitemaps and user journeys, ensuring they are logical and influential. From a technical SEO audit, we can identify whether a page has no inbound linking, too many links and even those missing anchor text.
Why is internal linking so important? Internal links connect your content giving Google and other search engines a clearer idea of your website’s structure. These internal links help to establish a hierarchy on your site, enabling you to give more link value to your most important pages and posts.
Need help from a technical SEO agency?
Motion’s in-depth website audit crawls every page of your website and evaluates against Google’s key ranking parameters, leaving no stone unturned! It uses multiple sources of scanning and can cover subdomains and test domains, so if there’s an issue on your site that Google doesn’t want to see, we will find it. Find out more about our B2B SEO services.
