Performing a technical SEO audit is essential for ensuring your website is effective and efficient from a search engine optimization standpoint. This article will explore the process of conducting a technical SEO audit, including the steps involved and the key considerations you need to keep in mind.
What is a Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit (or website review) is a process that allows you to identify and understand the various factors related to your website’s search performance/rankings. It provides insights into why your site might rank well or poorly in Google and what you can do to make changes and improve them.
At a high level, a technical SEO audit involves:
1. Identifying issues that may be impacting your website’s search performance/rankings
2. Recommending solutions for these issues and prioritizing them based on their impact on overall performance
3. Implementing the recommended changes and monitoring their effectiveness over time
The Benefits of a Technical SEO Audit
There are several benefits to conducting a technical SEO audit:
1. For management – Provides management with an understanding of your website’s search performance and the factors that may be impacting it
2. For site owners – Provides insights into what they can do to improve their website’s search performance/rankings
3. For SEO professionals – Helps them better understand a website’s search performance/rankings and provides insight into how they can improve their work
How Do You Perform A Technical SEO Audit?
The process of conducting a technical SEO audit can be broken down into the following steps:
1. Collecting data: To identify potential issues and solutions, you need to collect data about your website. This data comes from a variety of sources, including:
– Your website’s analytics package (e.g., Google Analytics)
– Google Search Console
– A website crawler/audit tool (e.g., Screaming Frog SEO Spider)
– Your website’s HTML source code
2. Identifying issues: Once you have collected data, you need to identify any potential issues impacting your website’s search performance/rankings. We can do this by reviewing the data and looking for SEO-related patterns or issues.
3. Prioritizing recommendations: After identifying the potential SEO issues, you should prioritize each problem based on its impact on your website’s overall SEO health and how easy they are to fix/implement. This step also determines the SEO action plan for your audit (i.e., what needs to be done and how to do it).
4. Creating an SEO action plan: The SEO action plan is a list of SEO recommendations that your site needs, along with estimated timeframes for implementation and metrics to track to measure SEO success.
5. Advocating for changes: Once you have completed the SEO audit, you should provide all of the SEO recommendations in a document to your website’s management. You should also provide them with a list of SEO benefits and reasons they should prioritize SEO for their site/business, along with any potential SEO consequences if the changes are not implemented.
6. Monitoring progress: Once you have implemented all of the SEO recommendations from your SEO audit, you should monitor your SEO metrics regularly to ensure that you are getting the SEO results/benefits you expect.
The SEO Action Plan
1. Contains a list of prioritized recommendations, along with estimated timeframes for implementation
2. Recommends metrics to track to measure SEO success
3. Addresses factors outside of SEO that impact SEO (e.g., social media, content, etc.)
In conclusion, A technical SEO audit is critical for evaluating your website’s search engine performance and identifying potential issues impacting it. The benefits of a technical SEO audit include understanding your website’s SEO health, gaining insights into what you can do to improve it, and improving your SEO skills. To conduct a technical SEO audit, you need to collect data about your website from various sources, identify any potential SEO issues, and create an SEO action plan with prioritized recommendations. You should then advocate for these changes with management and monitor your website’s progress over time.
