In the ever-changing digital landscape, optimizing your website for search engines is crucial. A professional technical SEO audit service is very much at the heart of this, allowing you to identify and correct problems that may prevent you from performing well in search engine rankings. This comprehensive audit looks deep into the complexity of your website’s inner workings so that search engines can efficiently crawl, index, and rank your pages.
This lengthy guide explains how you can easily identify and address common SEO issues using the process of a very thorough technical SEO audit service.
1. Begin with an all-encompassing Website Crawl
Start your SEO audit by conducting a complete website crawl to analyze all pages and ensure seamless access and indexing by search engines. Tools like Screaming Frog and Google Search Console can uncover structural issues, enhancing your site’s visibility.
Common Issues to Identify:
Broken Links: Broken internal and external links (404 errors) will really have a significant impact on the SEO performance of your site as well as user experience. Search engines may penalize sites with an excessive number of broken links. According to hubspot report 44% of users leave a site immediately if they encounter broken links
Redirects: Inappropriate or excessive redirects, such as 301 and 302 redirects, can slow down your site and confuse search engines. Avoid redirects chains and loops with great care.
Remedial Actions:
Utilize tools such as Screaming Frog to identify and rectify broken links by setting up appropriate redirects for pages that no longer exist or have changed URLs.
Ensure all redirects are working correctly and do not cause unnecessary redirect chains to ensure optimal site performance.
2. Crawlability and Indexing
Crawling is essential because it tells how accessible your pages are to search engines. When the search engines are unable to crawl some pages of your website, those pages won’t be indexed or ranked.
Common Issues to Identify:
Robots.txt File Misconfigurations: The robots.txt file guides search engines as to which pages to crawl and which ones to ignore. Misconfigured files will inadvertently block important pages from getting indexed.
Meta Tags and Noindex Tags: Pages that carry a “noindex” meta tag will not be indexed by search engines, which may cause a problem if this is applied to essential pages.
Remedial Actions:
Check your robots.txt file to make sure that it’s not blocking important pages, such as product or category pages.
Make sure that important pages do not have “noindex” tags unless it’s explicitly intended. Use the robots meta tag to control which pages should be indexed.
3. Assess Site Architecture and Internal Linking
A good site architecture is crucial for both user experience and SEO. It lets the search engine understand your pages’ interrelations and crawl efficiently.
Common Problems to Look Out For:
Poor Site Hierarchy: A site with an illogical structure confuses the users as well as search engines, leading to inefficient indexing and navigation.
Insufficient Internal Linking: Poor internal linking makes it difficult for search engines to find and index all of your pages. According to SEMrush SEO toolkit report sites with optimized internal linking see a 40% improvement in crawl efficiency.
Remedial Actions:
Organize your website in a logical structure that is intuitive to users and easy to maintain as your site grows.
Develop a strong internal linking strategy that ensures each important page has enough internal links from other relevant pages.
4. Optimize Page Speed and Site Performance
Page speed is one of the critical ranking factors in SEO. Google uses page speed as a ranking signal, and slow-loading pages can lead to poor user experiences, increase bounce rates, and decrease conversions. According to google think with insight a one-second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions.
Common Issues to Identify:
Large Image Sizes: Unoptimized images can significantly slow down your site.
Excessive JavaScript or CSS Files: Too many JavaScript and CSS files can lead to slower load times.
Server Response Time: A slow server will slow down the general page speed of your website.
Remedial Actions:
Compress and optimize images with TinyPNG or ImageOptim.
Minify and merge CSS and JavaScript files to decrease the load time.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve your content on different servers so that users can access it more quickly.
If your server response time is slow, it might be the time to change your hosting.
5. Be Mobile-Friendly
Google mostly relies on mobile versions of sites in the indexing to determine rankings. Over 50% of global website traffic comes from mobile devices. It’s all about making sure that the web page is responsive now, more than ever.
Common issues
Responsible design problems-When a site isn’t mobile-friendly, the users see all the poor experience displayed across their mobile phones and smartphones.
Text and buttons – Small text size with difficulty in clicking and also pressing any button.
Viewport Configuration: If your viewport is not set right, your pages will not scale correctly on mobile devices.
Remedial Actions:
Ensure that your website is built using a responsive design that can accommodate different screen sizes.
Optimize the text and button size so that they are readable and clickable on mobile devices.
Implement proper meta viewport tags to ensure your pages scale correctly on all devices.
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6. Resolve Duplicate Content Issues
According to siteliner 30% of websites face duplicate content issues that confuse search engines. Duplicate content may confuse search engines, leading to indexing issues and possible ranking penalties.
Common Issues to Identify:
URL Parameters: URL parameters may create duplicate content if they refer to the same page.
Content Duplication: Pages that have similar or identical content, even on different URLs (for example, product pages with the same description).
Remedial Actions:
Use canonical tags to point out the preferred version of a page.
Make sure that URL parameters are handled. Avoid them or use them accordingly.
Merge duplicated content or rewrite it as unique.
7. Optimize On-page Elements
On-page SEO elements are essential for the search engines to understand what content and about which topic is being shared on your pages. This will increase your site’s visibility and ranking if all these elements are properly optimized.
Common Issues to Identify:
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: These elements must be unique, descriptive, and contain target keywords. Duplicate or missing title tags and meta descriptions can negatively impact SEO.
Header Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.): Proper use of header tags helps structure your content and makes it easier for search engines to understand the hierarchy of information.
Alt image text: Images without descriptions fail to help accessibility and deny the chance to include useful keywords.
Remedial Measures
Ensure every page has an exact description as the title tag and meta description using related keywords.
Use header tags to create a hierarchical presentation of content, where the H1 tag is applied for the main title, H2/H3 tags being the subheadings.
Write alt text for all the images and include relevant keywords in them where possible.
8. Adding Structured Data Markup
Structured data or schema markup gives context to search engines while interpreting content for better search result features like rich snippets.
Problems to Look for:
No or Erroneous Schema Markup: Wrong or no application of structured data to the page can disallow search engines from rendering it as a rich snippet
Remedies:
Use of correct schema markup about your article or product review or otherwise.
Validate your markup using tools like Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
9. Monitor and Improve Site Security
Website security is one of the most important technical SEO aspects. A secure site not only protects user data but also builds trust and can positively influence search rankings.
Common Issues to Identify:
Lack of HTTPS: Websites without HTTPS are considered less secure, which can deter users and affect rankings. According to Norton cybersecurity websites using HTTPS are 85% more trusted by users.
Outdated Software: Using outdated CMS platforms, plugins, or themes can introduce vulnerabilities.
Remedial Actions:
Implement SSL certificates to enable HTTPS across your site.
Regularly update your CMS, plugins, and themes to the latest versions to patch security vulnerabilities.
10. Analyze and Optimize Backlinks
Backlinks are an important ranking factor. A healthy backlink profile will enhance your site’s authority and rank in search engines. According to moz link explorer sites with high-quality backlinks rank 70% better on average
Common Issues to Identify:
Low-Quality Backlinks: Links from spammy or irrelevant sites can harm your site’s reputation.
Broken Backlinks: Links pointing to pages that no longer exist can negatively impact SEO.
Remedial Actions:
Use tools like Ahrefs or Moz to analyze your backlink profile and disavow harmful links.
Regularly check for and fix broken backlinks to maintain a healthy link profile.
11. Regularly Monitor and Update Your SEO Strategy
SEO is an ongoing process. Regular audits and updates are necessary to adapt to algorithm changes and evolving best practices.
Schedule regular technical SEO audits to identify and address new issues promptly.
Stay updated with the latest SEO trends and algorithm updates to keep your strategy effective.
Conclusion
To identify and solve issues that may affect your website’s performance in search engine rankings, a comprehensive technical SEO audit is critical. By methodically addressing such areas as crawlability, site architecure, page speed, mobile-friendliness, on-page elements, structured data, security, and backlinks, you can elevate your site’s visibility, user experience, and overall SEO performance.
Remember, SEO is a continuous process. Regular audits and keeping up with the latest best practices are essential to maintaining and improving your site’s search engine performance.
Take your website to the next level! Get a technical SEO audit with Kreativ Street and improve your search rankings today.
