A thorough technical SEO audit of a website is indeed a big deal that can
look
baffling to beginners. Here are a few steps to performing an in-depth
technical
SEO audit that can give you reliable results
What to consider?
Before getting started with a technical SEO audit, you must gain familiarity
with
the client’s business goals, target audience, partnerships, when the website
was
last updated, who works on their web development, and was the website
subjected
to SEO so far.
Getting started with a technical SEO audit
The aspects to focus on in a technical SEO audit include crawl errors,
indexing
and hosting. To get started, add the site to DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog.
The
tools you will need include DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, Google Analytics,
Copyscape, Integrity, Google Tag Manager, and Google Analytics code.
When you add the site to DeepCrawl, you can expect the results in a day or
two
depending on the size of the site. Look for these things once you get the
DeepCrawl results.
Check “Duplicate Pages” and locate duplicate content. Ask the client to
rewrite
those pages and during the meantime, add you need to add this tag to the
duplicate pages tag to the duplicate pages.
The most common duplicate issues you might notice include duplicate Meta
titles,
duplicate Meta descriptions, duplicate body content, two domains,
subdomains,
similar content found on some other domain, and the pagination pages not
implemented properly.
By adding canonical tag on the pages, you can give an indication to Google
on
your preferred URL. In the robots.txt., disallow the incorrect URLs. Rewrite
the
entire content including the Meta data and the body.
Rectify pagination errors
With regard to pagination, you need to focus on two aspects. To locate which
pages are using pagination, review the reports for ‘First Pages’. After
this, review the pages manually to discover whether the pagination is
implemented rightly. To check the working of pagination, check the report on
“Unlinked Pagination Pages” to find out if rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link to
the previous page and the next page. To rectify unlinked pagination pages,
add rel=”canonical” tag to “view all” or a “load more” page. If all the
pages are found on separate pages, add the standard markup rel=”next” and
rel=”prev” markup. If you use infinite scrolling, you need to add to your
javascript the equivalent paginated page URL.
Fix Max Redirections
Check the report on “Max Redirections” to locate the pages that redirect
over 4 times. Some of the most common redirect response codes you might see
are 301, 302, 400, 403, 404, and 500.
To fix redirect issues, remove the external links leading to the old 404
pages. Update them with the internal link of the redirected page. You can
undo the redirect chains by removing the middle redirects. The next thing to
do is to add the site URL to Screaming Frog. If needed, you can also skip
some areas of the site. In the Screaming Frog results, look at these aspects
to fix.
Check for missing Google Analytics Code
Screaming Frog lets you find out which pages are missing the Google
Analytics
code (UA-1234568-9). To fix the missing Google Analytics Code, ask the
developers to add the code to the specific pages that are missing.
Check for errors on Google Tag Manager
Screaming Frog also lets you know which pages have missed the Google Tag
Manager snippet. Go to Configuration tab and then go to Custom. Add iframe
src-“//www.googletagmanager.com/ after setting the filter to Does not
contain. Check for errors and update on Google Tag Manager. Share the code
with the developer to add to the site
Check Schema markup
Check if the website is using schema markup. This helps the search engines
understand what the given page is on the site. On Screaming Frog check
schema markup by going to the Configuration tab and Custom. Add
itemtype=”http://schema.\.org/ after selecting ‘Contain’ in the Filter.
Fix Indexing errors
On Screaming Frog you can also find out how many of the site’s pages are
indexed. Once the site loads on Screaming Frog, go to Directives > Filter >
Index and check if there are any missing pieces of code.
In case of new sites, Google might not have indexed it. Ensure you are not
disallowing the elements that you want Google to crawl by checking the
robots.txt file. Check if the sitemap of the site is submitted to Google
Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Also conduct a manual research.
Rectify Hosting issues
This is a very crucial aspect to follow up in a technical SEO audit as
hosting can seriously harm SEO. Access the client’s server and do a manual
check for any issues. The commonest hosting issues you might find are wrong
TLD and slow site speed.
To fix wrong TLD, make sure that the IP address matches with the country
from which the website is operating. If the site has both a .co domain and
also a .com domain, redirect the .co to your client’s .com domain. To fix
the slow loading speed, identify the factors causing it by using tools like
PageSpeed Tools and Pingdom. Some of the issues that could cause this
include Host, large images, plugins, embedded videos, ads, theme, widgets,
and repetitive script and dense code. Fix these items to rectify hosting
errors.