How To Do Technical SEO Audit And How Viacon Is Going To Help?

Like us, you, too, probably have spent hours trying to find out the reason behind your website slowing down. And, still, you didn’t find any answers to it. However, that’s pretty natural though. A technical SEO audit has always been a tricky subject, no matter how you look at it.

It’s almost like a puzzle that keeps changing from time to time. Thus, it may feel like there’s a lot to do during the first time of performing an audit. That’s precisely why we have put this guide for you to offer the crucial details efficiently. So, let’s check it out!

Performing A Technical Audit – A Step-By-Step Guide

A technical SEO audit should be done meticulously and through different steps. You may have to perform a few of them regularly, while others can be done once in a while.

Let’s learn a little bit more about them.

Step – 1: Spot And Fix Indexing

First, you will want to make sure that Google appropriately indexes and crawls your website. And, for that, you can either take the help of a digital marketing consultant or try checking the following –

1. The sitemaps (check if you have submitted the indexable pages in XML sitemap or not)
2. The site audit tool (use Semrush’s device to check the site performance, thematic issues, blocked pages, etc.)
3. Subdomains (evaluate their health and check how many sites can be indexed there or not)
4. The robots txt. file (try to find if any such files are blocking your should-be-crawled pages or not)
5. The performance of submitted pages and indexed pages

Having a well-maintained website can positively affect your brand awareness. Hence, we would ask you to perform a technical SEO analysis on your website and improve the indexed and non-indexed pages accordingly.

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Step – 2: Address Your Website’s Architectural Issues

The term “site structure” refers to how a website has been organized. Hence, if you have done it well, it will be easier for you to navigate through the site within a few clicks.

Aside from this, a well-maintained site structure can also improve your website’s overall outlook to some extent.

But, how do you check if your site is well-planned or not?

Here are some of the signs that you should look for –

1. It’s not taking more than three clicks for a user to find the webpage from the homepage.
2. The pages and their available content are available in a logical and topical manner.
3. It has consistent URL structures.
4. Navigation menus boost the overall user experience even more.
5. Each of the available pages shows breadcrumbs.

Having a messy structure on your website will hurt both its SEO and user experience. Hence, while you are making a technical SEO audit, you should always focus on how it’s performing in terms of navigation and architecture.

Step – 3: Audit Canonical Tags

The canonical tags are generally used to find the “master page” for Google to index similar content available on your website. Thus, if these elements of your website are wrong, the search engine may end up indexing the wrong page.

It, in turn, may affect your content-related online strategies to some extent as well.

In a technical audit website report, you will find various alerts regarding canonical issues. Here are some tips that may help you out in this aspect –

1. Try using only one canonical URL per page. This way, it will not direct a search engine module to different pages while indexing your content.
2. Integrate the correct domain protocol – HTTP or HTTPS.
3. Keep how your URLs end in check – with or without a trailing slash.
4. Include the absolute URL while writing the canonical tag, not the relative ones.
5. Put the canonical tags in the AMPs (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
6. Tag only near-identical or legitimate duplicate content through the canonical URL.

Whether you believe it or not, canonical tags are, indeed, play a crucial role when it comes to SEO. They can ensure your website’s being indexed correctly, which can improve its ranking and web traffic sequentially.

Step – 4: Fix Your Website’s Internal Linking Issues

Improving your website’s structure will not be enough for you to improve its SERP ranking. Instead, you should also keep an eye on its overall health and internal links. And, do not make any link or lead generation mistakes while you are at it.

Anyway, your website will have two different types of internal links altogether. These are –

1. Contextual (integrated with the page content)
2. Navigational (can be found in the footer, header, or sidebar)

Breadcrumbs are also considered as a part of your website’s internal linking. However, they are pretty rare when it comes to blog-related sites.

In a technical SEO audit report, you can find the various issues directed to your site’s health. These are –

1. Orphaned pages (do not have any internal links)
2. High click depth (pages that are located farthest away from the homepage)
3. Warnings (denotes various issues, including the availability of no-follow attributes, etc.)
4. Errors (broken internal links)
5. Notices (permanence redirects and orphaned pages)

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Usually, the site audit report will tell you how to deal with the internal linking issues you have on your website. However, if you want to avoid such a circumstance, we would ask you to ensure that your internal links are –

1. Linking to pages with zero redirects
2. Linking directly to each and every indexable page
3. Offer helpful and relevant information for search engines and users

Additionally, when you are using an internal link, make sure to place it upon an anchor text that includes the primary keyword. This way, your audience will know precisely what to expect while approaching the hyperlinked webpage.

Step – 5: Take Care Of The Security Issues

If you are transferring data from an unencrypted HTTP, it could be stolen by any third-party attacker prying on you. So, the best solution for you would be to move to something more secure, such as an HTTPS server.

However, when you are moving on to somewhere else, you may end up making some common mistakes altogether. These are –

1. Choosing a server with an expired certificate
2. Selecting an older version of security protocol
3. Putting in wrong password inputs
4. Opting for something with no HSTS server support
5. Picking a website that has internal links to vulnerable pages

Make sure to use a technical SEO audit tool to find out these issues before choosing a new server. Otherwise, it may end up causing severe security issues to your website.

Step – 6: Improving Your Website’s Speed

The overall speed of your website can directly impact its overall user experience and SERP ranking. Hence, when you are performing a technical SEO audit, you will need to fix this issue as well.

Here are two things that you need to keep your eyes on –

1. Site speed (the average speed of the web pages available on your website)
2. Page speed (the overall time it takes to load a single webpage)

To improve the performance of your site, you can –

1. Remove uncompressed pages
2. Reduce the number of CSS and JavaScript files
3. Improve the interactive time of documents
4. Minify CSS and JavaScript files
5. Utilize browser caching methods
6. Clear up all the redirects
7. Minimize HTTP requests
8. Use a CDN (content delivery network)
9. Opt for a hosting provider who can manage your site’s size and performance metrics adequately

Increasing your website’s speed will sometimes also depend on the optimization of images. Hence, aside from working on the other aspects, we would also ask you to focus on this aspect!

How Can Viacon Help You With Performing A Technical SEO Audit?

Performing a thorough technical SEO audit is difficult, especially if you don’t have any prior knowledge in this aspect. Therefore, if you need any assistance in this regard, we’d ask you to opt for an expert, such as Viacon, for your purpose.

But, how can we help you out through our expertise?

As part of our job, we will first begin our journey by checking your website’s internal performance. Then, once we’ve completed creating a technical SEO report on the same topic, we will focus more on the keyword density and the available content.

This way, it will be easier for us to find the blogs that haven’t been indexed and fix them as quickly as possible. After we’re done, we will try to identify other SEO-related issues that are compromising your website and reintegrate them.

That’s how we, at Viacon, usually perform a technical SEO audit.

However, each site deals with separate issues and, therefore, cannot be treated similarly. Thus, we may take a different approach in your case if we consider it to be the right option. We’ll notify you about the same prior to beginning our auditing session.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article will help you perform a technical SEO audit without encountering any difficulties altogether. However, if you are still having issues with the procedure, we would ask you to tell us about it in the comment section. You’ll get all the help you need from us!

Also, if you need any SEO, social media marketing services, or content-related assistance, you can always reach us here – www.viacon.in/contact-us/

More Resources:

1. 6 SEO Online Marketing Strategies That Can Transform Your Business
2. Top 10 Tips To Master Local SEO For Brands
3. Complete On-Page SEO Checklist Guide