Technical SEO site audits assist you in improving the technical SEO aspects of your website. It helps you identify and fix the technical pain-points of your website for better search ranking.
Business owners and their marketing staff are usually familiar with content-based SEO audits of their business website, but very few understand the relevance of a technical SEO audit. The performance of the website, ease of crawling, mobile-friendliness, and security of the website play major roles in the top-notch search visibility of your website.
Here’s how to perform a technical SEO site audit.
1. Focus on User Experience
The loading time of your website matters! Any website that takes more than 3 seconds to load needs to be looked at for performance improvement. Take up the challenge and improve your website loading time to under 1 second for a better user experience.
Here are some tips to improve your website loading time.
2. Create a Mobile-friendly Website
Recent research says that anything between 60-95% of searches are taking place on mobiles. Being mobile-friendly is no longer a luxury, but a business necessity. Along with optimizing your website for desktop Googlebots, it’s important to optimize for smartphone crawlers as well.
Google has provided a mobile-friendly test that finds the error with mobile usability and the function of Googlebots on your website. Use it to your advantage.
3. JavaScript Crawling & Content Rendering
According to Google, it’s okay to use JavaScript for your website without blocking any pages from crawlers. However, it’s even better to use a simple HTML format for important content.
JavaScript crawling can be validated using Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Botify and Sitebulb.
4. Have a Structured Data Map
In the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), results are not only displayed as links but also as various rich snippets, cards, answers boxes, and knowledge boxes. For your website to rank better on search results, have a structured data map and optimize your content accordingly.
Later, you may analyze and verify the optimized content using Structured Data Testing Tools and competitor ranking analysis through SEO monitor Tool.
5. Remove Redirect Issues
Redirect issues will not only hurt the user experience but they also bring down website speed. The error codes are:
301 & 302: The 301 redirect code is okay, but ensure it does not have multiple redirect loops. The 302 redirect code is temporary but, if it lasts for long, it has to be changed to a 301 status code.
400, 403, & 404: These codes have to be carefully investigated and taken care of. The 400 redirect code does not allow the user to access the page. The 403 redirect code is not authorized for the users and the 404 redirect code does not redirect to any page as it has been deleted.
500:The 500 redirect code means an internal server error that has to be investigated and resolved quickly.
6. Know the Importance of AMP
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a necessity for faster mobile search results. It is a must-have feature, especially for blogs and media websites. SEO crawlers can help in verifying AMP existence for the overall website as well as for every web page.
Separate page-wise validation of AMP can also be done through Chrome DevTools and Google’s AMP Test.
7.Ensure safety of the Website
It’s better to use HTTPS instead of HTTP which indicates that your website is concerned about security and privacy. HTTPS is one of the most important ranking factors for the website. If your website still employs HTTP and not HTTPS, then you should migrate as early as possible. Ensure that you go for SEO validation before, during and after the migration.
You can find various tools that help in implementation, validation and monitoring of the migration process. It includesHTTP to HTTPS Redirect Generator, Chrome DevTools, SEO crawlers, Botify, and several others.
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