What is a Technical SEO Audit?

SEO audit is one of the most used terms in the SEO industry. Whether we are talking about a complete audit or a free audit, any specialist will recommend that before you start a promotional campaign, you should perform an exhaustive analysis of the sites you want to be optimized.

Being a topic to be discussed as well as an essential part of the promotion process, we have decided to devote a larger space to this aspect, detailing what an SEO audit is.

We will discuss the most important actions that should include an analysis of websites, which audit tools you can use, whether they are free or paid, who can do it, and with what results and how useful is a free audit.

SEO audit must be a recurring process

Yes, SEO is not a financial audit that is done once a year or every five years. Most experts think that analysis at the beginning of the campaign is enough and we can rely on it throughout the campaign.

From marketing and SEO, this approach can be damaging. Like any marketing campaign, and search engine optimization should be tracked and tailored to the market.

On the other hand, if we are discussing an SEO audit for an online store, there are a lot of technical changes at the website level. According to Golden Gate SEO, with each turn, the parameters can be altered and therefore, in such cases, periodic analyses are required.

When is it desirable to do an SEO audit?

SEO Technical Auditing actions on-page

To carry out such actions, we need to prepare ourselves with the best tools for technical audits.

Crawling and Indexing Activities

By doing this, we check whether the site is indexed correctly, more precisely if all the landing pages that interest us are read correctly by Google or other search engines. Here we recommend using Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

A good starting point here is the robots.txt file. Even though it’s pretty simple to check, over time I’ve encountered many instances when it blocks the correct indexing of the site.

Verifying the existence of an updated sitemap is another essential element to be tracked. A well-established sitemap helps search engines crawl the site better and faster and ensures that it gets everywhere.

Plug-ins known as WordPress Yoast and others automatically generate the sitemap, but for other places, this aspect needs to be checked.

The Most Useful Tools for Performing an Audit:

The architecture and structure of the site are fundamental to Googlebot. However, just as important is for the user and for the experience of navigating the site.

Think about the importance of an organizational chart within a company, set hierarchical levels, determine what each employee has to do, and so on.

Without the organigram would create chaos, and no one would know what to do. Just as important is the structure of a site.

How can you find what you are looking for on a site that does not have the categories correctly split or does not have categories and all products are listed on one page? How can you navigate to such a site?

For the search engine optimization process, the architecture of the site is decisive and must be thought and implemented correctly since its establishment.

Errors 404 and other types of errors

Error 404 is perhaps the most common. Regarding SEO, Google is trying to calm down and tells us that “Generally, 404 errors do not impact your site’s ranking in Google, and you can safely ignore them.

However, Google does not tell us the conditions we should have us be quiet. Such an error results from the absence/disappearance of a page – a blog article you deleted, tens or hundreds of removed products from an online store, or changed URLs for various reasons, are examples of how errors are born 404.

Logically speaking, no error can be auspicious to a site. Moreover, if it affects the user – who is annoyed when he gets on an empty page – and has no connection, at first sight with SEO, errors 404 must be kept under control and if they can not be eliminated, there should at least be a small ratio between the 404 number and the page number of the site.

Redirect 302 instead of 301 – another common problem that can directly affect the process. If redirect 301 has a permanent effect, 302 is only temporary and does not transfer the authority of the page to the new sheet.

You need to make sure that all of these redirects have been implemented correctly.

Other errors to be verified include broken links, internal link structure, errors 400, 401, 403, and 408, or server errors of 500 and 502.

So, what do you think of the necessity of a technical SEO Audit to grow your online business and increase SEO visibility?