Why Technical Audit is Important in SEO?

Technical audit is all about making a website technically strong and flawless. It focuses on the architecture of a website and its overall functionality. It is a difficult and time consuming task; however, if done carefully it can easily make a website productive, compelling and competitive.

If you want to carry out an in-depth SEO audit of your website, you need to use some of the most effective tools and resources. These tools will help you to make your website clean and appealing.

Some of the smart tools required for an SEO audit are:

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Google’s mobile friendly check
• Ahrefs
• Screaming Frog
• Copyscape
• Pingdom DNS Check
• GTmetrix
• Siteliner
• Majestic SEO
• Redirect checker
• Google’s website speed tool
• Title Tag Pixel Width Checker

Fact:

• You should never compromise on technical aspects of your website.
• SEO audit is essential for the long-term success of a website.
• The basic reason for SEO audit is to comply with the dynamics of algorithms.
• Minor technical adjustments can improve a website’s speed, usability and visibility.

Technical audit focuses on some of the most critical aspects of a website, which often remain unaddressed. A thorough examination of a website reveals different hidden elements such as server errors, total number of indexed and non-indexed pages, CTR, conversion and bounce rate, organic traffic, visitors, website speed, robots.txt file, sitemap functionality and much more.

Specific reasons why you need to perform an SEO audit:

• Algorithm updates
• Webmaster’s guidelines
• Too many 404 Errors
• redirect chains
• Keyword cannibalization
• Confusing site structure
• Manual penalty inflicted
• Internal redirects and duplicate pages on different URLs
• Structured data errors, sitemap errors and many blocked resources.

Business owners stuff keywords in their website, however, if a website is not technically sound, it will never produce results. Therefore, proper attention should be given to the technical side of a website too.

At the basic level a technical audit should include:

• URL and server errors, which limit a site’s performance
• Creation and implementation of XML sitemap and robots.txt files
• Duplicity between domain and main page
• Removal of Internal duplicate pages
• Internal and external duplicate content
• Canonicalisation
• Website architecture including missing, duplicate and optimal title tags and meta descriptions
• Site’s speed
• AMP pages
• Duplicity Due to Case Sensitive URLs
• 302-temporary redirected URLs
• Pagination issues, etc.

In fact, for better output, you should manually check each URL of your website, redirections, navigation structure as well as the length of each URL. Make the changes according to the server type (Apache or IIS) because every server has its own set of rules and guidelines.

Above all, it is important to follow webmaster’s guidelines and keep algorithmic changes in mind while performing an audit; otherwise it may cost a lot.

Important tips:

• Register your website with Google Webmaster Tool.
• Add a Google Analytics code to your website.
• Submit XML Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tool.
• Closely monitor site’s traffic and sources.
• Make sure the site has a Google Business listing.
• Resolve all crawl errors.
• Technical audit is not a one time job; it must be performed at regular intervals.

A technical audit can easily make a website search engine friendly. So, adopt technical audit to embrace success…