What Is Technical SEO | GFC Tech Surrey SEO Services

The Beginner's Guide to Performing a Technical SEO Audit

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to optimizations that increase search engine rankings by making it easier for search engines crawl your site. This includes optimizing site load times, checking robot.txt files and making sure any redirects are working correctly.

It's basically the process of making sure your website is visible, crawled, ranked, and indexed by search engines.

Why is Technical SEO Important?

Google and other search engines give preference to websites that comply with their webmaster guidelines. Your website content must be precise, accessible, and easy-to-use.

These guidelines will not be met if your website loads slow, is unresponsive, or has a weak or insecure connection.

Technical SEO is crucial as it helps you improve technical aspects of your website in order to increase organic traffic.

A crawl report can help you identify crawl errors

A crawl report is a must for every site. A crawl report (or site audit) will give you an insight into any errors on your site.

Your most pressing technical SEO issues such as duplicate content or low page speed will be highlighted.

Site audits can be automated using many tools. Once the crawl is complete, you can review the list for errors and warnings. This task should be completed on a monthly basis in order to ensure that your site is clean and free from errors.

Check for broken links

Broken links are bad for SEO. They can lead to decreased rankings, waste of crawl budget, poor user experience, and lower rankings. It is important to identify and fix broken links on your website.

Checking your crawl report is one way to identify broken links. This will provide a detailed view for each URL with broken links.

Verify HTTPS status codes

It is essential to switch to HTTPS. Search engines and users won't have access to your site if it still has HTTP URLs. Instead of your content, they will be able to access the 4xx and 5xx HTTP status codes.

SEMrush conducted a Ranking Factors Study and found that HTTPS is now a strong ranking factor. This can have a significant impact on your site's ranking.

Next, look out for any other status code errors. The site crawl report will give you a list URL errors including 404 errors.

Check the XML sitemap status.

The XML sitemap is a map that Google and other search engine crawlers use to find your website pages. It helps crawlers locate your pages and ranks them accordingly.

Google Search Console Sitemaps allows you to submit your XML sitemap. The sitemap can be also added to your robots.txt file

Your XML Sitemap must be clean and include all URLs that return 200 status codes. Do not waste your crawl budget on duplicate or broken pages

Site load time

Another important technical SEO indicator to monitor is the site's loading time. SEMrush's technical SEO error report revealed that 23% of websites have slow page loads.

Site speed is all about the user experience. It can also affect other metrics search engines use to rank sites, such as bounce rates and time on page.

Google's Page Speed Insights can be used to determine the load time of your site. Simply enter your URL and Google will do the rest.

 

Websites should be Mobile-friendly

This is especially important since Google introduced mobile-first indexing.

To improve SEO and search engine rankings, your website must be mobile-friendly. Google's Mobile Friendly Test makes it easy to test this SEO element. Simply enter your website and you will get valuable insights into the mobile state of your site.

 

Check for keyword cannibalization.

Search engines can be confused by keyword cannibalization. Google will decide which page is the best if there are two pages that have similar keywords.

Aleh Barysevich, Search Engine Journal, explained that each page has a lower CTR and diminished authority as well as lower conversion rates than a consolidated page.

Local SEO is known for allowing subpages and home pages to be optimized for the same keywords. This is a common mistake. Google Search Console's Performance Report can be used to find pages competing for the same keywords. You can filter the search results to find pages that have the same keywords as the URL. Or, you can search by keyword to find out how many pages rank for the same keywords.

Notice how many pages are on the same website with the exact same keyword in this example. To avoid keyword cannibalization, it might be a good idea to consolidate some of these pages.

 

Do a Google site search

You can search for "site:rootdomain" to find out what pages are being crawled.

You don't have to rank your website at the top of all searches. Site search will only show pages from your site.

Check for duplicate metadata

This is a common technical SEO error for large websites with hundreds to thousands pages. Nearly 54% of websites have duplicate meta metadata (also known as meta description), and 63% have no meta descriptions at all.

Duplicate meta description occurs when pages or products have similar content copied and pasted into meta descriptions.

Meta description problems can be identified by a detailed SEO audit or crawl report. Although it may take time to create unique descriptions, it is well worth the effort.

Meta description length

You can optimize your meta descriptions by making sure they are correct in length. Although this isn't a ranking factor, it can help improve your CTR in the SERPs.

Recent meta description length changes have increased the 160 character limit to 320 characters. This allows you to include keywords, product specifications, location (for local search engine optimization), and other key elements.

Check for site-wide duplicate content

It's now time to examine the duplicate content on your website. SEO is against duplicate content, as most digital marketers know. Although there is no Google penalty to duplicate content, Google does not like multiple copies of the exact same information. They are of little use to the user, and Google has difficulty understanding which page should rank in the SERPs. This means that it is more likely to be served by a competitor's page.

Although small amounts of duplicate content can be natural and not a problem in most cases, it can pose a problem if the majority of your content is "substantially identical" to content found elsewhere on the internet or on your site.

These are the fundamentals of technical SEO.

Any digital marketer who is worth their salt should have these basics working for every website they manage. The most fascinating thing about technical SEO is the depth you can go. It might seem overwhelming, but once you have completed your first audit you will be eager to learn more about how you can improve your website. These are great steps for business owners who want to ensure their website works well for search engines.

They are all completely free so get started!

 

Need a professional SEO audit? GFC Tech can help. please get in touch with our experts at https://gfctech.co.uk