Of the three pillars of SEO, on-page, off-page and technical, it’s the latter which is most often ignored. The clue’s in the name – it’s technical and possibly the trickiest to get right. But neglecting to run regular technical audits of your website is a rookie error, and this blog is going to get into the nitty gritty of why this is.
What is a technical SEO audit, I hear you say? It’s essentially a deep dive into the technical aspects of a website – looking into its structure and code to identify points of issue and opportunity. It’s important to set the technical foundations at the beginning of your SEO strategy. Conducting a technical audit to ensure your pages are crawlable and indexable is crucial before we can get on with the next steps of a strategy. Technical SEO is also important from a user experience perspective, and this blog will clarify how elements like page speed are instrumental for the success of your site.
To reach those coveted top SERP positions where conversions and traffic are at your fingertips, your website needs to be fast, secure and crawlable to get Google and your target users on side.
There are a huge number of little elements that make up technical SEO, and this blog won’t cover everything. Instead, we’ve whittled down the world of technical SEO auditing to 5 key steps. Our aim is to make this complex subject matter nice and simple for you, so you can tackle a technical SEO audit with ease.
1. Ensure your site is crawlable
First and foremost, you need to check your website’s crawlability. This means making sure that search engines can find your pages and follow links within your site’s content. You can do this in a number of ways to make sure that your site, and specific pages, are crawlable.
Firstly, it’s useful to check your ‘Crawl Stats’ report in Google Search Console. This will give you an overview of how your site is being crawled by different Googlebots and allows you to spot any unusual dips or increases in crawl requests that may need investigating. It gives you statistics about how Google has been crawling your website over the last 90 days and is intended for websites that have more than 1000 pages (if your site is smaller, you won’t need to audit crawling information in so much detail). As shown in the screengrab below, the report provides you with data on the number of crawl requests, the total download size, and the average response time.
There is also a section titled ‘Hosts’ which is perhaps the most important area to audit, when analysing the health of your website. Under this section, Google accesses three crawlers: robots.txt fetch, DNS resolution, and server connectivity.
You’ll ideally see three green ticks however, a white tick indicates that there has been at least one serious crawling issue in the past 90 days and a red exclamation mark shows you there’s been a crawling issue over the past week. If you’re not seeing three ticks, check the details to see if the issues were related to robots.txt fetch, DNS resolution, or server connectivity. Then, check the response codes of failed crawl requests and investigate the issue further.
Google Search Console is a goldmine for all things technical SEO. As well as checking out your Crawl Stats, be sure to look for any crawl errors in the Coverage Report. It will tell you if any specific pages have crawl issues. This is a problem to troubleshoot if any of your site’s key pages are flagged.
Another useful tool to assess your site’s crawlability is Google Search Console’s Sitemaps Report. A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that helps search engines crawl and index the content. In the sitemap you should include pages you want to be visible and rank for, and also any that search engines may have a hard time finding. The report will tell you if Google has had any problems receiving your sitemap.
2. Assess your site’s indexability
Within the Sitemaps Report on Google Search Console, you’ll also receive information about any indexing issues. Indexability means that search engines can show your pages in search results. It’s all very well that Google is successfully crawling your pages, but we need them to be shown to users too.
Indexability can be audited a few different ways. Perhaps the easiest way is to simply enter site: followed by your domain name into Google, as we have done here:
The search results will then tell you the number of URLs indexed, for our site, 277 pages are indexed. Here, you‘ll want to keep an eye out for a large difference between the number of pages you have, and the number being indexed.
You can also use the ‘site:’ operator to establish whether a specific page on your site has been indexed by adding the page URL after ‘site:’. If the page doesn’t appear in the results, there may be an underlying issue for you to investigate as you could be missing out on valuable traffic if that page is important to your business or services.
For an in-depth audit of a domain’s indexability, Google’s Coverage Report on the Search Console is definitely the way to go. As you’ll see below, this tool shows you the status of every page. The report identifies errors, indexed pages, pages with warnings attached, and excluded pages.
It can be easy to fall into the trap of trying to fix every issue highlighted in this report, but it’s important to assess this on a case-by-case basis and make changes where it will have the most impact on organic performance. For example, the report often highlights pages that include a noindex tag as an error, however, in most cases these will be pages that you simply decided you don’t want to be indexed but it’s worth a check in case a page with commercial value is on the list and you can quickly amend this.
3. Is your website mobile-friendly?
Google began rolling out mobile-first indexing in 2018. This means that the search engine is increasingly using the mobile version of your pages for ranking, rather than the desktop form. Google explained that this move was ‘to better help out our – primarily mobile – users to find what they’re looking for’.
In 2024, mobile search is more prevalent than ever, with 92.3% of internet users now accessing the internet using a mobile phone. That comes to a whopping 4.32 billion mobile internet users. What this all means for us is a need to make content and structures mobile-friendly. More and more of your competitors are presenting their content in the most accessible ways for mobile users. Making sure your website is also compatible will ensure you don’t miss out on valuable traffic.
What’s a free and easy way to check if your site is user-friendly? Well luckily for you, Google has another great tool. Its mobile-friendly test ‘Lighthouse’ runs a series of audits and assesses if your pages are mobile-responsive. It generates a comprehensive report, and each audit comes with a document guiding you through troubleshooting practices.
Here’s an example of how your Lighthouse report will hopefully look, should your mobile-accessibility be up to scratch. We’d also advise checking your website manually from your own mobile device. Check that components such as contact forms and phone number links are working successfully.
4. Audit page speed
For over 6 years now, page speed has been an important factor for Google searches and technical SEO. And page speed comes down to more than simply how fast your content loads – there’s not one metric. It’s all about providing a good user experience and ensuring it’s as easy as possible for search engines to crawl your pages. To achieve a thorough audit of page speed, you’ll need to go beyond assessing how quickly the site loads on your laptop. It’s a good idea to use online tools to get a full analysis.
Google has another free tool: Google PageSpeed Insights.This provides a performance score and review, along with showing you opportunities to make page speed savings.
If your site speed is lower than you’d like, there are a few effective fixes. For example, ensure you are using a quick server, that your caching is effective, and that your site doesn’t have too much unnecessary javascript.
Page Speed Insights may also highlight that there is work to be done to optimise your images to improve page speed. Often overlooked, auditing your images actually has numerous benefits. It should improve load speed which in turn will create a better user experience and could fuel conversion rates.
Here are a couple of pointers for addressing image optimisation:
📌Choose the right image format: PNG and JPEG are the most common, with PNG being better quality at the expense of a larger file size
📌Compress your images: you can use Photoshop or TinyPNG to reduce their file size
📌Consider improving the image file structure: remember that the file path and file name are used to rank images so use a category related topic
5. On-page Technical Review
It’s also crucial not to neglect your on-page elements. Basic features like H1 tags and meta descriptions can be the difference between first and second position on the SERPs. An on-page review can be boiled down to these five key areas. We’ve listed them in order of importance so you know what to prioritise in your audit.
- Canonical Tags:
This distinguishes the primary and secondary version of duplicate content on your site and designates which version should be indexed. This is vital because it will save your crawl budget, and prevent important pages being missed.
- Structured Data
Test your structured data using a tool like the Structured Data Testing Tool and ensure it’s up to scratch to boost E-E-A-T signals. It contains information to help Google better understand your website, and can even land you a spot in the Knowledge Panel on search engine results.
- Hreflang Tags
Hreflang tags are essential if you have different versions of your website in different languages. They can also function as a ranking signal so are important not to neglect if looking to improve your position in the SERPs.
- Page Titles and Title Tags
Although it is time-consuming, we’d definitely recommend giving each of your important pages a title tag. This lets Google know what the page is about, and is also beneficial for user experience. Optimise by aiming for 50-60 characters, and including at least one targeted keyword.
- Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are another important way to summarise page content and encourage users to click through to your site. Try to make these descriptive and unique but below 105 characters. Undertake some research into user intent to ensure your descriptions include what the users want to see. Adding a call to action (like ‘learn more’ or ‘try for free’) is also a good idea.
Of course, there are many other important elements to review and investigate during your technical audit but we’ve outlined our highest priority checks above (as these also often have the highest impact if we are finding issues in these areas). When you are conducting a technical audit, you will also want to review overall site security – have you installed an SSL certificate? Additionally, checking your internal links are working effectively is significant for user experience, and you should audit pagination and response codes to ensure users are directed correctly.
Get professional help with a technical SEO audit
At Cedarwood Digital we offer a range of technical SEO services, whether you need an audit completed for your website, or some support with a website migration. Our white label SEO service will give you the best foundation to perform well in organic search. We have years of experience working with SMEs and large organisations on full audits, link audits, crawl evaluations, and everything in between.
Drop us an email at [email protected] or fill in our quick form today to find out more.
