How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit: Tools and Best Practices

With the considerable and still growing influence of the Internet, your website undoubtedly plays a critical role in your business’s success. It is often the first point of contact with potential customers, so you should ensure it runs smoothly and ranks well on search engine results.

You need a technical search engine optimization (SEO) audit to achieve both goals.

A technical SEO audit evaluates your website’s performance, focusing on factors that affect search engine rankings, such as speed, mobile-friendliness, security, and indexing. This guide will cover the essential steps in conducting an audit and highlight the best SEO audit services and tools to make the process easier.

What is a technical SEO audit?

First, you need to understand what tech SEO is about. Like general SEO, it’s concerned with increasing your website’s ranking in the search results. However, instead of focusing on content and keywords, it prioritizes the technical aspects of your website, such as structure, speed, and code.

A technical SEO audit is like a diagnostic health checkup for your website. Its goal is to uncover issues that might be preventing search engines from properly crawling, indexing, and ranking your site. Thus, it helps ensure that your site is fully optimized for search engines, giving it a better chance of appearing in search results.

Why do you need a technical SEO audit?

Regularly conducting tech SEO audits for small business websites can help in several ways:

• Improve user experience. An audit helps you find and fix issues that can frustrate website visitors, such as slow loading speeds and broken links.
• Enhance search engine rankings. Technical issues can prevent efficient crawling or lead to search engine penalties. Fixing these problems helps improve your rankings and can make your website more visible to your target audience.
• Increase conversions. If leads encounter tech issues when they visit your website, they will likely go to a competitor’s site instead. A tech SEO audit ensures your site runs smoothly, reducing bounce rates and giving you more chances to convert website visitors.

Because of an audit’s powerful benefits, you should consider incorporating it into your overall SEO strategy.

What tools are useful in a tech SEO audit?

SEO audits may seem overwhelming, but there are several user-friendly tools that can be used to accomplish them. Here are some of the best options:

Google Search Console

This free tool is useful for businesses of any size. It highlights issues that affect your website’s performance on Google, including crawl errors, mobile compatibility, and indexing issues. Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool lets you check if webpages are properly indexed and how well they perform.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

This tool crawls your website, analyzing its structure and detecting broken links, duplicate content, missing meta tags, and other issues. Screaming Frog offers a free version of the SEO Spider tool, which, although limited, may be enough for smaller websites.

GTmetrix

This tool tells you how fast the pages on your website load. It then provides a detailed report on the factors and elements slowing down your site, as well as recommendations on how you can address the problem.

Ahrefs

This popular tool does more than help with keyword research. It can also detect technical issues, track your site’s SEO health, and analyze competitor sites, making it an indispensable component of the best SEO audit services.

Moz Pro

Moz’s comprehensive toolset includes a site audit feature that detects broken pages, missing metadata, and other problems. It features an interface that even non-tech-savvy users can navigate easily.

What best practices should you remember?

These are some of the best practices you should never ignore during an SEO audit for small business websites:

Check site speed

Slow loading speeds are a common reason for poor user experience, leading to lower search rankings. Using tools like GTmetrix helps identify slow elements on your website and gives you ideas on how to speed things up, such as compressing images and bulky media files.

Ensure mobile-friendliness

With half of all Internet traffic originating from mobile devices, you need to ensure that your website offers a smooth experience to mobile users. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool can confirm that your site responds to the smaller screens on tablets and smartphones.

Address crawl errors

Crawl errors prevent search engines from properly accessing and indexing your website’s pages. You can use Google Search Console to find such errors and ensure that your pages are being recorded in Google’s database and properly ranked.

Improve internal linking

A solid internal linking structure makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site and determine page authority. Make sure important pages are easily accessible from your homepage and other high-traffic areas of your site.

Check for duplicate content

When there are multiple pages on your site with the same information, search engines may get confused about which to rank, resulting in lower rankings. Tools like Moz and Screaming Frog can help identify duplicate pages and meta descriptions so you don’t have to manually scour your website.

Should you hire technical SEO audit companies?

If handling the technical aspects of your website still feels daunting, consider hiring technical SEO audit companies instead. Such companies employ SEO experts and advanced tools that can detect issues you might miss. They can also offer recommendations and help you implement solutions to improve your website’s performance.

Of course, there are many SEO agencies around, but they’re not all created equal. To ensure you get the best SEO audit services, choose agencies with a strong track record, positive client testimonials, and transparent pricing.

A technical SEO audit helps optimize your website and improve its search results performance. However, even when using the right tools and knowing tech SEO best practices, the process can still be too technical and time-consuming. It requires full attention to detail, which may force you to take time off from other crucial aspects of your business.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, partnering with a technical SEO audit company can give you peace of mind, knowing that your website is in good hands while you focus on running your business.

Don’t let technical issues prevent your business from being seen by your target customers. Work with a technical SEO agency you can trust today!