Seconds Techradar, there are over 547,200 new websites every day. Google has to track and store all these sites in its database, therefore taking up physical space on its servers.
The sheer volume of content available now allows Google to prioritize fast, well-designed sites and provide useful and relevant information to their visitors.
The bar has been raised, and if your site is slow or has a lot of jargon in the code, Google is unlikely to reward your site with a solid ranking.
If you really want to get ahead of your competitors, you have a great opportunity to be better than them by optimizing your site’s code, speed, and user experience. These are some of the most important ranking signals and will continue to be so as the internet becomes more and more flooded with content.
Auditing your website’s technical SEO can be extremely dense and with many moving parts. If you are not a developer, some of these elements can be difficult to understand.
Ideally, you should have a working knowledge of how to run an audit to monitor the implementation of technical SEO fixes. Some of these may require developers, designers, writers or editors.
Fortunately, several tools will run the audits and provide you with all the comprehensive data you need to improve your website’s technical performance.
Let’s review some of the data points that will appear regardless of the technical SEO audit tool you use:
structure
Tracking: Can Google crawl your website easily and how often?Security: Is your website secure with an HTTPS certificate?On-Page SEO Elements: each page has the keyword a title tags, meta description, filenames and paths? Does it have the same elements on the page as the sites that rank in the top 10 for your target keywords?Internal links: Does your site have internal links from other pages on the site? Other elements you might consider are site structure, stripes, anchor text, and link sculpting.Headings: Primary KW is in H1? Do you have H2 with compatible keywords?Compliance issues: Does your site code include valid HTML? What is the accessibility score?Images: Are your images loading quickly? Are they optimized with the title, keywords and srcset attribute? Do you use some new image formats like webP and SVG?Schema and Semantic Web: Are your schema tags placed and configured correctly? Some outline tags you can use include Web Page, BreadcrumbList, Organization, Product, Review, Author/Article, Person, Event, Video/Image, Recipe, FAQ, and How To.Canonical: Do you have canonical tags installed and configured correctly?Site Map: Do you ONLY have valid pages in the sitemap and redirects and 404 pages are removed from the sitemap?
These are just some of the items you’ll want to look at that most tools will report on.
User experience
Google has focused more on ranking factors that revolve around user experience. As the web is collectively organized, Google is raising the bar for user experience. Focusing on user experience will ultimately increase your ad revenue.
You want to audit the user experience of your website.
is it fast How fast is the page interactive? Is it easily navigable on mobile devices? Is the site hierarchy clear and intuitive?
Some of the ways to measure this include:
Website Speed Core Vitals Mobile Friendly Structured Navigation Intrusive or Interstitial Ads Design
Make sure you are working with a developer who knows the latest SEO technicalities and can apply the necessary changes to increase your SEO performance score.
Technical SEO audit tools
Some of the most popular SEO audit tools include:
Semrush Site Audit Screaming FrogSiteBulbWebsite Auditor ContentKing App GMTMetrixPingdomGoogle LighthouseGoogle Page Speed Insights
We’ll look at a couple of these tools and the data points you can get from them.
Semrush site audit
Once you create a project in Semrush, you can run a site audit. Your overview will look like this:
Click on the “Issues” tab and you’ll see a detailed list of the issues that were discovered, broken down by errors, warnings, and warnings:
If you click on an item, you’ll see a list of pages affected by each issue.
Please review them because sometimes the data points are invalid.
Ideally, you should export the CSV for each of these issues and save them in a folder.
Screaming Frog
This desktop tool will use your computer and your IP to track your website. Once completed, you will get several reports that you can download.
Here are a couple of sample reports:
This is a general report that you can use to track technical audit KPIs.
For example, this report gives you details of the meta titles for each of your pages.
You can use the bulk export feature to download all data points into spreadsheets, which you can then add to your audit folder.
SiteBulb
Like the others, Site Bulb will perform a full crawl of your website. The advantage of this tool is that it will provide you with more detailed technical information than some of the other tools.
You’ll get an audit score, an SEO score, and a security score. As you implement fixes, you’ll want to see how these scores increase over time.
Google Search Console
The index coverage report contains a treasure trove of data that you can use to implement fixes that Google has discovered on your site.
In the details section, you’ll see a list of errors, and if you click on each report, they’ll include the list of pages affected by each issue.
Implementation of technical SEO fixes
Once you have all the CSV exports, you can create a list of all the issues and review them to remove duplicate reports created by the different tools.
You can then assign which department each fix belongs to and the priority level. Some may need to be addressed by your developer, others by your content team, such as rewriting duplicate titles or improving descriptions with pages with a low CTR.
Here’s what your list might look like:
Each project should include notes, observations, or details on how to implement the fix.
Most websites will have dozens of issues, so the key here is to prioritize issues and make sure you’re continuously fixing and improving your site’s performance each month.
Audit EAT
It is important that your website reflects authority and current relevance. EAT stands for:
Expertise: Are you an expert in your field? Are your authors licensed?Authority: Are you considered an authority in your field by industry organizations? Do your social profiles, quotes, social shares, and link profile reflect this authority?Reliability: Can visitors trust that your website is secure and that their data is safe? Does your site have an SSL certificate, including privacy disclaimers, refund information, contact information, and credentials?
Google has a whole team of quality raters who manually review websites to rate them against these parameters. Google has even published the EAT guidelines for quality assessors for site owners to reference.
If your website is in a YMYL (Your Money Your Life) niche, these factors are even more important as Google tries to protect the public from misinformation.
Analytical audit
BrainLabsDigital has created a Google Analytics audit checklist which will help you review your Google Analytics account. the companion article will give you a simple and strategic approach to ensuring your Google Analytics is set up correctly.
Prioritize technical SEO fixes
Make sure you prioritize continuous improvement of your on-page SEO. Depending on your site, you may have a list of a dozen or a few hundred fixes. Try to determine which fixes will affect the most pages to see the biggest improvement from your efforts.
It can be daunting to see a list of 85 different technical SEO improvements. The upside is that as you go through these improvements, you’ll start to see movement in your rankings. Over time, you’ll want very few, if any, errors to show up in all of your tracking tools.
If your content is relevant, targeted and well-developed, and you receive quality new links every month, these technical optimizations will become the key differentiators to rank you better than your competitors.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
New in Search Engine Land
About the author
Marcela De Vivo is an industry veteran with over 20 years of experience in digital marketing, Marcela travels the world speaking about SEO, data-driven marketing strategies, and workflow automation and optimization. Marcela has a digital marketing agency called faucet based in California.
[ad_2]
Source link
