Conducting A Technical SEO Audit

Your business is now available online! So, what now? The SEO campaign, without a doubt, must advance to the next round. However, before you launch your SEO campaign, you must first conduct a website analysis. To put it another way, you must first conduct an SEO audit. An SEO Audit is carried out by an SEO Analyst and is an important step in investigating the ups and downs of a website. Its operation is similar to that of a doctor's check-up, in which a professional identifies problems and treats them in order to outline a lucratively planned strategy for future activities.

Steps for an SEO Audit!

The SEO audit is divided into two sections:

• Pre-audit
• Main-audit

SEO Audit – Pre-Audit!

The SEO executive performs the following checks during the pre-audit (assuming you are an SEO service provider company):

1) Consultation with the Client: The executive gathers information about the website and the client's business, as well as the client's expectations.

2) Define Goals: – After gathering all of the client's requirements, you must establish clear targets to be met in accordance with the client's specifications.

3) Analytics: –This is a great free tool for analyzing your website traffic and seeing which segments/modules users are viewing on your site, as well as many user engagement metrics such as browser, city, bounce rate, time spent on site, and so on. These statistics aid in developing a better strategy for focusing on long-term goals and building a brand reputation.

5) Google Ad words: Check to see if your client or yourself have ever used or want to use Google Ad words, as these are good for getting a website off to a good start because they are paid and with well-chosen keywords, your site can be visible to your desired audience, and the best part is you only pay if you get a visit on your site.

6) Do They Move? : – Executive also determines whether or not the site is mobile friendly. Google may encounter some mobile sociability issues even after having responsive sites. Because Google has officially stated that it will boost rankings for mobile-friendly websites following the Add to the confusion update, and people use mobile devices more to access the web, it's a win-win situation for Go Mobile.

SEO Website Audit – Main Components!

The following are the most important considerations for executives when performing a final SEO audit:

1. Website Crawl: The site must be checked to see if it is indexed by search engines. For this, we use the syntax "site: site URL."

For example: Site:ahitechno.com

This will display all of the pages indexed by that browser for that specific site.

2. XML sitemap: An XML file placed in a website for web crawlers so that when a crawler comes to our site, it can index all of our pages. Crawlers also consider a sitemap to be a positive point if it is present and regularly updated.

3. Robots.txt: (Optional) This is a file in which we list all of the pages that we do not want search engines to index, such as https://www.ahitechno.com/robots.txt. You can also define it separately for top search engines such as http://www.amazon.com/robots.txt.

4. Custom 404 Page: If a user requests a query that does not exist on your website, a customized error page must be served to the user. This is a custom landing page that has been coded to handle not found questions and to direct users to additional resources on the website. If this page is not available, users may be redirected to the search results.

5. Site Speed:  Speed is very important nowadays because a user decides whether to stay or bounce within the first 5 seconds of visiting a website, so we can test our website speed using Google Developers page speed test.

6. Architecture and Site Structure: The site architecture must be well structured and easily navigable for users; the use of breadcrumbs is required to determine where the user is on your site.

7. File and URL Names: A site's URL and files must be SEO friendly and simple to understand. For example, if a website offers digital marketing services and the URL ends with a standard code, such as xyz.com/11119988DM This is not good for SEO results; it should end with something like xyz.com/digital-marketing.

8. Keywords: This is the most important part of any audit because these are the goals we will use to improve the website's ranking in search engines. With the assistance of webmasters and a couple of other tools, extensive research must be conducted in order to select target keywords based on the client's goals.

9. Content: The site's content must be well structured, and the use of target keywords must be moderately frequent.

10. Duplicate Content: The content on the site should be as unique as possible, and duplicate content should be avoided as it will harm the site's ranking in search engines. Duplicity is harmful to any niche and will allow your competitors to outrank you.

11. Rel-Canonical: Canonicalization is a technique for dealing with duplicate content on a website.

Ensure that all sub-pages created with user-search or additional functionality adhere to the correct canonical paths in order to reflect authority and juice to the appropriate URL.

12th. Meta: This is an important HTML tag that should be checked by an SEO audit because it is the content that appears in search results. It also assists crawlers in learning about the content of the website and retrieving the most accurate results.

13. Images: A website with a lot of images takes longer to load and thus provides a poor user experience. As a result, images must be compressed before being uploaded to a website in order for it to load faster. Because search engines cannot read images, always use the Alt and Title attributes to inform machines about what an image is about.

14: Link Audit: Monitor your existing link profile using a Moz Pro or Ahrefs account. Is your website linked to large article/web-directory sites? A best practice for avoiding algorithmic or manual penalties is to conduct regular back-link audits and remove low-quality manipulative back-links that may not appear natural to search engines.

Once all of these steps have been followed and executed correctly, you can begin implementing SEO techniques. But the most important thing to remember is to keep an eye on your website's SEO functionality on a routine basis to ensure that it meets all of the goals outlined in the strategy.

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