How to Audit a Website for Technical SEO Issues

 

In today’s digital landscape, a solid Technical SEO foundation is crucial for any website aiming to rank higher in search engines and offer a seamless user experience. Technical SEO auditing helps businesses identify and fix issues that prevent their websites from achieving optimal performance on search engines like Google, Bing, and others. But what exactly does a Technical SEO audit entail? This comprehensive guide will walk you through how to audit a website for Technical SEO issues and ensure your website is performing at its best.

 

What Is Technical SEO and Why Is It Important?

Technical SEO refers to optimizing a website’s infrastructure and ensuring search engines can crawl, index, and render the pages effectively. It doesn’t focus on content optimization or link-building strategies (which are parts of on-page and off-page SEO), but rather on the structure and technical settings that affect how search engines access and interpret a website.

The Importance of Conducting a Technical SEO Audit

Regular audits help:

  • Enhance Search Engine Visibility: Ensure that search engines can crawl, index, and rank your web pages correctly.
  • Improve User Experience (UX): Technical SEO affects page load time, mobile-friendliness, and overall user interaction, which directly impacts conversions.
  • Identify Hidden Problems: Uncover issues such as broken links, duplicate content, or errors in the XML sitemap.
  • Boost Ranking Potential: A technically optimized site gives search engines more reasons to rank it higher in search results.

Steps to Audit a Website for Technical SEO Issues

 

Crawl Your Website

The first step of any SEO audit is to perform a full site crawl. Crawling your website helps uncover issues like broken links, duplicate content, and indexing errors. Tools such as Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, and DeepCrawl can simulate how search engines view your site.

What to Look For:

  • Broken links: Both internal and external links that return a 404 error.
  • Redirect chains: Multiple redirects before reaching the final URL.
  • Duplicate content: Pages with duplicate meta tags, content, or title tags.

Best Practices:

  • Use a robust crawler that covers your entire site.
  • Prioritize fixing high-impact issues like broken links and duplicate content.

Looking for professional help with identifying and fixing Technical SEO issues for eCommerce Website? Let us handle it!
WhatsApp Contact: +966549485900
Call Directly: +44 73801 27019
Email: hi@MahbubOsmane.com
Explore our Professional SEO Services for expert solutions tailored to your business needs.


Check for HTTPS Implementation

Security is a key ranking factor. Ensure that your website is served over HTTPS rather than HTTP. HTTPS encrypts communication between the user and the server, making the connection more secure.

What to Look For:

  • SSL Certificate: Ensure every page is served over HTTPS and that your SSL certificate is valid.
  • Mixed Content Issues: Ensure no page is loading assets (images, scripts) over HTTP when the site is on HTTPS.

Best Practices:

  • Set up automatic redirects from HTTP to HTTPS.
  • Regularly check your SSL certificate’s status and expiration date.

Ensure a Mobile-Friendly Design

Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the site for ranking and indexing. Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly is crucial for both SEO and user experience.

What to Look For:

  • Responsive Design: Your site should automatically adjust to fit the screen size of any device.
  • Mobile Usability Errors: Google Search Console can help detect issues like text too small to read or clickable elements being too close together.

Best Practices:

  • Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to analyze your website.
  • Prioritize loading speed and ensure that your site is easy to navigate on smaller screens.

Review Website Speed and Performance

Page speed is a critical ranking factor. A fast-loading website enhances the user experience, which indirectly boosts SEO performance.

What to Look For:

  • Page Load Time: Aim for a load time under 3 seconds.
  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures how long it takes for the largest element on your page to load.
  • Time to Interactive (TTI): This measures how long it takes before your website becomes fully interactive.

Best Practices:

  • Optimize images by compressing them and using modern formats like WebP.
  • Enable browser caching and use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve content faster.

Analyze Your XML Sitemap and Robots.txt File

An XML sitemap helps search engines navigate your website, while the robots.txt file tells them which parts of your site they can or cannot crawl.

What to Look For:

  • Sitemap Structure: Ensure that your XML sitemap is properly formatted and includes all your important pages.
  • Robots.txt Configuration: Ensure that you are not accidentally blocking important pages from being crawled.

Best Practices:

  • Regularly submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.
  • Avoid blocking important resources like CSS or JavaScript in your robots.txt file.

Check for Indexing Issues

Use tools like Google Search Console to see if your pages are properly indexed by Google.

What to Look For:

  • Index Coverage Errors: Pages that are excluded from the index due to errors like “Crawl Anomaly” or “Blocked by Robots.txt.”
  • Canonicalization Issues: Ensure that Google is indexing the correct version of your pages and that canonical tags are used appropriately to avoid duplicate content.

Best Practices:

  • Fix errors flagged in Google Search Console.
  • Use the “URL Inspection” tool in Search Console to verify whether Google can index your pages.

Optimize Structured Data

Structured data helps search engines understand the content on your site better. This data also enables rich results, such as review stars and featured snippets, which can increase your click-through rates (CTR).

What to Look For:

  • Schema Markup: Check if your website uses proper schema markup for product reviews, articles, and FAQs.
  • Structured Data Errors: Tools like Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool can help you detect errors in your markup.

Best Practices:

  • Use schema.org markup that is relevant to your content (e.g., Breadcrumb, FAQPage, Product).
  • Fix any warnings or errors that appear in the Structured Data Testing Tool.

Fix Broken Internal and External Links

Broken links hurt user experience and search engine crawlers’ ability to navigate your site.

What to Look For:

  • Internal Links: Ensure all internal links are functional and not pointing to 404 pages.
  • External Links: Ensure that all external links lead to valid, active pages.

Best Practices:

  • Regularly audit your site for broken links.
  • Use tools like Ahrefs or Screaming Frog to automate the process of detecting broken links.

Conducting a Thorough Technical SEO Audit

By following the steps outlined above, you can uncover the most common technical SEO issues and ensure your website is optimized for both search engines and users. Regular audits are essential as they ensure your website maintains optimal performance and continues to rank well in search engines.


Let us take care of your website’s Technical SEO! Contact our team to ensure your website runs smoothly, ranks higher, and offers the best user experience.
WhatsApp Contact: +966549485900
Direct Call: +44 73801 27019
Email: hi@MahbubOsmane.com
Visit our White Hat SEO Services page for more information on how we can help you achieve your SEO goals.


By following these steps, you can ensure your website is in optimal health and performance, primed for higher rankings and better user engagement.