A strong online presence is essential for businesses aiming to succeed in this competitive digital landscape. Your website often serves as the first impression and the “home base” of your brand. If your site is not optimized for search engines and user experience, you risk losing valuable opportunities to connect with potential customers.
Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures your site ranks well and provides a seamless, engaging experience for visitors. A critical component of any successful SEO strategy is the SEO website audit, a thorough evaluation of your site’s technical health, content quality, and performance. Whether you’re learning how to audit a website or refining your SEO technical audit checklist, consistent audits are indispensable.
This guide explores why regular audits are vital to your site’s success, the tools needed for the job, and how Logical Position can assist in elevating your website’s performance.
What Is a Technical Audit?
In short, a technical audit of your website is a report of on-site SEO errors, insights, and opportunities tailored for your website. Tech audits usually check and evaluate crawlability, indexing, site speed, mobile-friendliness, URL structure, internal linking, metadata, and security to identify and resolve issues that optimize website performance and search engine rankings.
It Ensures All Pages Are Discoverable
When executing an SEO website audit, an SEO analyst or website auditor first looks to see if every important page on the website is discoverable by Google or other search engines. Google’s crawlers move through a website by starting on one page and following every link on that specific page. If you have an XML sitemap that lists all your important pages, search engines will also read your sitemap to find important pages that it may have missed through the crawl.
That’s why it’s so crucial to understand page experience and ensure your pages are discoverable and accessible. When a page on a website is not linked elsewhere on the website, then search engines may have trouble finding that content.
You can also submit pages manually through Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools; however, this can be time consuming. To ensure important and high-value pages are discovered, crawled, and indexed efficiently, it is recommended to use a mix of all three methods:
- Proper internal linking throughout your site
- Complete XML sitemap, referenced in your /robots.txt file
- Manual submission of the most important pages (or using IndexNow or URL Inspect API)
Expert advice: When it comes to technical SEO for business websites, among the most overlooked areas are when owners accidentally set important pages to “noindex” or prevent search engines from crawling the site through the robots.txt file. These errors happen all the time and interfere with the ability of Google’s site crawlers to index or crawl the page. It’s an easy fix but can go unnoticed for months without the help of a website audit.
It Checks on the Site’s Content
The analyst then begins to analyze the site’s content. They check to make sure that a page or most of the site’s pages have a sufficient amount of content. Content provides users with helpful information and allows search engines to understand the meaning of the page and determine what it should rank for. The advantages of structured data, metadata, and on-page content are essential to informing search engines of ranking and relevance and providing users with a great experience.
A tech audit also identifies duplicate content, which can be detrimental to SEO efforts. It is best practice to create unique, helpful content for each page on your site. While some content similarity within your site is fine, you want to minimize and reduce the amount of duplicate and redundant content across your site. Use internal linking to connect pages and direct users to where they can learn more in greater detail.
It Determines the Site’s Speed
Next up on the website audit checklist is to figure out the site’s speed, a factor that affects your users’ experience. What used to be an unimportant fun fact for website owners is now a primary determining factor for website rankings on Google.
Google tests site speed on a page-by-page basis, so a website auditor will run speed checks on a few key pages to gauge the general website speed. This process is a great way to check if pages are optimized to display on mobile, desktop, or both. Google uses a mobile-first indexing approach, so it’s critical to make sure your pages are accessible to users with mobile devices.
All these aspects are vital to search engine optimization on a website. Most SEO issues stem from mistakes that are easily discoverable through website audits. By conducting an SEO technical audit, you can find areas to fix or optimize, ensuring your website operates at its best for both users and search engines.
Tools You Need for an SEO Audit
Website crawling tool: You’ll need a complete list of the pages on your site and the issues associated with each. A crawling tool like ScreamingFrog or SiteBulb can help you create this list.
Backlink audit tool: Backlinks are an important part of search engine optimization because they demonstrate other websites’ trust in your site. You need a way to measure and keep track of all the external sites that are linking back to your website. Tools like Search Console’s links report, Ahrefs, and Semrush provide analytics for these backlinks.
Content analyzer tools: Finally, you need to analyze your keyword performance and identify any content issues or opportunities. Tools like Copyscape, Semrush, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools can help you with these analyses.
Your SEO Technical Audit Checklist
With these benefits in mind and tools at hand, let’s take a look at how to audit a website.
Crawl the Site
Use your crawling tool of choice to get a complete list of all the URLs on your site. Whether you’re planning a site migration or not, yYou’ll also want to crawl your sitemap, as this is an essential tool for Google to discover the most important pages on your site.
Key Tools
- Screaming Frog and Sitebulb: Crawl your site to identify orphaned pages, broken links, and redirection issues.
Check Traffic
Examine your site’s traffic performance. Are you seeing a significant decrease in traffic? Are certain pages getting fewer sessions than normal? Is seasonality affecting your site? Checking traffic can give you a sense of when and where issues may be occurring across your site.
Check Indexing
If your site isn’t indexed, it can’t rank at all in Google search results. Google Search Console’s page indexing report offers a wealth of information about which pages aren’t indexable and why. Dig into these reports to see a sample of pages affected by a given issue and keep an eye out for any sudden decreases or increases in a particular report. This can give you a clue as to whether there’s a larger problem.
Key Tools
- Google Search Console: Use the coverage report to see which pages are indexed and flagged with errors.
Check Mobile Friendliness and Site Speed
Tools like Lighthouse reports, Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report, and PageSpeed Insights can diagnose particular site speed issues on the individual page level. They can also provide some guidance on methods for improving page speed, such as compressing images and removing unnecessary code.
Key Tools
- Google Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, or WebPageTest.org: Assess Core Web Vitals like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
Check Link Structure and Backlinks
Next, check your backlinks. You’ll want to keep an eye out for significant changes in the number of backlinks and any potentially spammy links that have harmed your rankings. You should also look for broken backlinks, which you can redirect so your users have somewhere to go.
You also need to analyze your internal link structure and identify any under-linked pages. Internal links are a huge part of how Google discovers your pages and relates them to one another. Examine your internal links and click depth (how many clicks it takes to get to a given page) on your site, and consider how you can improve your internal linking strategy.
Key Tools
- Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker: Evaluate the quality of your backlink profile.
- Broken Link Checker: Detect and resolve broken links across your site.
Audit On-Page SEO
Consider the quality and strength of your title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and on-page content. These give search engines and users alike a sense of what your page is about. Make sure your content is compelling, keyword-focused, and of appropriate length.
Key Tools
- Crawl Files: Examine your crawl exports to see if your titles, descriptions, and headers need improvements.
Check for Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can lead to cannibalization—that is, competition between similar pages on your site. This can confuse search engines as to which page you want to serve for a given user intent. Identify content that is too similar and look for ways to distinguish your pages from one another.
Key Tools
- Copyscape: Check for duplicate content issues that could negatively impact your SEO.
Check Rankings
Take a look at your keyword rankings. Look for significant changes in metrics like keyword position, search volume, SERP features, and user intent. Then, make sure your on-page content answers what users are actually searching for.
Again, consider cannibalization and whether different pages are competing for the same keyword. Fluctuating rankings between two or more pages for the same keyword is a strong sign that you need to diversify the content on those pages.
Key Tools
- Ahrefs and Semrush: Analyze content gaps and monitor keyword rankings.
Conduct a Competitive Analysis
Finally, take a look at what your competitors are doing well. Examine their rankings, their site structure, and their on-page content to see what is helpful to their users and what you might be able to emulate on your own site.
Key Tools
- Semrush’s Competitor Analysis Tool: Compare keyword rankings and backlink strategies.
- Google Analytics: Monitor organic traffic and track changes in behavior metrics like bounce rate and time on page.
Audit Your Site and Improve Your SEO Today
An SEO website audit works by checking your site for common problems, allowing you and your SEO professionals to create an actionable plan for the future.
When it comes to SEO, Logical Position doesn’t just identify problems—we partner with you to develop and implement solutions that drive measurable results. With every campaign package, Logical Position performs regular site audits to ensure your website stays optimized and competitive.
From addressing technical SEO challenges to optimizing content and improving link structures, Logical Position has the tools and expertise to elevate your site’s performance in an ever-changing digital landscape.
Contact Logical Position today to learn more about our national SEO services, local SEO packages, and more.
