Technical audits are really important for SEO. And this is so for two reasons: because they allow for better user experience and because they tackle some of the core issues that google looks at when it wants to decide whether a website is relevant for a particular keyword or not.
What we will do here is address succintly what should be part of a technical SEO audit. We will therefore discuss four core issues: website performance, website architecture and functionality, on-page optimisation/content issues, and finally, indexation.
Website Performance
Website performance is really important part of technical SEO. According to a 2015 Moz survey it is, in fact, one key criteria
Web Hosting.
Caching.
Images.
Minify CSS, Javascript and HTML.
Website Architecture and Functionality
Website Structure and SILOs
A good website structure and SILOs play a crucial role in SEO and they are pivotal to a good website. These factors used to be more relevant before penguin’s updates but they are still relevant today.
Good Website Structure. When we think about how a website should be organised there needs to be a clear reference to what the company does – and these pages need to be individualised.
Fundamental to this exercise is the individualisation of particular product or service pages. Without this individualisation google will never know what we are actually selling or promoting in detail.
Also relevant – although not as relevant as the above individualisation – are pages such as about us, Contact, Terms of Services and other more technical pages. What google looks for is for the existence of credible businesses.
Think Link-Building. But a good website structure is not enough. We need to start thinking also how different pages link to one another. And why? Because google functions like an electrical current – it transfer link juice across the internet.
Imagine we have a highly powerful website linking back to our website. What would happen is that this link is transferred to one particular landing page. But like was said before google functions like an electric current and if we have a webpage linking to another webpage on our website the power of that first link will be transferred throughout the rest of the website.
It is therefore important to think about the internal links and how we can connect our website so these internal links keep transferring link power from our link-building efforts.
Canonicals
Canonical tag is a code that tells google which page is the authority. It shows up in the code as an HTML snippet. There are three common scenarios where canonicals can be used.
The Powerful Website/Blog. When you have a really powerful website or blog it can happen that this content is taken away from other platforms. RSS feeds crawl the internet in search of these texts and they basically copy and pastes content randomly.
An option is to go on google search console and immediately after publishing the content you can ‘fetch as google’ and submit your article straight away. By doing this google will understand that you were the first to write the article and will protect you.
Duplicate URLs/Content. One of the most useful uses of canonical tags is when you see cases of duplicate urls/content on your website. For example, imagine that there are different urls more or less with the same content. If this happens you can tell google which one has the authority.
Duplicate Content. Another example is when you want to use someone else’s content on your page. Canonicals can be used here to tell google that this particular content was taken from an outside source – and so it will give the authority away from your website to that other source.
301 Redirects
301 redirects are a useful tool that can be used in a number of ways in order to improve the functionality of our website. Here we are going to dissect two important ways in which these 301 redirects should be done – and the right way to do them.
Duplicate URLs/Content. Whenever we see that there are multiple URLs for the same webpage we need to
And the reason is simple: imagine that our users are going to two landing pages – what is happening here is that traffic is being diverted from one landing page to another and therefore rather than one landing page having the all the power, this is being duplicated with another.
Google looks at how many users go to our landing pages in order to improve our domain authority – and page authority. If an important landing page has two versions – and therefore if traffic is being directed to these two versions – then we are destroying some of the power of that page – and reducing its potential authority.
404 Errors. 404 errors are another example of where to use 301 redirects. Google does not like to see pages that lead to nowhere. And this is essentially because
301 Redirects Done Right.
Site-links.
Indexation
Xml sitemaps
Robots.txt
Htaccess.
