A technical SEO audit covers everything from page speed to broken links, ensuring everything on the site works as it should. Fixing these issues correctly will help your site perform better and rank higher in search engines. 🔧
The audit is something every website needs to stay in top shape. Skipping regular checkups can lead to small issues turning into bigger problems.
But you need to understand the issues found in a technical SEO audit to fix them and improve your site. Keep reading to learn what’s wrong, why it matters, and how to do one in 8 easy steps.
Let’s get going! 🏃
What is a Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit is a check-up for your website’s health. It ensures your site is properly optimized for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, helping them crawl and index your pages correctly.
The audit looks at key technical aspects such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, indexation, and security. It also checks for issues that could affect your search engine rankings, like broken links, redirects, or missing metadata.
Key areas covered in a technical SEO audit include:
- Site structure
- URL format
- Redirects
- Sitemaps
- Robots.txt files
- Image optimization
- Site errors
- And more
How Long Does a Technical SEO Audit Take?
Small sites can usually be reviewed in a few hours, while larger, more complex sites may take several weeks. In some cases, a more detailed audit might require ongoing monitoring and testing to ensure everything remains optimized.
How Much Does a Full Technical SEO Audit Cost?
The cost of a technical SEO audit can range from $1,000 to $10,000 or more
A basic audit using automated tools might be free or cost a few hundred dollars. However, if you want a detailed audit from an expert, the price can surpass $10,000, depending on your site’s size and how in-depth the analysis needs to be.
Why Should You Do a Technical SEO Audit?
Without a solid technical foundation, even the best content and backlinks won’t have the impact they should. Fixing technical issues can dramatically improve search visibility,engagement, conversions, and overall site performance.
Here’s why a technical SEO audit is so important:
- Better Search Visibility and Rankings: Ensures search engines can crawl, index, and rank your content, helping it appear higher in search results.
- Enhanced SEO User Experience (UX) and Site Speed: Fixes issues like slow load times, broken links, and mobile-friendliness, improving the overall user experience and boosting rankings.
- Increased Organic Traffic: Optimizing technical aspects leads to higher rankings, making it easier for users to find your content.
- Reduced Risk of Penalties and Hidden Problems: Identifies and fixes issues like duplicate content, poor site structure, broken links, or slow page speed that could harm your site’s performance.
- Stay Ahead of Algorithm Changes and Competitive Edge: Keeps your site in line with SEO best practices to minimize the impact of algorithm updates and stay ahead of competitors who overlook technical SEO.
6 Essential Steps to a Technical SEO Audit
Many other guides mix off-page and on-page SEO with technical aspects.
We’re focusing solely on technical SEO: Ensuring your site is optimized for search engines at a foundational level.
All of our steps can be done with technical SEO tools, but we’ll also show you how to automate parts of the process, saving you time and making your efforts more efficient.
1. Check Crawlability and Indexability to Improve Search Visibility
If search engines can’t crawl and index your site properly, your pages won’t show up in search results, meaning your valuable content could go unnoticed.
To check for crawlability issues, start by reviewing the Page Indexing Report in Google Search Console (GSC) for any blocked or unindexed pages.
Use a tool integrated with GSC to get more detailed insights into your site’s crawlability and indexing.
When checking for crawlability issues, focus on:
- Indexation errors
- Robots.txt issues
- Sitemap problems
- Optimizing your crawl budget
Try a SEO audit tool that allows you to choose different crawlers, including Googlebot, Screaming Frog, and more; it will generate reports showing your website’s health and pinpoint the issues that need fixing.
OTTO SEO features dynamic indexing. With a single click on the “Deploy” button, OTTO will automatically index these pages and add them to the footer of your homepage, ensuring they are added to Google’s index.
While this process depends on Google’s indexing times, it ensures that updates are recognized quickly and keeps your site’s content visible in search results.
OTTO SEO also offers instant indexing, allowing OTTO to run a 24/7 indexing crawler that submits your URLs for immediate indexing.
This feature lets you index up to 200 pages per day per project, using sitemap-based indexing for large sites or bulk updates and URL-based indexing for specific pages like blog posts or product updates.
This means your content gets indexed instantly, improving visibility without delay.
2. Analyze Site Structure to Optimize User Experience
Site structure mainly involves analyzing your internal linking. This means making sure your important pages are well-connected through links within your site, helping search engines and users navigate your content easily.
When your structure is off, important pages can get buried, making them harder to find.
Use a site audit tool that provides a visual map of your internal links. This will help you check that important pages are properly linked and that there are no “orphaned” pages (those with no internal links pointing to them).
Poor internal linking also limits your link authority, which can hurt your site’s ability to rank well.
OTTO SEO, the first AI SEO agent that automates numerous SEO tasks, automatically identifies internal linking opportunities and creates the necessary connections for you.
3. Check Site Speed and Performance to Enhance Load Time
A slow website can frustrate visitors, cause higher bounce rates, and harm your rankings. Google considers page experience, including load time, a ranking factor, so if your site is slow, it could impact how well it performs in search results.
Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a tool that helps you measure your website’s load time and overall performance.
It analyzes your site and provides a detailed report on how fast your pages are loading, pointing out issues like large images, unoptimized code, or server delays that could be slowing your site down.
Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics used by Google to measure the user experience on your website.
These include loading performance (Largest Contentful Paint), interactivity (First Input Delay), and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift). Improving these metrics is essential for better user experience and higher search rankings.
4. Ensure Mobile-Friendliness to Boost Mobile Usability
Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly is more important than ever because most people browse the web on their phones.
Since June 5th, 2024, Google has been using its mobile Googlebot to crawl websites, meaning if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it won’t even be indexed.
Google’s mobile-first indexing ranks sites based on their mobile version, so a poor mobile experience can hurt your rankings.
To make sure your site performs well on mobile, check how it looks and functions on different devices.
You can also test your Core Web Vitals with PSI to spot any issues affecting mobile user experience and fix them for better rankings and usability.
5. Fix Broken Links and Redirect Issues to Prevent User Frustration
Broken links create a frustrating experience for users and waste valuable SEO opportunities if important pages are no longer accessible.
Redirect issues, like redirect chains or loops, can also slow down your site and confuse search engines, making it harder for your pages to rank.
To stay on top of this, use an audit tool to scan your site for broken links and redirect problems.
These tools will help you find 404 errors from missing pages and excessive redirects that could be harming your site’s performance.
OTTO SEO automatically identifies all broken links and fixes them for you, saving you time and ensuring your site runs smoothly without any hassle.
6. Implement Schema Markup to Enhance Rich Snippets
Structured data, also known as schema markup, is a type of code that helps search engines understand your content better. It provides additional details about your pages, allowing Google to display rich snippets like star ratings, FAQs, event details, and more.
Adding schema markup helps search engines categorize your content more accurately, which can boost your rankings.
You can use a schema markup tool to automatically generate structured data for your pages, ensuring the correct format and avoiding errors.
With OTTO SEO, you don’t have to worry about manually creating schema markup.
It automatically generates structured data tailored to your industry, ensuring your content is optimized for search engines and eligible for rich results.
7. Address Duplicate Content to Improve SEO Health
If multiple versions of the same page exist, search engines might index the wrong one, pushing your preferred page out of search results. Worse, if your site has too many duplicate pages, Google may see it as spammy, which can lead to poor indexation and lower visibility.
Use an audit tool to quickly find duplicate content issues. Run a site scan and check for duplicate meta tags and similar page content.
If you find duplicate content, you can rewrite the text to make it unique or set up 301 redirects to point search engines and users to the correct page.
8. Monitor the Results to Track SEO Effectiveness
After making technical updates, it’s important to keep an eye on your site’s health. In the first few months, check GSC weekly to track indexing and ranking improvements.
If things aren’t improving, there may be lingering issues that need attention.
Run a full technical SEO audit every six months to catch deeper issues before they affect performance. In between, a quick monthly check helps you stay on top of core web vitals, PageSpeed, 4xx errors, and sitemap issues.
An audit tool makes this process easier by providing historical data on past issues, showing what’s been fixed, and flagging new problems before they hurt your rankings.
Don’t Just Conduct Technical SEO Audit: Automate Your Fixes
There’s always something to do in technical SEO.
With Google constantly updating its algorithms and new pages being added to your site, maintaining a technically sound website requires ongoing effort.
Fixing crawl errors, optimizing site speed, and ensuring mobile-friendliness are just the beginning, you need to keep improving to stay ahead.
But that’s not all. You also have to handle on-page SEO issues, build links, create and optimize content, and manage off-page SEO tasks. How can you possibly do it all?
The answer: automation. 🤖
That’s where OTTO SEO comes in. Unlike traditional SEO tools that just highlight problems, OTTO actually deploys fixes directly to your website.
This AI-powered SEO agent automates technical SEO, on-page optimizations, off-page tasks, link building, content creation, and more… Saving you time and effort.
Still spending hours on manual SEO fixes? Automate them in under a minute! Enjoy your FREE Search Atlas trial today!
