Technical SEO audit is key to success. To stay ahead, you must maximize efficiency in all your SEO efforts. Without this, your website or business may fall behind.
SEO is a top priority for marketers. Approximately 61% of marketers say this is their main focus. If they are all working in this direction, so should you. If you ignore it, you ignore sales.
Do you know where to start these studies? The answer to the question is quite simple. You should start by reviewing the site’s current SEO status. The easiest way to do this is to perform an SEO audit. You should see your site’s rankings and try to understand what you can do to improve its other qualities.
For beginners, this may sound a bit daunting. But with the steps here, you can learn what needs to be done down to the last detail. In just one hour, with the help of a few tools, you can do it easily. The time may be quite short, but the impact will be considerable.
Before you start, you first need to learn the basics of SEO auditing.
Table of Contents
What is an SEO Audit?
You want the content on your site to be relevant to the people viewing your site.
Old SEO tactics are far from achieving this. These include keyword stuffing, creating different pages for different versions of a keyword, and creating microsites to generate traffic. You should know that the past is gone and the factors required for ranking are different these days. You should know that sites that are mobile-friendly and respond to the needs of the user come to the fore.
Search engines assign a value to your site through algorithms that crawl your site and compare it to other sites based on different ranking factors. Within this value, usability and relevance are usually the most prominent qualities. Every page accessible on your site is crawled to determine whether your site has useful and appropriate content. As your site is crawled, search engines also check that it is secure, fast, and easy to use. Each page then receives a ranking value. This ranking value determines the position of that site on the search engine results page. When a person searches with the appropriate keywords, they will find these results. Although it is a very long story with its details, SEO is all about this.
However, SEO is constantly changing.
Each search engine has its algorithms and updates that improve them and make them better. Algorithms are not the only thing to worry about.
Your competitors will be able to get a much better ranking than you. Old content should be updated and made suitable for today’s conditions. As the rules continue to change, you should constantly try to adapt to new SEO tactics and find ways to stay away from red flags. The worst part of the job is that your site is completely broken and loses the traffic it can get. For this reason, it is necessary to perform SEO audits regularly. If you want to have a site that will attract the attention of search engines, it will be much more accurate to see your deficiencies with these audits.
When conducting an audit, you’ll also be able to see the health of your site. Since search algorithms and technology can change quickly, you may want to consider conducting mini-audits monthly. You should know that these mini-audits will not be as useful as full SEO audits. You should try to perform a full audit every 6 months.
For the best results, you should continue on your way by performing a full audit every quarter during the year and a mini audit monthly. Before moving on to the full audit steps, you need to know what the most important elements of an SEO audit are.
What are the Basic Elements of an SEO Audit?
Here are the three most important factors to consider when conducting an SEO audit:
- Background factors such as server and indexing
- Foreground factors such as content, keywords, and metadata
- Link quality and other references
Sometimes you may have trouble reaching every point.
In such cases, you should try to apply Pareto’s 80/20 rule, based on the impressions from the audit.
The most important part of your site’s SEO efforts is your incoming traffic values and what they see.
If your site is not mobile-friendly, you are likely to have serious problems in this regard.
Since the mobile-first index approach is considered a priority by search engines, you should check the appearance of your site’s results on the search engine results page.
Since 60% of searches on Google are conducted on mobile, Google has taken this approach to a whole new level by making its algorithm mobile-first.
After performing the one-hour mini audit here, you will be able to clearly learn where you are in the search engine.
You can use the following eight steps to conduct an SEO audit in less than an hour.
1. Start the Audit by Scanning (5 Minutes)
The most important part of an SEO audit is crawling.
Before you do anything, you should start crawling your site. You can use the tools below for this:
These are the most pioneering vehicles in the industry. Each of them is an ideal choice for getting started.
You should note that the free version of Screaming Frog has some limitations.
After scanning 500 URLs, you should know that the limit will be reached.
These crawlers can help you detect a wide range of errors such as broken links, bad keywords, bad images, page title problems, duplicate content, unlinked pages, and redundant redirects.
How to Perform Scan Settings?
You should download Screaming Frog and run the application.
To review the scanning criteria, click on Configuration and Spider in the toolbar to go to the next step. If you are using the paid version of the tool, you can change the scan criteria.
Press OK and then in the URL line you should type the address of your site, such as https://www.sitename.com/.
You must then start the scan by pressing the “Start” button.
Crawling is useful for detecting duplicate content, finding pages with broken pagination, and detecting redundant redirects.
If you have the Google Search Console property, you can also get information about the “crawl budget” through this property. The crawl budget will show you the pages that Google crawls and how often Google crawls your site. The “average” figure in the crawl budget section means the amount of times Google checks your site during the day.
Does it have a different meaning? Another meaning of this number is that it shows the crawl status of your site by Googlebot. Through these crawls, you can find duplicate pages, pages that shouldn’t show up in search, redirects that need fixing, and broken links.
Scanning Your Site Manually
You can get average information about your site’s ranking by performing a few Google searches.
How many of your pages appear in the relevant search results?
Does your site appear as the first result when you search by name?
In general, where does your site appear in the search results?
If you want to find out which pages are crawled, you can search Google with your own URL as “site:ayhankaraman.com” and examine the results.
If you have pages that are not included in the results here, there is no need to automatically assume that they are not crawled. You just need to understand what is going on in the background.
Your site does not always need to be at the top for every search you do. Ideally, it should usually be on the first page of the results.
Learning the Average SEO Score
Using SEO SiteCheckup, you can categorize your site’s data and find out its average SEO score.
Thanks to this data you will learn, you can get the following information:
- You can identify the most frequently used keywords.
- Check if your site has a sitemap and robots.txt file.
- You can get information about broken links on your page.
- You can examine coding errors.
If your site has various social media profiles, SEO SiteCheckup will inform you about this.
If caching and compression processes have been applied to your site, these factors are taken into account when calculating your site’s SEO score.
Data on various security issues such as malware is analyzed and shown in the report.
If you don’t have a mobile device at hand, this site will help you see the mobile version of your site. With this tool, you can get a clear picture of where you need to focus.
2. Make Sure Only One Version of Your Site Is Viewable (5 Minutes)
Your site should be able to work with several versions of the same URL.
If there is more than one version of the same version of your site, search engines will send a mixed message when performing a crawl. In other words, crawlers will not be able to determine which is the correct version.
If search engines do not know how to show your site to potential traffic points, then your site’s SEO ranking will be negatively affected. This includes competing mobile and desktop versions. There is also the situation where the “https” and “http” versions are perceived as two different sites. This means that your SEO ranking will suffer.
You shouldn’t worry about the confusion between HTTP and HTTPS, as this is a very common situation.
Some sites have experienced various drops in AdSense revenue after switching to HTTPS. However, without SSL protection, it is no longer possible to move forward in terms of SEO in Google.
Google pays special attention to having SSL protection on your site. Google Chrome now characterizes sites without SSL as “not secure”.
In line with these recent changes, Google expects to use “https” versions of the sites. If you can meet this expectation, you can be more advantageous in SEO.
3. Perform On-Site SEO Checks (10 Minutes)
When evaluating your site and the results from crawls, you need to make sure that your site is properly optimized.
To start, you should first look for duplicate pages, titles, and title tags.
If you’ve shared a lot of content on similar themes, you may find a lot of unrelated content in the crawl. This is normal. You should know that you should look for duplicates of the same content. For this, you can use the Copyscape tool to identify SEO problems caused by duplicate content.
After that, you should review a few criteria that Google takes into account when determining rankings.
Page Titles and Title Tags
A title tag is an HTML code that gives search engines information about the title of the page. This information appears directly on the search engine results page. It is the information in this tag that is written in blue on the search engine results page.
You should make sure that this tag is related to the content on the page. Your content must be able to answer the question of your target audience.
The ideal length of the title tag is 50-55 characters.
However, you may want to consider checking the title tag by pixel width if you wish.
Meta Descriptions
Even though meta descriptions don’t directly affect your ranking, they are still extremely important.
You need to ensure that meta descriptions attract customers. Meta descriptions need to be comprehensive, engaging, and interesting to users.
Google continues to make various regulations regarding meta descriptions. You should try to find the ideal length for meta descriptions by adapting to these regulations.
Clean Hierarchy
You should ensure that the content on your site is organized. For this, you need to choose a clean hierarchy.
A clean and clear hierarchy will make it much easier for Google to analyze your site.
Keyword Placement
Every article on your site must have a focus word. You should mention this focus word within the first 100 words. You can consider using the relevant focus word several times without overdoing it. In this way, Google can more clearly understand what the focus is on the page. However, you should not be limited to this.
There are many more important points where you should place the keyword. Each of these are factors that affect your ranking. If you do keyword stuffing, you may be penalized, but you should know that you should act strategically and place the keyword at important points on the page.
In general, it is extremely important to perform on-site SEO checks. You should remember that this step in successful SEO strategies is only a part of the work.
4. Manage Internal and External Links (10 Minutes)
Every site with a logical hierarchy is likely to be advantageous in terms of SEO ranking. For this reason, the first point you need to check is internal and external links.
Usually, when the pages of the sites are deleted or moved, a broken link problem may occur on your site. You don’t need to worry about this because you don’t need to check them all individually. There are two downloadable tools, Integrity and Xenu Sleuth, that can detect broken links on your site. Both tools are very easy and simple to use. After downloading any of the tools, simply type the address of your site in the URL section and start the scan. Once the crawling process starts, the tools will check all the links on your site and send them to you as a result. The tools will indicate the amount of links they have checked and how many are in bad condition. Depending on the size of your site and the amount of links it has, it may take a while to get the results. However, you can view the results by link, page, status, or flat view and make the necessary investigations. You should change the links that you determine to be broken by going to your site. You should know that if there is a broken link on your site, your SEO value will be negatively affected.
Google evaluates external and internal links with different scoring. However, both of these will help increase your SEO value.
5. Check Your Site Speed (10 Minutes)
People are extremely impatient. Google knows this.
Your customers don’t want to wait. The later your pages load, the more likely your customers are to run away. For this reason, Google uses site speed as a ranking factor. This ranking factor will show its effect more towards the end of 2018.
How can you prepare for this situation?
You should check the site speed. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will help you with this.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool
Google’s tool can give you information about several things:
- It can give you information about the speed of your site.
- It can show you how your site performs compared to other sites.
- It can make recommendations to improve site speed.
First, you should visit the PageSpeed Insights page and create the report.
After adding your URL and pressing the analyze button, Google will provide you with some information about speed and optimization. This information will be separate for mobile and desktop. You can quickly check the differences in values between mobile and desktop because you can quickly switch between the two options.
What should you do with the information here?
If your site speed is not in good shape, you may want to consider intervening. Google will provide you with various optimization recommendations. You can speed up your site by implementing these recommendations. You can optimize images, minimize JavaScript files, and do various interventions in browser caching. Google will show you what you need.
6. Use Analytics Data and Compare Site Metrics (10 Minutes)
The point you need to look at here is the instant data provided to you by analysis services such as Google Analytics. First of all, you should review whether the analysis code has been added correctly. If your analytics code is not inserted correctly, then you should fix it.
If you are using Google Analytics, you should add the tracking code
If your analytics service is working correctly, you should try to compare the data you get here with the search for “site:awisemedia.com” that you have already performed. The number of pages in the analytics data must match the number of pages in the search for “site:ayhankaraman.com”. If there is no match, then you can immediately recognize that certain pages are not being crawled correctly.
Checking Bounce Rate
Google Analytics is especially good at determining the bounce rate of pages. You should make sure that the bounce rate is quite low. Because this low value will positively affect your ranking.
A high bounce rate will mean that people cannot find what they are looking for on your site. In this case, you should go back and check the content on your site and make it appealing to your target audience.
You can see your bounce rate by logging into your Google Analytics account and going to Audience > Overview.
Comparing Metrics Using MozBar
Additionally, you can take a look at the values of pages using MozBar, a tool developed by Moz. MozBar is a tool that can provide you with various insights into SEO data, and it does so directly from the search engine results page. This toolbar is added to your browser and this is how it functions.
For example, MozBar will be able to show you the type of interlinking on the site through coloring. This alone is very useful. If you want to compare the link values of pages against each other, this feature will be very useful. More search tools that you may need are also included in this toolbar. With this toolbar, you can perform various custom searches by location or city.
Page Authority value is supported by MozBar. This value is between 1 and 100 and will show how the page will rank on the search engine results page. When conducting an SEO audit, having this kind of tool is extremely valuable for understanding your site’s relationship with the search engine.
The less guesswork you have to do, the better quality your SEO audit will be.
You should also remember that with MozBar, it is also possible to get information about the site’s social media activities.
7. Check Off-Site SEO Status and Perform Link Audit (10 Minutes)
If you want to succeed in SEO, you need links.
Thanks to links, Google and other search engines understand that your page is relevant to the searcher’s topic and, moreover, that it is useful.
When it comes to off-site SEO, links are not the only thing crawlers look at.
Your site is also reviewed for mentions of your brand. For this reason, you need to pay attention to both on-site and on-site elements.
Performing Link Audit
Using a tool like Ahrefs, you can easily perform a link audit and see what kind of links are on your site.
A link audit is useful because:
You can evaluate your current link profile and see how it is affecting your site.
You can find out where you need to focus to get more valuable links.
You can get information about your competitor’s link quantity and try to get ahead of them.
However, you should not be limited to this after doing a link audit.
You may be asleep while your competitors are reviewing the capabilities of their SEO efforts. In this case, they will be able to achieve rankings for important search terms.
This is where tools like SEMrush come into play.
SEMrush will be able to show you the sites that rank for a particular keyword. This tool can also show you the links obtained by the relevant sites.
In general, you can examine the links of your competitors and compare them with the links you have. There are many different tools you can use to do this and you should know that you don’t have to stick to SEMrush. For example, you can use Moz Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs Domain Comprasion. You should know that Ahrefs’ tool is not free. While checking links, you should also try to check keywords. You should review for which keywords your competitors are ranking.
Since an SEO audit can provide you with detailed information about your competitors, you should examine the data you come across to the finest detail to gain an advantage on the search engine results page.
Being Active on Social Media
Social media is an extremely important resource for getting continuous links and interaction. You can make an extra contribution to your SEO efforts by using this situation advantageously.
You can start by discovering which social media platform is suitable for your target audience.
To put it simply, the contribution of social media to your SEO efforts is as follows:
It increases the amount of links you get. People who have discovered your content on social media are much more likely to link to it.
It is an advantage to raise brand awareness. In this way, you can increase the amount of searches made with your brand name.
Social media is extremely important for increasing traffic and mentions. It is one of the most ideal opportunities to get traffic without depending only on search engines. You should take advantage of social media and make it part of your link-building campaign.
You can check how your site will appear on Facebook using Facebook Sharing Debugger. This tool will also help you check your Open Graph tags.
Search Engine Optimizers can perform SEO audits using different tools. But no matter what, they all have one thing in common: you need to perform an audit to be successful and maximize SEO performance.
Search engine algorithms, best practices, market trends, and competitors are always on the move.
Is Your Site Up to Date Enough?
While an hour-long SEO checklist is no substitute for important SEO audits, it’s a very good step toward performing them.
You should start the audit with a crawl using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool.
You should eliminate duplicate content using Copyscape. You should make sure that there are no duplicate versions of your site. You should see for yourself which results come up by searching and performing on-site SEO checks
You should check your site’s analytics data with the help of Google Analytics and try to examine important metrics by downloading MozBar. You should review off-site SEO factors, look at the competitive situation, and interact on social media platforms.
After doing all this, you should review your SEO strategy and try to create a brand strategy with the right steps.
If you want to make your site and its social media presence better and more valuable, you should produce well-structured content that will be valuable to its target audience. If you achieve continuity in these efforts, your SEO ranking will be at a much better point than before.
Which technical SEO elements do you check regularly? Do you have an answer to this?
