Most people believe that technical SEO is very challenging. However, once you’ve mastered the basics, it becomes easy. You might even be using these tactics without being aware of them. Ultimately, everyone wants their website to rank higher, get better traffic, and more conversions. Technical SEO is about fixing the errors on your website to make it get better while ranking.

Here Are 10 Steps To Do A Complete SEO Technical Audit:

1. Use a craw report to identify crawl errors:

The first step to do a complete technical SEO audit is to run a crawl report for your website. A site audit or crawl report provides an insight into significant errors on your website. You will see technical issues that need your immediate attention, such as the low speed of a page, missing H2/H1 tags, and duplicate content. Take help from different tools to automate site audits. Go through all the warnings listed by the crawl and find solutions to those errors.

2. Check the HTTPS status codes:

It’s a must to switch to HTTPS because users and search engines won’t be able to access your website if you continue to keep an HTTP URL. Instead of getting access to your content, they will get 5xx and 4xx HTTP status codes.

A study on ranking factors suggested that HTTPS is a crucial ranking factor. It will impact your website’s rankings strongly. Also, solve any other status code errors. A common one is the 404 error. You can find this out using the site crawl report. Using the Google search console, you can get a list containing all the potential errors. Finally, ensure that the SSL certificate is correct.

3. Check the XML sitemap status:

The XML sitemap is for search engine crawlers such as Google. This map assists the crawlers in finding the pages of your website. It uses those to rank your website. Make sure that the XML sitemap of your site meets some primary guidelines. According to them, it is essential to format your sitemap in an XML document. Second, ensure that it follows the XML sitemap protocol. Third, in the sitemap, all of your pages must remain updated. Lastly, you need to submit the sitemap to the Google Search Console. You can do that using the Google Search Console sitemap tool.

4. Check the loading time of the website:

To do a complete technical SEO audit, you need to check your website’s loading time. More than 23% of websites have a slow page loading time. The speed of your website directly affects user experience. Also, it is likely to impact other key factors that search engines use for site ranking. That includes bounce rate.

To find the loading time of your website, use the page speed insights tools by Google. All you need to do is enter the URL of your website and leave the rest to Google. Ideally, the load time for your web pages must be within 3 seconds so that you can get better rankings.

5. Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly:

To improve your website’s search engine rankings, it must be mobile-friendly. You can check this aspect by using the mobile-friendly test by Google. All you need to do is enter your website and insights into the mobile state. To make your website mobile-friendly, you need to increase your font size. Next, embed YouTube videos and compress images. Lastly, use (AMP) accelerated mobile pages.

6. Audit for keyword cannibalization:

Did you know that keyword cannibalization can confuse search engines? For instance, if you’ve got two pages to compete for keywords, Google will choose the best one. As a result, each page will have a lower diminished authority, CTR, and lower conversion rates. For this, you can use the performance report on the Google Search console. It will look for pages in competition for similar keywords. Hence, you can consolidate the pages having keywords that are alike. That way, you can avoid keyword cannibalization.

7. Check the robots.txt file of your website:

If you realize that all your pages are not indexed, it would be a good idea to check your robots.txt file. Sometimes people unintentionally block certain pages from search engine crawling. Thus it’s a must to audit your robots.txt file. While examining it, look for “disallow.” That stops the search engines from crawling a page on your website. Ensure that none of your essential pages get accidentally disallowed.

8. Check for any duplicate metadata:

The issue of duplicate metadata is common for many e-commerce sites and other websites having thousands of pages. Studies suggest that almost 54% of websites contain similar metadata (also referred to as Meta descriptions). Also, approximately 63% of websites don’t have a Meta description. This issue arises when similar pages or products copy content and paste it into the Meta descriptions field. To do a complete technical SEO audit, you need to be alert about any Meta description issues. It might take some time to create unique metadata, but it’s worth it.

9. Check for duplicate content site-wide:

When it comes to technical SEO, the issue of duplicate content isn’t only present on meta-descriptions. There can be an issue of similar content in your website overall. Almost 66% of sites have a problem with duplicate content. To find such content issues, you can use Copyscape. It’s an excellent tool for identifying duplication. Once you have a list of the content with this problem, you have to go through the pages and alter the text accordingly.

10. Check for any broken links:

All broken links are critical for your SEO campaign. Having such links can waste your crawl budget, generate lower rankings and lead to a bad user experience. That makes fixing and identifying broken links essentials. The simplest way to find broken links is to check the crawl report of your website. That provides a detailed view of every URL with a broken link.