Most companies understand the importance of onsite and offsite search engine optimisation and the role these disciplines play in making their websites more visible. However, what may be less obvious to some is the crucial role that a technical SEO audit plays in the whole process. It may not be the most glamorous aspect of search engine optimisation but, it’s a key first step that needs to be included in your overall SEO strategy. If you don’t conduct a technical site audit before you start to optimise onsite and offsite elements, you may find that your best efforts go to waste.
A Website SEO Audit Will Make Your Website Easier to Crawl
Every search engine uses a web crawler to navigate websites and index the pages and content they contain. These crawlers have an upper time limit set: the amount of time they will devote to any one website is limited. If they encounter too many issues and errors on your site, they will simply stop crawling, which could result in a significant drop in your SERP ranking for that particular search engine. Worse still, it could mean that many of your pages are not indexed and will not appear in search results at all. Even the biggest search engines specify an upper time limit for their web crawlers so it is imperative to fix all technical issues on your site.
What Errors Can a Technical SEO Audit Uncover?
A comprehensive technical SEO audit of your website will identify all potential errors that could impact your SERP rankings. These may include:
Broken internal links
URLs that are too long
Descriptions and titles that are either too long or too short
Duplicate titles and content
Missing H1s
Slow page load times
Server (hosting) errors
Erroneous noindex meta tags
A full Google SEO audit will also look at sitemaps, schema, site navigation and other key factors. You should have a mobile SEO audit performed at the same time, to ensure that there are no issues that specifically affect the behaviour of your website on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
The Primary Aim of a Technical Site Audit
The primary aim of a technical site audit is to eliminate all onsite errors and to ensure that you have a well-structured, fully compliant, easy-to-navigate and easy-to-crawl website. In this way, you can maximise the benefit of any future search engine optimisation that you may perform on the content of your site.
If you would like to arrange a full Google SEO audit of your website, contact us now to speak to one of our experts.
