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If you’ve spent time crafting original, useful content and you don’t understand why it isn’t bringing users to your site from search engines, then it may be that you need someone to look at the indexability, performance and crawlability of your site by doing a technical SEO audit.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve paid the best copywriters to use Google’s E-E-A-T framework and create 1000+ word articles on the right subject matter, if search engines face the following issues:
- The site is slow because of your hosting
- You score low on Core Web Vitals, Google’s latest way of measuring user experience
- Search engines can’t find your content because it’s not adequately linked to or surfaced
- You have a multi-lingual site with issues showing the right language
- Your images are poorly optimised
There are many more reasons besides, and a good ‘tech’ SEO audit will reveal these and provide you with recommendations on how to improve things.
Contents of a technical SEO audit
Search Engine Optimisation is quite a broad set of activities and skills. Here we’ll focus mainly on the technical aspects (as opposed to content, analysis, strategy, or off-site SEO).
Typically an audit will focus on 3 main areas, although the size, audience and nature of the site may mean additional work is required.
Performance of the site
- Server/hosting performance
- Core Web Vitals
- Asset optimisation (e.g. use of images or videos)
- Improvements to how Javascript/CSS is used/delivered
Indexability
- Whether search engines are allowed to access all required pages
- Any issues such as broken links or extensive redirects
- Extensive use of Javascript
- Duplicate or near-duplicate content
- Syndicated content
Crawlability
- Whether pages are easily found
- Effectiveness/validity of XML sitemaps
- Exhausting “crawl budget”
There are other areas that larger businesses might seek to improve through a tech SEO audit such as internationalisation, multiple sites and so on, but in general the 3 headings above cover everything that you can expect to be addressed by even the most basic audit.
Technical SEO audit reports
Usually the outputs of a one-off technical SEO audit would be delivered as part of a written report. This document is something that can be shared with your developers, or, if you access to your site’s code, an experienced technical SEO person should be able to work to improve things themself if they have experience of working with web technologies such as HTML, CSS, Javascript (and any number of other languages such as PHP depending on how your site is built).
How often should you conduct a tech SEO audit?
Typically quarterly should be sufficient for a normal site focused on lead generation, however for larger sites with dynamic content, it’s often a good idea to have an ongoing monthly relationship in place, since changes to content will be more frequent, there may be multiple users publishing content, and even developers working actively on the site whose main objective is to add new features rather than worry about search engines.
Tech SEO software
It’s true that there are plenty of brilliant bits of software out there that will help with crawling your site and identifying issues — my favourite is Screaming Frog because of the wealth of options it offers, although the outputs can be a little overwhelming if you aren’t familiar with technical SEO already.
Web-based alternatives such as Ahrefs, Semrush, Lumar etc. are great if you can afford to pay the monthly fees and have the time to monitor the results and action them.
Here’s where I come in…
I’ve got over a decade of experience doing technical SEO at the highest level. I fix websites, write code, and reading all about search engine best practices for fun, seriously.
In addition to doing the tech side of things, I can also conduct an audit of existing content, provide you with a future-facing content strategy, sort out your analytics, tagging and more.
So get in touch if you are looking for an SEO audit — no-strings, I’ll even take a quick look at the site in advance and let you know if I think the problem lies elsewhere.