There is no need to panic if your most recent SEO audit has unveiled the fact that you are not technically equipped. Although there isn’t anything as too much information in terms of technical SEO audits, we have mentioned some steps in this article that will be beneficial for you. However, it is essential to get the subsequent things implemented before going further in this article. You need to set up hosting for your site, use an extension such as .net or .com for registering a domain name, and set up security plug-ins while installing WordPress as well. The remaining part is quite simple. We will guide you through the entire process that is required in a technical SEO audit which will help you to perform the task yourself without hiring SEO Services India.
Essential guidelines for a technical SEO audit
1. Make certain that the XML site map has been formatted properly
In case your website does not have an XML site map, then make sure to set up one as soon as possible. Site maps are particularly beneficial in case you have a large site containing lots of pages since they will provide the crawlers with a specific path to follow while evaluating them. Site maps make it very simple for the bots to crawl your website so that they will be able to comprehend the structure. There happen to be SEO tools built-in for auto-generating your site map if your site had been created in WordPress. It will be a good idea to ensure that this particular element is formatted properly and intact so that your SEO efforts will not be wasted eventually.
You may use Screaming Frog for checking your XML site map and stick to these steps mentioned below:
- Choose List Mode at the page’s top.
- Enter the site’s URL that you like to crawl.
- Go to Upload, Download Site map.
- This will confirm the URLs found on the site map.
- Begin crawling by clicking Start.
Make it a point to submit your site map to Google so that it can be crawled once it has been set up.
2. Review site map
It will be possible for the site map to inform the search engine regarding your site’s structure. Your site map’s review is vital when it comes to the technical SEO audit since a clear and concise site map can be indexed faster than a complicated one. Here, we like to mention that “clear and concise” implies a site map that we can understand easily and which has less than 50,000 URLs (a site map with over 50,000 URLs will not be crawled by Google). The site map has to be indexed on Google Search Console after you’re complacent with its review.
3. Verify core web vitals
Core web vitals are responsible for figuring out your site’s ranking to a great extent. This is because core web vitals can evaluate the interactivity, speed, plus stability of a site for deciding its competence when it comes to providing user experience.
In general, you will come across 3 core web vitals – Biggest Contentful Paint measuring the website’s loading time, Cumulative Layout Shift measuring the site’s visual stability, and First Input Delay measuring the site’s interactivity.
You need to consider many things for improving core web vitals, and here we have mentioned some highlights in the following paragraphs.
- Make it a point to activate “lazy loading” for optimizing images appearing on the site and minimizing their load times.
- Minimizing page size by compressing images for minimizing load times.
- Reserve space for advertisements before designing the layout for minimizing layout shift once the page loads.
- Make use of a caching plug-in such as WP Rocket for minimizing the time taken for opening a new link.
4. Verify internal links
It will be imperative for the pages on the website to flow in a logical way implying that there must not be any internal link that is not related. Or else, it can impact the search engine ranking adversely.
Here, we have mentioned several things to consider while performing a technical SEO audit on internal linking without the help of the best SEO Services India.
- Click depth
It is essential to keep click depth as low as feasible. It will indicate the number of clicks that will separate a particular page from the home page. Make sure that it is less than 3 to get the best results.
- Broken links
Broken links can confuse your visitors which will be detrimental to your site. Your crawl budget can be wasted by broken links in the long run. Visit the All Resources dashboard in Website Auditor and click on Internal Resources following that. The list has to be sorted by HTTP Status Code for finding broken links.
5. Website’s Audit Browseable Version
It is important to make certain that only one version of your site can be accessed. Does your website have multiple versions? If it is so, the search engine will receive conflicting signals from you. It will be difficult for the crawlers to comprehend the correct version. It will not be possible for the search engine will display the current version of your site if it becomes confused in the long run because of different versions.
6. Verify whether the site happens to be mobile-friendly
It is a fact that most searchers can access the Internet with the help of their smartphones right now thanks to the popularity of mobile searches at present. The mobile-friendliness of a site can affect user experience to a great extent, and therefore, Google and other search engines consider this particular factor as well. You can make use of Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test for verifying whether your site happens to be mobile-friendly or not.
Conclusion
You need to re-crawl the website after completing the steps mentioned above. This will help you to make certain that all the changes made by you without the help of an SEO services company in India are properly working as intended. A re-crawl is also going to index your site’s updated version after taking into effect the modifications made by you during the audit. This will help your website to appear higher in the SERPs (search engine results pages).