Technical SEO - Audit & Optimization
The Real Science of Search Engine Optimization
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing, or improving, the structure of your website to ensure it meets the minimum search engine requirements for speed, navigation, crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture in order to ensure technical issues or errors are not negatively impacting your visibility (rankings) in the organic search results (SERPS). These improvements can also impact your Quality Score if you’re running Google Ads.
Technical SEO focuses on the backbone and structure of your website; from your web server (hosting) to the coding and layout (structure) of the public-facing pages, and is my favourite area of SEO and where I focus on the most.
Technical SEO is fact-based and involves testing to identify problems and issues, and then fixing them to achieve results. This area of SEO is entirely within your control and forms the critical foundation of a well-optimized website.Technical SEO is not generally focused on your content, keywords or readability. Those are On-Page SEO factors, which along with Technical and Off-Page, form the 3 key areas of search engine optimization.
Off-Page Optimization is focused on external link-building, which can include social media, reputation and trust. Those fundamentals are generally the same for Bing and Yahoo and if you rank well in Google you should also do well in the others.
With the constantly changing, ever-increasing complexity and competition of ad platforms, you need an experienced professional to get the most out of your SEO budget through honest, transparent and measurable strategies and best practices.
The #1 Technical SEO Factor is SPEED
At a high-level the key technical factors to consider are:
- Loading speed (Server, coding, image size, etc.)
- Crawlability of your website (Navigation, sitemaps, etc.)
- Mobile-friendly design (Responsive, AMP pages)
- NEW in 2021 - Google's Core Web Metrics, which are a combination of speed and visitor experience metrics
- NEW in 2022 - Google's Page Experience Update which as the name implies, focuses on how a user will perceive the experience of a specific web page. It considers factors such as whether the page loads quickly, if it’s mobile-friendly, runs on HTTPS, if there are intrusive ads present, and if content moves around as the page loads.
What Does a Technical SEO Audit Include?
- Analysis of current indexing on Bing & Google
- Identify any possible DNS Issues
- Server Status Codes
- Testing Site Loading Speed
- Site-wide URL Structure
- Robots.txt & XML Sitemap files in place
- Site is registered with Google Search Console
- Site is registered with Bing Webmaster Tools
- Proper Canonical Tagging exists
- Mobile SEO analysis
- Site Navigation and UX evaluation
- Broken internal links and missing content (404’s, 301/302’s)
- Current coding and infrastructure (Hosting, platform, CMS)
Along with identifying issues that may impact your SEO, a website audit may also look at your website’s security and vulnerability to hacking or exploits – especially if you are an e-commerce site that processes transactions or collects customer information through online forms.
To arrange for a Technical SEO Audit for your website, click the orange button below and I’ll be in touch within 1 business day!