When looking to optimize content for SEO, people often think about on-page SEO. This includes things like keywords, title tags, and meta descriptions — all critical components to help get your content seen by search engines. However, a site that's only SEO-optimized on-page isn't firing as efficiently as it could.
Technical SEO is the unsung hero of search optimization, the under-the-hood website maintenance that ensures you're riding high on the search engine ranking pages (SERPs).
While both on-page and technical SEO are important, the latter tends to be ignored. Discover what a technical SEO audit checklist should consider — including aspects such as crawlability, page speed, and mobile usability — and how optimizing your site for technical SEO will boost its performance and visibility.
What Is a Technical SEO Audit?
The three basic elements of search are crawlability, indexing, and ranking. Ranking, or where a page is listed on a SERP, tends to be what people care most about, but crawlability and indexing speak to how search engines find and categorize sites in order to rank them.
While a thorough review of your on-page SEO strategy should help improve your ranking, if you're ignoring issues that can affect site crawlability and indexing, your site could be performing sub-optimally. It's like changing the oil in your engine without checking the filters.
A technical SEO audit is a methodical review of all the elements of your site that affect how search engines find, index, and rank your site that aren't addressed by on-page SEO issues.
1. Check Crawlability and Indexation First
A technical site audit checklist should start with crawlability and indexation.
Search engines send out "crawlers" to explore the web. Crawlability is a measure of how easy it is for crawlers to find, access, and navigate your content. Indexability is a measure of how easy it is for the search engine to index your site in its massive database of webpages.
Crawling and indexing are the foundational elements of search. In response to a search query, search engines rank by the most relevant results in its index. Without successful crawling and indexing, there can be no ranking.
Use Google Search Console to Spot Coverage Issues
Google is the dominant search engine and Google Search Console is a valuable tool for spotting issues affecting crawlability and indexation. Feed sitemaps and URLs into Console and you'll get alerts on issues that need attention to optimize your Google Search results.
Review Robots.txt and Sitemaps for Clarity
Robots.txt files essentially limit search engine crawlers. They define limits, blocking access to certain sites or pages. Meanwhile, sitemaps act as a sort of guide to a website's network of pages for crawlers. Together, they define what crawlers are allowed to see and how easy it is for crawlers to navigate your site.
As part of your technical audit checklist, you can find and fix issues with these two elements of your site using tools like Google Search Console.
2. Evaluate Site Architecture and Internal Linking
A clean site architecture is easier for search engine bots to crawl and index, and it's also easier for users to navigate. Your technical SEO audit checklist should include a review of your website's architecture, looking particularly at organization and ease of navigation.
While inspecting your site architecture, you should also check each internal link and make sure that every page has at least one internal link. These are important for helping bots understand how the pages on your site relate to each other. An architecture and internal links review is also a good time to root out cannibalized or duplicate content. Identical or extremely similar content compromises indexability. This is often a greater problem the bigger your site.
3. Improve Site Speed and Core Web Vitals
There's not much point in SEO if users don't like how your site functions once they've found it. A technical site audit checklist must also consider user-friendly features such as site speed, which is one aspect of a set of metrics known as core web vitals.
Google Search Console measures core web vitals, such as page loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.
4. Audit for Mobile-Friendliness and Responsive Design
Mobile devices generate more than 60% of global web traffic. This is one reason why Google uses mobile-first indexing, which effectively indexes mobile sites over desktop sites. Checking that your site is performing optimally on mobile is a critical element of a technical SEO audit. This includes ensuring your site loads quickly and has a responsive design that adapts seamlessly to various screen sizes, from phone to tablet to desktop.
5. Clean Up Redirects, Errors, and Crawl Waste
Over time, your site can accumulate broken links, redundant redirects, and duplicate content. There may also be meta tag errors (more on that below) and other small issues that get filed as "crawl waste," elements of your site that flummox the search engine bots, stifle crawlability, and compromise indexing.
Manually searching your site for these rogue elements is one way to find them. But there are also tools like Screaming Frog that mimic the actions of web crawlers and flag broken links, redirect chains, and unnecessary crawlable URLs.
6. Review On-Page Elements That Matter to SEO
Included in the HTML code of each webpage are meta tags that help bots crawl and index more accurately. Title tags, meta descriptions, and meta keywords all contribute to SERPs and clarity for your users.
Schema markups are also important in this regard. These are structured data that make it easier for bots to understand what your page is about and index it accordingly. For example, schema markups can tell bots that a string of ingredients listed on a page is actually a recipe.
Good meta tags and schema markups help to ensure the context of your content is better understood by search engines, encouraging better indexing and ranking outcomes.
Optimize Meta Tags and Header Hierarchy
Make sure each webpage has unique meta tags that are appropriately descriptive of the content on the page.
Add Schema Markup Where It Adds Value
Think of schema markups as adding a zoom function for web crawlers — they help the bots to zero in on your page and see it a little better.
7. Prioritize Issues Based on Impact
If your technical SEO audit checklist has produced a long list of problems to resolve, it's time to prioritize. Don't get distracted by low-impact solutions, like fixing broken links on a barely-noticed blog. Make high-impact changes first, such as fixing meta tags on your highest traffic pages, then work your way down to other issues.
Maintain Technical SEO With Regular Audits
Run through your website's technical audit checklist regularly — we recommend quarterly — to be confident that your technical SEO is well-maintained. It helps to have a technical SEO specialist in your corner to analyze your website so you can fix potential issues that may be keeping your site down in the SERPs.
Compose.ly’s technical SEO experts know what to look for. Our SEO services involve diving deep into your site and fine-tuning your technical SEO strategy to improve your site's performance. Whether you’ve experienced a persistent decline in web traffic, want to boost organic growth, are operating a new website, or it’s been a while since you updated your website, a technical SEO audit can help boost your content.