12 Steps to do Technical SEO Audit | Technology, General , Health, Digital Marketing News

An SEO-friendly website must follow three criteria: On-Page, Off-Page, and Technical SEO. On-page cover all the content and HTML part, Backlinks created in the Off-Page and technical SEO covers that part which can affect the ranking of our website such as Indexing, Crawling. All these three factors can improve your website’s ranking if you do it correctly. Now the question arises which part should we do first? Before On Page SEO and Off page SEO, we have to do technical SEO. If we do technical SEO after content and backlink creation, the ranking will be down. In this article, we will study finding technical issues while doing website auditing, how to improve website speed, website structure.

Check Website Indexing: The first step, to check if your website is appearing in SERP that means the website is indexed or not. How can you check that? Search for your website domain on Google and check your website is coming amongst searches. If your website is coming in the SERP, then you must track the records. Google Search Console is the tool where you can check the results. How many clicks, impressions your website is getting, how many pages are indexed, indexing issues these things you can record.
Google Search Console will give you the information of Google only. You want to check the results from other search engines as well like Bing, Yahoo etc. Then you can try the Website Auditor tool for checking Domain Strength Report. Whatsoever tool you use, one thing will be the same. The number of indexed pages will be the same as the total number of pages.
Fix Website Indexing Issue: It will be necessary to fix the page indexing issue. Before that, we have to optimize which type of page indexing issue we are getting. There are two types of page indexing issues.
If you use Google Search Console, you must know about the Page Indexing error. It occurs when a page is not indexed or added in the robots.txt file. And it has been added in the sitemap file. How to fix this? At first check, it has to be an index or not. After that, take it off from the robots.txt file or change it from no index to index. When valid with warnings occurs, it happens when we try to block some pages with robot.txt. The right way is to use the no-index tag to remove the page from indexing.
Auditing Website Structure: Logical Website Structure, internal linking are necessary for google bot and users. While auditing the website structure, make sure the path of links in internal linking should not be more than three clicks from the Home Page. Audit the website structure carefully.
Boost Crawl Budget: Now, you will think about what is crawl budget? When a search engine crawls, the number of pages in a given period is called a crawl budget. Do not confuse between crawled pages and ranking factors. How many times your website’s pages crawled or not is different from the ranking factor. Google provides a crawl budget depending upon our website importance. If pages are not heavy and the website is smooth, the site will use the budget for a longer time. If there are many redirection issues, then the budget will be over before the given time. To amplify your crawl budget, you can do the following things.

Disregard Shallow Priority Resources: To make everyone attracted to our website. We use videos, gifs on our page. It makes the website heavy and doesn’t make any impact on search engines but only on users. So to resolve this issue, we can ask Google to ignore these resources. For that, update the robots.txt file and disallow image by image path, gif, videos.
Prevent Your Website From Lengthy Redirect Chains: We often listen that there should be minimum redirections. It is because when Google crawls, it ignores too many redirections and steps forward to other pages. It causes no indexing. Find these pages and fix them.
Control Dynamic URLs: Sometimes, a single page can have multiple URLs but with the same content. Google sees this as different pages. To stop Google from crawling these URLs, go to Google search Console Open Legacy Tools and Reports> URL Parameters. The list will open up. You can edit the particular parameter to prevent Google from crawling.
Look After Broken Links: When there are 400 or 500 errors, the crawl budget gets wasted. To prevent crawl budget, fix the broken link issue.

Remove Duplicate Content: In SEO, to prevent your website from plagiarism and Spam. You have to make sure not to use copied content. Also, your website doesn’t have two pages with similar content. It can make Google confused. To hide pages with duplicate content, you can hide it from search engines.
Improve Page Speed: We know our website speed should be two seconds, according to Google. Improve page speed because the average page speed should be 15 seconds. After this Page Speed metric struggle, Google has come up with Core Web Vitals. In this, there are three metrics to measure page speed which are LCP (Largest Contentful Pain), FID (First Input Delay) and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift).
Mobile-Friendly Website: According to Google’s algorithm, search engines crawls the website’s mobile-friendly version first. It directly means that how the website is ranking on Google. To check the website is mobile-friendly, test usability criteria, use of plugins, clickable elements. Check each landing page whether it is mobile-friendly or not. You can track the most common issues that affect your page’s mobile-friendliness by using Google Search Console.
Investigate HTTPS Content: Nowadays, every site uses HTTPS migration to secure the website. It is a good ranking factor as well. Always remember to investigate mixed content and canonical & redirects.
Structured Data: Structured Data or Schema is HTML code. In this, we can specify some particular element or product by HTML code on our website and provide multiple details to Google.
Update Sitemap: To tell Google about your website and pages, you must have a sitemap. Once you update the sitemap, make sure it is up to date. Keep your sitemap updated. There should not be any redirects and indexing issues. Most importantly, submit a sitemap in the Google Search Console to let Google know about your website.
Request Indexing: After fixing the issues, ask Google to re-crawl your website again. To let Google know about the changes you have made to the website. You can use the URL inspection tool of Google Search Console for re-crawling by adding the URL and clicking on Request Indexing. When you make changes, like HTTP to HTTPS redirects, content updates or any other change, you can ask Google to re-crawl your website.
Regularly Audit Website: Audit your website regularly. It is the last step to do. It is part of the SEO strategy. Use various SEO auditing tools and make changes as required because it can also affect the ranking of your website.