SEO Tips & Tricks Podcast: SEO Website Audit (Part 3)

Technical Audits

Welcome back to another episode of the Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks Podcast with Tim Jennings. I am your host, Tim and I have been the Head of SEO at Soulheart for nearly a decade now. In my time at Soulheart, I have helped countless businesses and nonprofits dominate the Search Results Pages. On this podcast I share tips and tricks to help your website not only get found by the various search engines like Google but also help you convert those people to active users on your website.

Today, we will be continuing our series on SEO Website Audits where we’ll delve into the realm of Technical Audits. Get ready to settle in, fasten your seatbelt, and embark on this exciting journey through the world of Search Engine Optimization!

What is a Technical Audit for SEO?

A technical audit for SEO is an essential process that helps businesses and nonprofits improve their websites and increase organic search visibility. It provides an in-depth analysis of website performance, structure, content quality, and other technical aspects related to SEO. This type of audit focuses on the technical elements that can affect how search engines crawl and index a website.

The goal of an SEO audit is to identify potential problems and optimize the website for better search engine visibility. By conducting a technical audit, businesses can ensure their website meets the best practices recommended by leading search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

What are the Benefits of a Technical Audit?

Conducting a technical audit offers numerous benefits for businesses and nonprofits. It allows them to identify any existing issues and fix them promptly, thus improving website performance.

By optimizing the technical aspects of your website, you can improve user experience (UX) by ensuring faster loading times and making navigation easier for visitors. This will also help increase organic search visibility as search engines prefer websites that are easy to navigate and provide a great user experience.

Moreover, by performing regular SEO audits, businesses and nonprofits can detect any malicious or malfunctioning codes that may be affecting the website’s performance and fix them before they cause any major damage. This will help prevent any potential losses caused by decreased organic search visibility.

Who Should Conduct an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit should be conducted by a professional who is familiar with the latest best practices for website optimization. Although it is possible to do an SEO audit yourself, it is highly recommended to hire an experienced professional as they have the required skills and knowledge to carry out a thorough analysis of your website’s performance.

If you don’t have the budget to hire an expert, there are several free SEO audit tools available online that can help you get started. Such tools offer basic technical analysis of your website and identify potential issues as well as provide actionable solutions for improvement.

Some of the most popular SEO Audit tools are Moz, SEMrush, and Screaming Frog. Each tool has its own unique advantages and disadvantages. For Example, SEMrush offers a detailed analysis of website performance, breaks down any issues in three groups (errors, warnings, and notices), and provides you with a lot of valuable details to help resolve each issue. On the other hand, Screaming Frog is is very a powerful tool that is great for identifying any broken links or redirects on your website, provides you a comprehensive list of crawlable URLs, and Meta data. However, if you don’t know what you are doing it can be a steep learning curve. Moz provides a detailed website crawl report, helps with technical issues, and you can schedule regular crawls to find issues faster. However, Moz lacks some of the details you would get in a report from SEMrush or Screaming Frog.

How to Conduct an SEO Audit

To conduct a comprehensive technical audit for SEO, you should first analyze the website’s structure and indexability. This involves examining the URLs, titles tags, content organization, meta descriptions, page speed, redirects, server errors, JavaScript/AJAX, and other technical elements that may affect search engine visibility.

Once you’ve analyzed the website structure and indexability, move on to analyze the website content. This includes assessing the content quality, keyword optimization, duplicate page titles and descriptions, image alt tags, and broken links.

Finally, analyze your website’s external factors such as backlinks, domain authority, page authority, and other off-site factors. This is important to ensure your website has a strong presence within search engine results pages (SERPs).

What are the Steps Involved in an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit typically involves several steps that include:

Crawling and analyzing your website’s structure.

Checking page titles, meta descriptions, and other HTML elements for accuracy and optimization.

Checking the website’s performance on mobile devices.

Analyzing website content for keyword optimization and relevancy.

Checking the website for broken links, duplicate page titles and descriptions, image alt tags, and other technical elements that could affect search engine visibility.

Checking external factors such as backlinks, domain authority, page authority, etc.

Testing the website’s speed and performance.

Providing actionable recommendations for website optimization.

How to Improve Your Website with a Technical SEO Audit

Once you have conducted an SEO audit, you can use the findings to improve your website’s performance. The first step is to fix any issues identified in the audit such as broken links. Fixing broken links on your website is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, broken links create a poor user experience, frustrating visitors and potentially driving them away. Secondly, search engines like Google consider broken links as a sign of outdated or neglected content, which can negatively impact your website’s search engine rankings. Thirdly, maintaining a healthy link structure enhances the credibility and professionalism of your site, fostering trust among both users and search engines. Regularly addressing broken links also contributes to efficient crawling and indexing by search engine bots, ensuring your content is accurately and promptly ranked. Ultimately, by taking the time to fix broken links, you enhance user satisfaction, SEO performance, and the overall health of your website.

Next, I would look for duplicate page titles and descriptions. Fixing duplicate titles and descriptions on your website is essential for optimal SEO performance. Unique and relevant titles and descriptions not only help search engines understand the distinctiveness of each page but also improve click-through rates by providing users with accurate previews of your content. Duplicate titles and descriptions can lead to confusion among search engines, potentially causing them to choose less relevant pages for display in search results. By resolving this issue, you enhance your website’s visibility, click-through rates, and overall search engine ranking potential, resulting in a more effective and user-friendly online presence.

Then, you should look for other technical elements that could be affecting your search engine visibility such as page speed, redirects, JavaScript/AJAX, and server errors. Optimizing these elements is essential for an effective SEO strategy as they all affect the user experience which search engines prioritize when ranking websites.

Improving page speed enhances user experience, as fast-loading pages lead to lower bounce rates and increased engagement.

Handling redirects properly ensures efficient navigation and prevents users from encountering frustrating dead ends. Proper redirection also preserves link equity and avoids dilution of SEO authority across unnecessary redirects.

Optimizing JavaScript and AJAX implementation ensures that search engine bots can crawl and index your content effectively, leading to better visibility in search results. Ensuring that your website content is accessible and indexable enhances its chances of ranking higher.

Lastly, addressing server errors promptly is vital to maintain a seamless user experience. Frequent server errors can negatively impact user trust and satisfaction, potentially leading to decreased organic traffic and lower search engine rankings.

By addressing these issues, you create a fast, user-friendly, and search engine-friendly website, resulting in improved user satisfaction, higher search engine rankings, and ultimately, greater online success.

How Often Should You Conduct an SEO Audit?

It is important to conduct regular SEO audits to make sure your website is always running at its best. As search engine algorithms and web technologies change frequently, websites need to be regularly updated and optimized to remain competitive in organic search rankings.

Ideally, businesses should conduct an SEO audit on their website at least once a year or more often if necessary. Smaller businesses may not need as frequent audits as larger ones, but it is important to stay on top of website optimization since even minor changes in the search engine algorithm or web technologies can have a major impact on organic search visibility.

Using the right combination of technical and content-related SEO techniques can help businesses improve their website’s performance and rank higher in organic search results. Conducting regular technical audits as part of your SEO strategy can help you stay ahead of the competition and ensure your website is always running at its best.

More Technical Audit Tips for SEO

By following the recommendations from a technical audit, businesses and nonprofits can make sure their websites are optimized for both search engines and users. This will result in higher organic search visibility, better user experience, and increased traffic to their website. Therefore, it is essential for businesses to conduct regular SEO audits and ensure their websites are always up-to-date with the latest best practices.

At the end of the day, an SEO audit can be a great investment for businesses as it can help them improve website performance and rank higher in organic search results. With that said every business and nonprofit should consider conducting a technical audit at least once a year to stay competitive in the ever-changing digital landscape.

For more information on SEO audits and how they can benefit your business, head over to soulheart.co/seo and sign up for exclusive resources that I don’t share anywhere else! My goal is to help business owners and marketing managers not get found on search engines like Google, but dominate their competition! With the right strategies in place, you will be sure to see an increase in website traffic and conversions.

And finally, I am excited to share with you a BRAND NEW resource that my team at Soulheart has been working really hard on over the last year. This week we launched the Soulheart Circle community. The Soulheart Circle is a community of marketing professionals and business owners who want to level-up their marketing efforts. Community is rapidly becoming the next big thing in marketing. At Soulheart we believe it is the final stage to create a closed-loop marketing experience. Inbound marketing drives organic leads, outbound marketing brings in leads through day-to-day interruptions, and community marketing helps you build deeper relationships with potential customers and build a unique revenue stream to leverage.

There you’ll discover a range of marketing challenges, valuable resources, and dedicated training courses crafted to support the growth of your business or nonprofit. Additionally, you have the opportunity to engage with our team and connect with fellow marketing experts within the community, enabling you to ask questions and exchange insights. We’re committed to keeping you updated on the latest marketing trends, equipping you with the precise strategies we implement at Soulheart, and furnishing resources to empower you to outshine your competitors. So head over to soulheartcircle.co and take the Transform My Marketing challenge!

That will do it for today’s episode of the Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks podcast with Tim Jennings. I hope you found this episode helpful and are now inspired to start taking action on your technical audits.

Remember, Regular audits can help you stay ahead of the competition and ensure that your website is always running at its best. So don’t wait any longer – go out there today and get started! And if you need more help with SEO or digital marketing, head over to soulheart.co and book a free discovery call with me!

Thanks for joining me today and until next time – Happy Optimizing!