If you are looking to improve your website’s visibility and ranking on Google’s search results page, then your go-to step is to launch an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign. But before you activate your campaign, you should do the all-important groundwork needed to ensure a successful campaign and results. As any SEO agency worth its salt will advise you, one of the most critical aspects of an SEO campaign is the SEO audit.
The purpose of this audit is twofold – The first is to assess how well the website measures up against an SEO checklist which includes items like user experience and content quality. The second role of an SEO audit is to suss out weaknesses that are currently impacting the organic performance of your website. These issues can include technical SEO problems like page loading speed or on-page optimization challenges like weak meta title and descriptions.
To be specific, a technical SEO audit delves into structural elements of the website which could be malfunctioning or not performing as well as it should. As part of a technical audit, issues like page loading speed, URL structures, XML sitemap and crawlability are assessed. Here are three important steps you need to take note of when doing an advanced technical audit.
1. Run Your Website Through An Auditing Machine
If you are feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of carrying out a technical audit, it is important to remember that there are online tools available that make the task incredibly straightforward. The first step you need to take is to check your current SEO score against a plethora of benchmark rankings. This is a vital first step as it orients your auditing process moving forward and makes clear the technical SEO issues you are facing on your website. Tools like Semrush and SEO Site Checkup are excellent tools to check how your website is faring.
2. Take Note Of Your Website’s Technical Issues
After running your website through an SEO auditing tool, you will be able to discover a myriad of underlying technical issues that could have been hampering your organic traffic. Some of these issues require a quick fix. Take duplicate content for example. One easy way you are able to remedy this problem is through scraping existing content and creating fresh and unique content.
But what if some of these problems are too technical? This is where an SEO agency can step in. SEO specialists are trained to identify and remedy these technical issues whether it be poor loading speed or poor website viewing on a mobile device.
For example, a poor loading speed of 3 seconds and above causes the bounce rate to increase dramatically. Some ways that this issue can be remedied by SEO experts includes optimising website images. This involves compressing them as higher quality images which require an extended period of time to load.
3. Make Sure Your Website Is “Technically Sound”
According to SEO experts, it is imperative that several bugs are fixed before your website can be considered “technically sound”. These include but are not limited the following factors:
- Excellent page loading speed
- Optimised viewing for mobile and desktop devices
- No repeated content in the meta description or body of content
- Optimised crawlability for so search engines like Google understand the website
- Updated XML sitemap that acts as a guide for Google to crawl your website
- No canonicalization issues
For SEO Results You Can See Contact W360 Group Today!
When you fix these technical issues, you are able to vastly improve your search engine visibility and ranking. By engaging with an SEO agency like W360 Group, our team of SEO specialists get to work sifting through these errors and remedying them. We have helped dozens of companies achieve their SEO success stories by conducting onpage SEO, technical SEO and content optimisation. Click here for an SEO audit request conducted by our very own Digital Superheroes!
