Technical SEO Audit: 9 Steps Checklist To Boost Rankings

Technical SEO is the backbone of any successful SEO campaign. By optimizing your website’s technical aspects, you make it more accessible to Google and enhance user experience. Without it, your SEO efforts won’t reach their full potential, regardless of how strong your strategy is or how authoritative your content and links are.

That’s why performing a Technical SEO audit and fixing all the technical issues must be one of your first steps in optimizing a website for SEO.

In this guide, we’ll share a detailed technical SEO audit checklist to help you on that quest.

But before that, let’s start with the basics.

We recommend performing a technical SEO audit at least every quarter.

Benefits of a Technical SEO Audit

Performing a Technical SEO audit offers various benefits:

• Improves crawl budget by ensuring search engines can efficiently crawl and index your most important pages.
• Fixes indexing issues helps you identify and resolve problems that may be preventing search engines from properly indexing your pages.
• Enhances user experience by allowing you to optimize the speed, navigation, and overall usability of your website.
• Increases accessibility to search engines by making your website more accessible and crawlable by search bots for page indexing
• Boosts SEO traffic and rankings by enhancing your site’s display in search engine results pages, which drives more organic traffic.
• Ensures website security as you identify and fix security vulnerabilities to make your site safe to browse for your users.
• Prevents duplicate content issues by eliminating overlapping content, which can otherwise confuse search engines and dilute your site ranking.
• Enhances website architecture by improving your website structure and organization, making it easier to navigate by users and search engines.
• Resolves mixed content issues, which ensures your content is fully secure.

When should you perform a Technical SEO audit?

A Technical SEO audit is often one of the first steps for a website that is taking a fresh look at its SEO strategy. And finding and fixing the issues must be on the top of your list when starting a Technical SEO audit.

It is recommended that a technical SEO audit must be part of your ongoing website maintenance and must be done quarterly.

A website’s size and type also affect the time frame of ongoing technical SEO audits. For example, a large website or a website publishing lots of content regularly must be audited more frequently, while having a single page with no changes for months will not require as much frequency. If you run a local business, for instance, you may want to focus more on following an on-page local checklist, and doing technical SEO as a one-off exercise.

Steps to Perform a Technical SEO Audit

Performing a technical SEO audit is important for all types of websites. But for larger, complex sites, it can be tougher. Thus, it requires a clear process and experience to manage successfully.

To avoid mistakes, we have put together a list of elements and steps for performing a successful Technical SEO audit for your website.

1. Understand your Project and Goals

Understanding your project and goals is key for a successful SEO audit. Identify your current situation, objectives, and resources to pinpoint challenges and opportunities. This will help you efficiently address issues and achieve your desired outcomes.

Define your objectives

Start your technical SEO audit by assessing your current situation and defining goals. For example, your goals could be anything like:

• Recover Traffic
• Fix Website
• Solve Indexing Issues
• Ensure Functionality
• Lighten Pages
• Manage Crawl Budget (for larger sites)

And so on.

Identify Resources

Next, assess the resources and tech stack you have at your disposal. That includes tools, budget, and team members. Understanding your resources will allow you to plan your audit more effectively. This will allow you to allocate tasks efficiently, ensuring no aspect of the audit is overlooked.

For example:

• In general, a WordPress website has multiple plugins from different developers. In some cases, this could lead to potential conflicts when more plugins interact with each other. While a custom-developed website usually does not have plugins, and this may be less of an issue.
• An image or video-streaming website has a different tech stack than a simple business website or blog.
• Different web hosting companies have different infrastructure (nginx, apache, cdns, etc.) and server-level configuration controls.

Pinpoint Challenges

Identify the specific challenges your website is facing. This could include issues like slow load times, poor mobile compatibility, or indexing problems. Pinpointing these challenges early on will help you create a targeted action plan to address them systematically.

Take your time to comprehend your site’s tech stack properly before moving on to the next step.

2. Analyze the website architecture

Website architecture means how a website structure is planned and organized. A good website architecture:

1. Makes your website accessible to search engines.
2. Help users to discover your content easily.
3. Supports the future growth of your website
4. Reduces bounce rates

You should consider the 3 core elements of your website architecture, so keep reading to learn about them.

Site structure

Site Structure refers to how webpages and subfolders are organized on your website. Therefore, you must think through what structure you are going to implement while creating your website.

Your site structure should be user-friendly and logical. To improve user experience and search engine crawlability, aim to make important pages accessible within a few clicks from the homepage.

While the “three-click rule” is a good guideline, it is not applicable for all types of websites (like ecommerce sites for example). Thus, you should focus on creating an intuitive and efficient navigation system that serves your users’ needs.

Website navigation

Effective navigation is key to a good user experience and improved SEO performance. Make sure your navigation menu is clear, simple, and intuitive. Include important links in the header, footer, and sidebar.

Additionally, it is beneficial to use breadcrumb trails to help users understand their location within the site. Good navigation helps users find content quickly and ensures that search engines can crawl your site efficiently.

Here are some best practices for creating an effective website navigation:

• Add your most important pages(links) to the Header Menu for SEO visibility.
• Consider the structure from the users’ viewpoint. Give preference to pages required/visited by most users.
• Add Sub-menu links logically. For example, let’s say you have a digital marketing agency offering SEO, PPC, and web design services. Your main menu is “Services,” and the sub-menus will be SEO services, PPC services, and Web design services. Other SEO services like On-page SEO services and link-building services should be Sub-sub menus of SEO services.

Services

-SEO Services

»On-page Services

»Off Page Services

»Link Building Services

-PPC Services

-Web Design Services

• Don’t get too creative in naming your menu items. Keep it short and simple. For example, simply use the term “Blog” instead of “Creative Lab”.
• Use simple and readable font size.

You should manually analyze your website navigation, as no other tool can help you with this. Just follow this rule for guidance.

URL structure

Your website’s URL structure must be logical and consistent so a user can easily understand it. Also, strive to go for user-friendly URL slugs for your web pages.

It is a best practice to keep the URL structure as a mirror of the website structure.

For example, If your website structure is Home > Category > Sub-Category > Product

Then the URL structure must be like xyza.com/men/shoes/running/

During the URL structure audit, you should focus on eliminating common URL issues like:

• Underscores in URLs
• Two separate versions of a page URL with and without trailing slash.
• URLs that are too long.
• Too many parameters in the URL

3. Find and Fix Crawling and Indexing Issues

Your website can’t rank higher if Google is unable to crawl and index it properly. So, you need to ensure that your website has no crawling and indexing issues.

Here’s how you can do it.

Check for Indexing Issues

You can find all the issues preventing the indexation of your website in the Google Search Console.

Go to Google Search Console > Pages.

Then check the data for “All Pages” and “Sitemap” one by one.

Check the “Why pages are not being indexed” section. Here, you can find all the issues preventing your website from indexing. You should analyze the “Crawl Stats” report in GSC to get insights about your website’s crawl budget.

Then, make changes accordingly to solve the issues. For example, if you get the issue “excluded by no-index tag,” then you need to allow that page by removing the no-index tag if its goal is to get traffic.

Here are some other tips to improve your website indexing and crawling:

• Proper internal linking
• Regularly update/improve existing content
• Get high-quality backlinks
• Add your important pages to the header, footer, or sidebar
• Promote your content on other platforms and social media.
• Keep your webpages lighter
• Avoid using too much javascript.
• Use good and faster web hosting.

Check the robots.txt file

The robots.txt file is where you can instruct Google regarding which parts of your site It can index and which it cannot.

You can use the “disallow” tag for pages or website sections that you don’t want to index on Google.

It’s advised to add instructions carefully because a wrong instruction can cause a site-wide de-indexing of your website. Get help from an experienced SEO if you need to make changes there.

If you’re getting an issue “blocked by robots.txt” in your GSC pages indexing report then you can solve the issue by allowing those pages in the robots.txt file.

Check the sitemap

An XML sitemap helps Google find all the important pages of your website. That makes it easier and faster for Google to crawl and index your site.

You must ensure that the sitemap includes all the important pages and has no issues, such as broken pages or incorrect pages.

You need to check the sitemaps report in Google Search Console. Additionally, analyze your sitemap by using an SEO tool like Serpstat and Ahrefs.

4. Audit Internal Links

Internal links are links on your pages that point to other pages on your website. However, many SEOs ignore them or underestimate the importance of internal links.

If you want quick SEO results, internal links can help. Internal links significantly impact SEO rankings and user experience.

Look for these factors while auditing internal links:

• Find and fix broken internal links.
• Fix the orphaned pages by giving at least one link to each page.
• Ensure internal links are not added forcefully and have good relevance to the page it is linking to.
• Avoid using generic terms as anchors like “Click here”.
• Remove any redirection chains and replace it with the destination URL.
• Avoid using the nofollow tag for internal links
• Don’t add too many internal links on a page.

You can use an SEO tool like Serpstat or Screaming Frog to find internal linking issues.

5. Fix website speed performance and code issues

Website load time is a confirmed ranking factor by Google. Your site mspeed is important for a rich user experience.

Website speed has a direct effect on website conversions. So, a good benchmark is ensuring that your website loads in under two seconds.

You can use a tool like GTmetrix and Pagespeed Insights to check website performance and speed. There are mainly three page speed metrics known as Core Web Vitals that you need to improve:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) (visual load)
2. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) (visual stability test)
3. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) (measures responsiveness)

Here are some important tips to improve website performance:

• Avoid using a heavy, fancy design for your website. A minimalistic and clean design delivers higher conversion rates.
• Properly optimize website images and use the latest image formats like Webp.
• “Lazy load” the media.
• Combine HTML, CSS, and Javascript files and minify them.
• Prevent the loading of unrequired CSS and JS scripts.
• Use a CDN
• Use a cache plugin like SG Speed Optimizer.
• Do not use too many plugins
• Use a high-quality wordpress theme.
• Use powerful and reliable web hosting.
• Remove unnecessary tracking scripts and pixels.
• Keep your themes and plugins up to date

Along with this, website code issues can also negatively impact your website performance and user experience.

To prevent such negative impact, ensure that:

• URLs with or without trailing slash are not creating two different versions of the page. If that’s the case, then set a redirection to redirect one version to another. For example, *.com/sss/ and *com/sss are the different versions of a single page. Redirect one to another like *.com/sss > *.com/sss/ to avoid any issues.
• There is no mixed content and multiple URL versions. The website has only one version and others are redirecting to it. For example, https://siteground.com is the selected version of your site. So the other three versions; http://siteground.com, https://www.siteground.com, and http://www.siteground.com are redirecting to the intended one. Not having this in place may cause a duplicate content issue and to some extent, cause some sort of “confusion” for Google – which can affect rankings.
• Meta tags are perfectly present in the header of your webpage.
• There are no indexed pages (important pages) without meta tags.
• There is no broken canonical tag on web pages or multi-canonical tags on a single page.
• The website has the correct Hreflang tag and is properly placed in the website header. It becomes more important for international SEO for multilingual or multi-regional sites. It is the combination of the language and country you’re targeting. For example, for a USA-targeting website, the Hreflang tag is en-US – and for an Australian website, the Hreflang tag is en-AU. There are specific codes for different languages and countries. So, ensure that you’re using the right one.
• SSL certificate (HTTPS) is working on the whole site properly.

6. Improve mobile-friendliness

Google is taking mobile compatibility seriously and will stop indexing pages and websites that are not fully mobile-friendly from July 2024.

So, if your website is not fully mobile-ready then you should act immediately. Ensure your site is fully optimized for mobile devices by using responsive design, proper font sizes, and avoiding intrusive pop-ups.

You can check the Mobile Usability Report in Google Search Console or use a tool like Bing Mobile-friendly tester to check whether your website is mobile-friendly. You can also check the Page Experience Report in Google Search Console to find mobile performance issues.

Here are some important tips to follow:

• Your font size must be easier to read on mobile devices.
• Add proper space between elements.
• Avoid unnecessary elements in the mobile version.
• Don’t show pop-ups on mobiles.
• The content should not be wider than the screen.

7. Find Schema Markup Issues

Schema markup is a code snippet that helps Google learn about your website easily. As a result, your website gets better rankings on Google and SERP features like Knowledge Panel, featured snippets, and others.

There are different types of schema markup for different types of content like:

• About page schema
• Website schema
• Web page schema markup
• Recipe schema markup
• How-to schema markup
• Person schema markup

And so on.

As part of the technical audit, you need to ensure that your pages use the right schema markups.

Schema markup code snippets should not be broken or incorrect. To find and fix schema markup issues, you can use a tool like Google Rich Snippets testing tool. There you can enter your webpage’s link or paste your page’s code to check for any structured data issues.

8. Identify Image Issues

Image SEO must be a strategic part of your SEO strategy. Optimizing website images can help you to:

• Get more traffic from Google Images.
• Improved user experience.
• Have a faster website load speed.
• Reduce page size.
• Improve the accessibility.

You should look for these issues and fix them to optimize your website images for SEO:

• Ensure that you’re not using copyrighted Images. You should create your images or can use Creative Commons-licensed images, from sites like Pixabay.
• There shouldn’t be broken images on your website pages. Broken images ruin the user experience and create a negative impression on users.
• The image file size should not be too large. It can increase your website’s load time and make your webpage heavier. You should resize the image and change the image format to the latest ones, like WebP or SVG. Also, you can compress the images to save more space and further reduce the image memory size.
• If your website uses https but has http images – it can create a “mixed content” issue. Your webpage opens perfectly with https but images on that page open via http instead of https. You can use a tool like Serpstat to find the issue and solve it by setting a rule in your .htaccess file.
• Alt text is used to describe an image and helps Google learn about the image. So ensure images on the website have alt text.

9. Perform log file analysis

Log file analysis provides insights into how crawlers and visitors interact with your site. This is especially useful for medium to large websites. Analyze log files to identify and resolve any issues that may be staying in the way of efficient crawling.

Analyzing your website’s log file can help you understand your website from a crawler’s viewpoint, i.e. how it crawls your website, how long, and how easily.

Log file analysis is more useful for medium to large sites rather than for smaller or new sites. But still, it can help you to make the required changes to your SEO strategy.

If you find issues that are stopping crawlers from smoothly crawling your website then you can get the help of a developer to solve the issues.

Mistakes to avoid while performing an SEO Audit

You can avoid the risk of negative impact by using logic – i.e. Do not do anything that seems illogical.

Another thing that you should keep in mind, is to avoid making multiple changes at once. And keep a track record of every small change that you have made with time and date.

It will help you pinpoint the exact cause, and roll back the changes in the worst-case scenario. Note that a fix may actually have a negative impact on your website’s SEO.

Conclusion

There are many advanced factors for each of the points discussed. You could almost write a book about each factor! Sometimes a website has unique issues that can only be found and solved with years of experience and practice.

However, for 98% of sites, this Technical SEO audit checklist will be enough to solve all the issues and grow their website traffic. Just follow this guide step by step, and open the doors to organic growth for your website.

Technical SEO Audit FAQs

What tools do you need for an SEO audit?

You can use an SEO audit tool like Ahrefs and Serpstat. It can save a lot of time, and can easily find issues like broken links by using these tools.

Also, such tools allow you to export the list of issues in a spreadsheet. Thanks to that you can use a Google Sheet to keep track of every issue as you fix them.

What do you need from a client before completing a technical SEO audit?

If you are doing a technical SEO audit for another party, you need login access to their website, access to Google Search Console, and Google Analytics.

How to prioritize issues to solve first?

You should prioritize issues based on impact, urgency, and how easy it is to be done.

Issues like mixed content or multiple URL versions are sitewide and critical issues. So you should give priority to these issues rather than focusing first on solving orphan page issues, for instance.