The best SEO plans come from an understanding of the fundamentals of a site's infrastructure and how a search engine finds pages-then adapting your site to improve Google's ability to grasp what your site is staying. The most reliable way to improve the chances of your site appearing in a search is to optimise every page.

After pouring an immense amount of effort into crafting interesting content built on the foundation of relevant keywords, it is essential to know how a search engine is reading your site.

We have written a beginner's guide to a technical SEO audit. This SEO audit checklist for beginners is to help maximise the impact of your online marketing. Many online marketing companies in the UK will also assist in a comprehensive technical SEO audit as part of their SEO audit services.

Website infrastructure

A site needs to be crawlable to be indexed and have a chance of being ranked by a search engine.

Google uses crawlers (bots/spiders) to locate and examine the content it finds. This process starts with a sites HTML. An HTML is the structure of the site, title, body content, etc. It tells Google what the page is about, e.g., a company selling flowers would title their HTML' freshly cut flowers'. The title and body of content must be high-quality and relevant to the page for google to give a high ranking. 

Search engine ranking is also judged on user experience (UX). This is why checking a site's CSS is crucial. A CSS is the style sheet language used to interpret the appearance of the site. This is transcribed into usability for an audience, e.g., colour, font size, etc. The quality and usability of the CSS will also affect rank, as Google will also test how usable a site is.

shutterstock_1971707954.jpgIndexing

After a site has been crawled, each piece of content is classified. This is called indexing. The information stored in an index is what Google uses to judge how relevant a site is to a search. Google must have access to the pages you want to appear in a search. Check there are no robots.txt files or wrong settings that will prevent crawlers from accessing a page. 

To check a site's visibility, use an SEO audit service like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console and gain access to statistics about Metadata, JavaScript, etc. These SEO services also allow you to find duplicate pages and remove them. The goal is to have a few good pages with high-quality backlinks to improve the chances of appearing in a search.

Use these types of SEO services to build an SEO audit checklist to cover all aspects of a site. An SEO audit service is a valuable tool for beginners or new websites without an established SEO checklist.

Links

One of the primary ways to create a quality page is to add high-quality links to the content. Relevant links on your site from a quality site and a reputable site using pages from your site as a link is a way for Google to establish authentication and trust. A trusted or quality page is going to be ranked higher in a search.

Over time the URLs that links use change location resulting, in the links breaking. Broken links will lower the overall quality rating of a page, affecting its rank. When performing a technical SEO audit, search for any broken links. However, it is not too late to reclaim the lost value of these links. By identifying broken links during your SEO audit, then redirecting them to the relevant page, the link becomes creditable again.

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Optimising loading and friendliness

Often an afterthought but key to how Google rates a page is loading time and mobile-friendliness.

The loading speed of a page should be up to 3 seconds, or you risk losing traffic. This will result in a high bounce rate and lower ranking. Try a speed testing tool like Google Search Engine to evaluate loading speed. A slow loading speed can be prevented by reducing the size of images and videos or removing unnecessary features or content.

As over half of users in the UK that use the internet access it through a mobile. It is now vital that sites are accessible and functional on all devices. That is why mobile-friendliness is an essential part of Google's ranking system. Improve a site's mobile-friendliness by using our Free SEO Audit

We hope you have found this technical SEO audit guide insightful. Are you struggling to give your SEO the extra boost? We would love to hear from you. Contact us today!

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