Technical SEO audit - The Starting Point For Your Strategy

A technical SEO audit of your website will be the starting point of your SEO strategy. There are many aspects to your website and online presence that are relevant to SEO, and a technical audit will enable us to see how well these are working together. Any part that is not performing well, could lead to your website being side-lined and effectively forgotten.

Once we have implemented the on-page elements of your SEO strategy, we will also perform a technical audit in conjunction with our retained link building for SEO services. This will ensure that your website is providing you with the best ROI.

What Is Involved in a Technical SEO Audit

As part of our SEO service, Cayenne Red will conduct a thorough review of your existing website and/or new site that you may be migrating to as part of the audit process. We follow a detailed checklist during the audit and feedback how your site is currently performing.

We will also give you a range of ideas for potential improvement. We work with you to prioritise the changes required – looking for both quick-wins as well as a plan to implement the changes required to meet the goals of the longer term SEO strategy.

Have a Look at Our Technical SEO Audit Checklist:

1. Site Architecture/Information Architecture: We review your site navigation from both a usability and performance standpoint. We identify where your visitors enter and exit your site, and identify any areas that may not be getting the traffic that they should. If your site is intuitive and easy to navigate, search engine crawlers will also find it easy to crawl your site. Next we have a look at the naming conventions used in your navigation to ensure you are utilising the results of your keyword research. It is recommended that your directory, or folder structures are a maximum of three levels to get to the desired product, or page. We will also have a look at your site’s hierarchy to ensure best practices are being used.
2. Server response codes: There are a few server response codes that will have a negative impact on SEO. They can be quite easy to remedy, but it is imperative that you get them fixed. These server responses will cause you to lose page rankings and authority across your entire website, especially 404’s, as these indexing errors indicate to search engines that your site is not routinely updated.
3. Scripts: We have a look to see if your website has any scripts running or content in Flash, AJAX, iFrames, or if content that is embedded in JavaScript. For example, broken links/404 errors; these scripts can prevent your site from being crawled properly. If your site can’t be crawled, then it cannot be indexed properly and your ranking will be affected.
4. Unfriendly URL’s: To ensure that your site’s URLs are as friendly as possible for the search engines, we look out for dynamic URLs and look how we might be able to structure them. This requires the help of a professional programmer and is an aspect which you should most definitely seek professional help. Basically, you want your URL’s to say what they mean and where they are going to take you to improve the user experience.
5. Duplicate content: We consider both internal (within your own site) and external duplicate content (which you might find in manufacture product descriptions for example). If you have pages across your website with duplicate content, you will be setting your pages up to be competing with themselves – search engines will then choose one page and index it, leaving the others unindexed, and not showing up in search engine results. If you are an Ecommerce site, you may need to consider re-writing, or adding to manufactures product descriptions in order to stand out from your competitors that have directly imported the same content as they received it, with no amendments.
6. Site map/XML issues: A site map will allow search engines to find and index new content on your website. We will always ensure that you have a sitemap, and that it has been submitted to the search engines manually.
7. Site speed: Site speed is not only important for providing a better user experience, it is also factored into search engines algorithms. We will review your site (both desktop and mobile) speed and identify any factors that may be slowing it down, such as oversized images, or video files.

An audit will give you great insight into how hard your website is working for you. Whilst it may seem overwhelming at first, knowing that you have taken all of the advice from your audit to ensure that your website is performing to its best ability, will enable you to methodically work on key refinements. This results in excellent rankings for your chosen search terms.

Need Help With Your Technical SEO audit?

Contact Cayenne Red or call 020 3286 1153 today to discuss your technical SEO audit!