You’ve packed your pest control company’s website with helpful content, but are you paying attention to the technical aspects under the hood? If it’s been a while since you’ve done a technical SEO audit (or maybe you never have), even the best SEO strategy in the world won’t help you.
What is a technical SEO audit, and how do you perform one? In this comprehensive blog post, Relentless Digital explains how to pull off a site audit flawlessly. If you’re looking for premier SEO for pest control companies, book a strategy session with our pros today.
What Is Technical SEO, and How Does It Differ From On-Page and Off-Page SEO?
Technical SEO, or search engine optimization, involves changes that make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. A technical site audit addresses core web vitals such as:
- Sitemaps
- Site structure
- Site architecture
- Robots.txt files
- Site errors
- Image delivery
- Security
- Accessibility
- Canonical tags
- UX
- Site speed
On-page SEO is probably the type of SEO you’re most familiar with. It involves adding relevant keywords to a web page, optimizing images, adjusting metadata, and adding internal links. Off-page SEO is anything you do outside of your website. That might include building external links, guest posting on someone else’s blog, getting your business listed in a pest control directory, and so on.
Google offers a helpful guide if you’d like to learn more about getting started with SEO.
What’s a Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit involves finding and fixing problems with your core web vitals so that search engine crawlers can easily index your website. When search engine bots can find your site, you stand a better chance of ranking well in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
If you’ve already glanced at the steps involved in a technical site audit and feel overwhelmed, don’t worry. Even making a few minor changes to certain pages can help Google and other search engines crawl your site.
When Should You Perform a Technical SEO Audit?
It’s good practice to perform a technical site audit when a site is new. Doing so means you’re set up for success right out of the gate. After that, experts suggest performing an audit at least quarterly. It’s also wise to check under your site’s hood if you notice it dropping in search engine rankings.
What Tools Will You Need for Your Technical SEO Audit?
You don’t need many fancy tools to perform your site audit. To get started, all you’ll need is:
- Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools
- A site audit tool that can crawl your website
Google Search Console and Bing’s Webmaster Tools are 100% free. A few free site audit tools are available, but you’re more likely to get the best results with a paid one.
Technical SEO Audit Checklist
Here’s a quick checklist of how to audit your site for search engines:
- Check your site’s crawlability.
- Ensure that your web pages are indexed correctly.
- Repair XML sitemap problems.
- Explore your site structure and architecture.
- Correct broken internal links.
- Audit site and page speed.
- Hunt down duplicate content.
- Check your crawl budget.
- Take a look at on-page technical elements.
How To Perform a Perfect Technical Audit
Ready to uncover technical SEO issues and build a strong technical SEO foundation for your site? Here’s how to perform a thorough technical SEO audit, step by step.
Check Your Site’s Crawlability
Are your important pages languishing at the bottom of the search engine rankings? If so, problems with your robots.txt file may be preventing search engines from crawling and indexing those pages.
Your robots.txt file is easy to find. Simply type your page’s URL into the search bar and add “/robots.txt” to the end (without the quotation marks). Once it loads, you’ll see “Allow” and “Disallow” at the top of the page. If you have any sites under “Disallow,” this tells search engines not to crawl the page.
To fix the problem, remove the sites you want search engines to crawl from “Disallow.” You can also use Google’s robots.txt checker to quickly scan and fix issues preventing search engines from crawling your site.
Ensure That Your Web Pages Are Indexed Correctly
You’ve verified that Google can crawl your pages, but is it indexing them properly? To find out, look at your Google Search Console coverage report. It shows four categories:
- Valid: Working pages that have been indexed
- Errors: 404 errors and redirect problems
- Valid with warnings: Pages that Google has indexed but have warnings
- Excluded: Pages that are excluded from indexing (most commonly due to your robots.txt file)
The “Errors” category is the one you’ll want to pay the most attention to. To fix indexing errors:
- Check your sitemap and ensure you’ve entered the URLs of affected pages correctly. You can use a URL inspection tool to do this.
- If you have internal links pointing to different addresses, set up 301 redirects for them.
- If you have permanently deleted pages, keep all the internal links you’ve deleted as a 404, but delete them from your sitemap.
Repair XML Sitemap Problems
Just as a treasure map leads swashbucklers to treasure, your XML sitemap tells Google how to find your most important pages and, in turn, display them in the search results. You don’t necessarily need one for Google to index your site, but having one can speed up content discovery significantly.
Sitemap issues can cause search engines to have trouble finding your pages. Some common sitemap problems include:
- Missing pages. This may be because you’ve set the pages to “noindex” or changed the canonical URL to another URL.
- Not using the URL protocol (e.g., using HTTP instead of HTTPS). If you’re using WordPress, you can change this by going to “Admin,” “Settings,” and then “General.”
- Compression errors. When uncompressed, your sitemap file size shouldn’t exceed 50MB. How many pages should your sitemap include? Ideally, it shouldn’t contain more than 50,000 URLs.
Add a Schema Markup
Think of your markup as the language that search engines use to understand your site’s content. Search engines can’t see webpage elements like images as humans can, so they need markup to display the page properly to users.
If you have a markup, Google might display an image from your site in the search results, which can be enticing to users. Without a markup, it’ll show text instead. Adding a markup is helpful for both local and international SEO.
Explore Your Site’s Structure and Architecture
Your site architecture is the manner in which it’s laid out, including how your posts and pages are linked together. Essentially, it’s like the blueprint of a house.
A solid site structure offers benefits like the following:
- Provides intuitive navigation and encourages users to stay on your site longer
- Helps with internal linking and enables your pages to develop strong link equity
- Helps Google crawl and index your entire site
- Boosts topical authority by connecting multiple pages that are relevant to one another
Adjusting your site audit settings is the perfect time to make changes to your website structure. Follow these best practices for structured data:
- Ensure that your website is consistent from one page to the next.
- Model your structured data after top players in your industry. Find a website that you’d like to outrank and use its structure as inspiration.
- Make sure that your URLs are easy to type and remember. URLs ending in random letters and numbers are not good for search engine optimization.
- Ensure that users can get to any page on your site within no more than three or four clicks.
- Implement breadcrumbs to show users the path they’ve taken on your site. This will allow them to easily click back to a previous page.
- Use the pillar-cluster model. This model involves linking a parent page (the pillar) to child pages (the clusters). This structured data model effectively directs users to relevant content in an organic way.
Correct Broken Internal and External Links
If you’re wondering, “What is a technical SEO audit?” don’t forget about external and internal linking. External links are links from other pages to your site, while internal links are those that link together pages of your website. Both must be on point for your site to rank well in the search results.
Broken links are caused by:
- Deleted content
- Misspelled URLs
- Changes in your URL structure
- Geolocation or firewall restrictions
- Non-working plugins
Most commonly, bad links go to a 404 page. However, if the server can’t understand the URL, they can also go to a 400 Bad Request page. Regardless of where a broken link leads, it’s bad news for SEO.
You can use a site audit tool like Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics or Google Analytics to hunt down broken links easily. Go to “Reports,” “Engagement,” and then “Pages and Screens.” In the search bar, type “404” or “page not found.” The tool will show you a list of non-working links on your site.
Once you’ve found the links that need fixing, head to Google Search Console and go to “Pages.” At the bottom, click “Why pages aren’t indexed” and then “Not Found (404).” Click the URL you want to repair and then click “Inspect URL.” Google will tell you what’s wrong with the URL and give suggestions on how to fix it.
Audit Site and Page Speed
You probably don’t wait more than a few seconds for a page to load, and neither will your users. Page and site speed is especially important for users on mobile devices.
Cluttered pages and large images can slow your site to a crawl. It doesn’t matter how good your content is if users get impatient and leave.
There are many free and paid tools for checking page load times. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is one of the best. Simply enter the URL you want to check, and Google will tell you how long it takes to load.
Ideally, pages shouldn’t take longer than three seconds to load. If your site loads slower than you’d like, follow these tips:
- Compress large images, as well as your CSS and JavaScript files, to make your site mobile-friendly.
- Employ HTTP browser caching so users can quickly retrieve pages they’ve visited before.
- Limit the number of HTTP requests each page uses. Each HTTP request requires the browser to “talk” to the server, which increases loading time.
- Limit the number of external scripts. Too many can cause the browser to jump to the bottom of the page, requiring the user to scroll back up again.
Hunt Down Duplicate Content
You definitely don’t want duplicate pages on your site. If you have several page titles that are too similar to one another, Google won’t know which to index. As a result, both pages will lose any link juice they’ve built up.
The easiest way to fix duplicate content is by implementing 301 redirects. You could also permanently delete one of the pages, but this isn’t a good idea if that page has strong link juice.
In WordPress, the easiest way to perform a 301 redirect is to use a redirection plugin. You can also edit your .htaccess file, but this involves messing around in your site’s server, so this strategy is best for experienced webmasters only.
Check Your Crawl Budget
Your crawl budget, or crawl capacity limit, is the maximum number of connections Google’s bots can use to crawl your site. Google implements a crawl capacity limit to avoid overwhelming your server.
You won’t need to worry about a crawl budget if you own a small website. You’ll only need to pay attention to it if:
- Your site has 10,000+ pages and content that changes daily
- Your site has one million or more unique pages and content that changes weekly
- Many of your site’s URLs are classified as “Discovered – not currently indexed.”
Follow these best practices to avoid exceeding the crawl budget:
- Ensure that pages load quickly, which allows Google to crawl more of them.
- Keep sitemaps up to date.
- Use a 410 or 404 status code for pages that you’ve permanently removed.
- Use 301 redirects to consolidate duplicate content.
- Block pages that you don’t want to appear in the search results using the robots.txt file.
Take a Look at On-Page Technical Elements
On-page technical elements refer to elements such as:
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Internal links
We’ve already discussed internal links, so let’s go over your page’s title tag and meta description.
Both title tags and meta descriptions tell Google and its users what your page is about. The title tag is, naturally, your page’s title. It shows up as a blue link above the page’s snippet on the search results page.
The meta description is a snippet that explains in greater detail what users will find when they click on the page. This is your big chance to convince users that your page is worth clicking on, so make your meta descriptions as engaging as they can be.
Both title tags and meta descriptions should contain your main keyword. Keep your title tags short, ideally less than 60 characters, and your meta descriptions between 140 and 160 characters.
Has Your Site’s Performance Nosedived? Call Relentless Digital!
Now that you know the answer to “What is a technical SEO audit?” could you use a helping hand with technical SEO audits? Reach out to Relentless Digital or check out these great pest blog topics.
