Conducting a website audit regularly is very important for every online business. Don’t wait until your website ranking is dropped and you lost customers. At least take a look at some common factors in a scheduled time.
In this post we are going to mention top 10 things that you need to check when conducting a technical audit of your website.
- Check your Website’s Mobile Friendliness:
There are two main reasons why you need a mobile friendly website.
- More that 60% searches are made using mobile. If your website is not compatible with mobile devices, your pages are not going to rank.
- Google is now using mobile first indexing that means they will look for the mobile version of a page to index and ranking purpose.
You can use this tool: – https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly to check your website is mobile friendly or not.
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- Check the URL redirects
Different versions of a website can be indexed on Google if they are not redirected properly.
There are 4 types of versions of each website.
- https://www.example.com
- https://example.com
- http://www.example.com
- http://example.com
For users all the users are same but Google will treat them completely individual website. So, all these URLs should redirect to the desired version.
You can check redirects manually by opening them in a browser. If all the URLs redirects to the same version then it is ok.
- Check the loading speed
A decade back Google announced that they will take the site speed as a signal to ranking factors. Another statistic reported that more than 39% visitors leave the page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
So, check your website’s speed carefully when auditing the site. How to do it?
Use Google’s insight tool to find out your pages HTML related issues. Fix those to get a fast-loading website.
Test your speed by using tools like GTMetrix and discover the reasons why your website is slow. Not only homepage, check other popular pages too.
Take a look at the below things that generally slow down a website: –
- Huge size images.
- Unoptimized cache.
- Poor hosting plan.
- Check your total indexed pages
If you found the number of pages indexed in Google is more than you expected, then take a look at the indexed pages. Definitely you will find some unwanted pages are indexed there. Cleaning those pages can boost your other pages ranking. Because Google already stated, publishing a lot of content doesn’t make your site better.
Also, it helps to better audit your site if there are no unnecessary pages. Here is some example of such unnecessary pages.
- Theme templates.
- Default theme contents.
- Search result pages.
- Tag & Category pages.
Check the sitemap, if there is any unwanted page type mentioned then remove them from the sitemap and upload the sitemap again. Also, you can block restrict those pages from indexing by disallowing them in your robots.txt file.
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- Check Indexing issues
If your target pages are not indexed then all the efforts will be in vain. Check webmaster search console dashboard crawling section. You may find some important URLs are not indexed. You will notice the reason why those URLs are not crawled by Google.
One of the common reasons is no-index tag on those specific pages. After fixing the issue you can validate the fix on search console. The URLs will be in pending status until the Google bot visit your site and trying to index those pages.
- Check your on-page SEO status
You can’t deny the fact that on-page SEO is the most important thing when the topic comes to ranking. If you have a large website with product pages, then it is not possible to examine all the pages manually.
Different tools are available that can help you in this purpose. Things that you need to check mainly are mentioned below:
- Duplicate Meta description, title and H1 tag.
- Long Meta description, title & URL.
- Too short Meta description, title & URL.
- Missing Meta description, focus keyword, alt text.
- Proper use of keywords in Meta description & title.
- External links of your pages.
- Broken Images.
- Duplicate pages without canonical.
- Check your backlinks and Anchors
After the on-page if any factor has a contribution on page ranking that is backlinks. It still matters. Use tools like AHRF, SEMrush or Moz to analyze your backlinks.
If you use AHREF or MOZ then sort the backlinks depending on DR and DA. Keep your close eye on low DA and DR Backlinks. Mark the poor and spammy links among them. Also, you can use SEMrush’s toxic score to separate the spammy links.
Collect all the spammy links and submit a disavow file in Google. If you never done disavow before then read this article.
Another thing to check carefully is your backlinks anchor profile. A healthy anchor profile is a combination of branded, generic, exact match and LSI type of anchors. Maximum percentage of promotional anchors is an indication of spammy backlink profile.
- Check the brokenexternal linksand backlinks
Your pages should not contain any broken link. It is one of the reasons of bad user experience. Find out the broken links and fix them.
Also, there may be some good quality broken backlinks. Before building new links try to fix this thing.
If you have deleted or changed some pages URL before then there is a big chance of having broken backlinks. Redirect those broken pages to the new and relevant URLs.
- Check Schema markup setup
Did you know rich snippet result can increase your visitors dramatically? No matter you is a product seller, service provider or a blog owner, having an organized schema markup for every targeted page is very important.
Check your pages here (https://search.google.com/test/rich-results) to know your page is already eligible for rich result or not. If there is any field missing then update the data in your GTM or other plugin where you have setup your markup data.
- Check your Competitors
This is another important thing to do when conducting a website audit. By analyzing your competitor, you can explore the reasons why you are behind them. Here are some items you need to compare with your competitor:
- Targeted keywords of your competitor.
- Backlinks of your competitor.
- Content quality of your competitor.
