As a website owner, you want your site to be as visible as possible to potential visitors. In today’s digital age, one of the primary ways to achieve this visibility is through a high ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). As such, optimizing a website for search engines is crucial.
One critical aspect of website optimization is technical search engine optimization (SEO) audits. Technical SEO audits refer to a set of tasks performed to ensure your website is well-organized, user-friendly, and SEO-friendly. Performing these tasks can help boost your website’s ranking on SERPs.
Here are some must-have technical SEO audit steps that can help increase your website performance and position on search engines:
1. Check Your Website’s Loading Time
One of the critical factors that can influence your website’s ranking is loading time. A website that takes too long to load, regardless of whether it’s on desktop or mobile, can harm your SEO score. To improve your website’s loading time, you can reduce the size of your images, web fonts, and other media files, optimize your code, and use a content distribution network (CDN).
2. Analyze Your Website’s Structure and Navigation
Your website’s structure and navigation should be user-friendly and intuitive. This essential aspect of technical SEO audit ensures that visitors can navigate your website easily without getting lost. You should have a clear hierarchy that allows easy navigation, and your URLs should be structured correctly.
3. Conduct a Keyword Research
Keyword research is vital in any SEO audit. It helps identify the keywords and phrases your site should rank for. By researching your industry-specific and location-based keywords, you can identify the phrases and keywords searched for by potential visitors, and work on optimizing them to improve your ranking.
4. Analyze Your Website’s On-Page Elements
On-page elements, such as title tags, alt text descriptions, headings, and meta descriptions, play a crucial role in website ranking. The optimization of these elements can help search engines understand your content better and improve your site’s visibility. Make sure your website contains relevant, clear, and informative meta descriptions, title tags, and headers.
5. Review Your Website’s Internal and External Links
The links on and to your website are crucial to your SEO success. Internal links help search engines understand your site structure, while external links improve the authority of your website. You should ensure that all links on your website are working correctly and that broken links are removed. You should also seek to earn external links from reputable, relevant sources to improve your website’s authority and ranking.
Conclusion
Technical SEO audit is a critical task in website optimization. Without these technical tasks, your content may go unnoticed despite your vast body of work. By performing these must-have technical SEO audit steps, you can help increase your website ranking, drive qualified traffic to your site, and lead to sales and revenue growth.