You are investing money in building a website. You could be working on creating quality content on an ongoing basis, investing in pay-per-click advertisements and even creating social media buzz. But despite all this, you aren’t seeing the kind of results that should be expected based on the efforts put into your digital marketing strategy.
Before putting more money into either of these elements of digital marketing, it’s important for you to know what is really holding back your website. This is what a technical website audit will tell you, and it is the most important step before implementing a full-blown digital marketing plan.
What a Technical Website Audit Actually Is
A technical website audit is a holistic analysis of all the factors involved in search engine crawling, indexing, interpretation, and ranking. This type of website audit focuses on all the elements that help or hinder SEO efforts in general.
If this foundation isn’t in place, all your efforts towards creating high-quality content and doing keyword research are in vain, regardless of how much time and effort you put into it. Search engines aren’t able to rank things they are unable to find, understand, and verify. With a technical website audit, you will know what stands in their way and needs to be sorted out.
What a Comprehensive Technical Audit Examines
Site crawlability and indexing: Search engines access and read your site using the website's link architecture and perform a crawl. Technical SEO auditing involves identifying crawl problems such as broken links, redirects, etc., which keep the search engines from accessing crucial website pages, or waste the crawlers' time on pages that should never be indexed in the first place.
Page load time and core web vitals: Page experience factors such as load speed, visual stability, and interactivity have been confirmed by Google as direct ranking factors. Websites that take too long to load are frustrating for users and penalized in search results. Technical website audit will analyze the load time across multiple devices and identify what causes slow speed that hurts your rankings and conversions.
Website responsiveness on mobile devices: Mobile phones now account for most of the search traffic. A website that does not work well on mobile screens is hurting itself in two ways - losing rankings and business at the same time.
URL structure and site architecture: The way your website is structured and links between pages determine how search engines interpret the relevance and authority of your pages. Site architecture mistakes result in the loss of authority and confuse search engines crawlers in such a manner that affects rankings negatively on the whole site.
Duplicate content and canonical problems: If the content of a certain page exists on several different URLs, search engines do not know which one to rank; hence, their authority is divided. An extensive website technical audit helps to find all instances of duplicate content and suggests a canonicalization solution.
Structured data and schema markup: With proper schema markup, the search engine will be able to better understand the content you've published and provide rich snippets, improving the visibility and the number of clicks on your site through the search results. We’ll see what is currently being done regarding schema implementation and where we can improve it.
HTTPS/SSL security status: Having an insecure website is terrible for SEO performance because it's going to send the wrong message both to the search engine and to your visitors. It’s going to check whether or not HTTPS/SSL is properly implemented across the whole website.
What You Receive From a Quality Technical Audit
A good technical website audit will not come up with an unmanageable list of all the issues, small and large, equally important and without any prioritization for solving them. Instead, it will provide you with a concrete action plan on which items need to be addressed first, in which order, and how much better you can expect the website to perform once they are sorted out.
You should look for such audit providers that present the findings clearly, prioritize the recommendations by business value and are willing to talk you through the report to help you see what the numbers mean for your website today.
Fix the Foundation Before Building Higher
Any content you generate for search engine optimization, any links you build, or any campaigns you launch will work much more effectively on a technically well-made website than on one plagued by various technical problems. The technical site audit should not be considered the end of the process but the start of it.
If you need reliable, practical and truly insightful services of technical site audits for your website which would help you reach your maximum potential through organic methods, Incinque Agency offers you such services.
