What does a technical SEO audit involve?
Search engines are only able to include your website in search results if they are able to crawl, index and contextually understand the pages. So, our audit analyses everything from the structure and navigation, to speed and content of your website. This generates a report to provide you with strategy and actionable recommendations to resolve any technical issues.
Crawlability & Indexation
We check that search engines can reach and process every important page of your website and review any potential indexation issues. We review on-site duplicate content issues, including recommendations for content consolidation and identifying duplicate content. We also review any XML sitemaps and make recommendations for effective implementation. Alongside this, the team considers any crawl errors encountered, and checks the correct response codes are being served.
Website Architecture
A well-structured, logical and easy to navigate website not only helps users, and drives stronger commercial performance, but also lets search engines index, understand and display content in search results. That’s why, from adjustments to navigation menus, through to internal linking and content theming, we review and make recommendations for clear site structure and hierarchy. Then we ensure user journeys aren’t impacted by complex pathing, navigational dead ends, or broken links.
On-page ranking factors and search presentation
A number of characteristics can help search engines understand the purpose and relevance of the individual pages of your website. Our team recommend site-wide structure of title tags, helping you create engaging meta descriptions. We review site-wide URL structure and URL parameters, alongside structured data (such as schema.org) for site exposure with enhanced search results and more engaging ‘rich cards’ or ‘rich snippets. We also check Google Search Console for any HTML issues.
Risk Factors
There are a number of risk factors that should be analysed to mitigate a search ranking penalty being applied to your website. Although usually imposed for legitimate reasons, often a brand is not aware of activity conducted by a third party or even a potentially malicious competitor. We analyse websites for any large quantity of content that search engines might consider ‘automatically generated’ and thus ‘low quality’, as well as checking link profiles to identify any evidence of large-scale ‘bad links’. We also address other risk factors, including such as sneaky redirects, cloaking, hidden text or doorway pages.