Technical SEO Checklist – Complete Technical SEO Audit

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is a set of best practices that help you to improve your website's performance in search results. It includes everything from on-page optimization and content creation to technical implementation (such as site speed and crawl rate) and infrastructure setup (such as server configuration).

The Technical SEO Audit Process

• Identify potential issues with your website's server codes.
• Audit your server code for redirect chains or 404 errors that may prevent crawlers from accessing pages correctly.

The goal is to identify anything that could be causing any issues for crawlers or search engines that would prevent them from indexing all of the content on your website correctly.

How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit?

The best way to perform a technical SEO audit is by using a tool. You can find many of them on the internet, and they will help you in every step of your audit process.

The first thing you need to do is check all the pages on your website from the search engine's perspective.

This means that instead of checking each page with human eyes, you will use one or more tools to analyze web pages from an algorithm point-of-view. When we say "from an algorithm point-of-view," we mean that these tools look for errors, duplicate content, and broken links for them to be indexed by Google and other search engines like Bing or Yandex.

Auditing Your Website

Auditing your website is an essential part of the technical SEO checklist. This is where you'll find out if any issues need to be addressed, and it's a great chance to clean things up while you're at it.

Here are the steps for auditing your website:

Meta Tags

Review meta titles and descriptions with Keyword-Rich Meta Descriptions & Meta Title Tags.

Keywords aren't as important as they used to be, but meta descriptions still rank well in search engines like Bing/Yahoo!/Baidu, etc.

URL Structure

It's an essential part of your technical SEO audit.

What is a good URL structure?

A good URL typically has the following characteristics:

It is simple and easy to read, and it contains relevant keywords. The words in your URL should be recognizable to humans and search engines alike.

It includes elements that clarify where the page content is located on your website (e.g., http://example.com/technical-seo-checklist/).

These are called "slugs" or "permalinks," depending on what CMS you use (WordPress uses permalinks by default).

If you use subfolders for your URLs, they should contain words related to their content (e.g., http://example.com/sports/, not just http://example.com/).

Page Load Speed

Page load speed is a ranking factor.

The size of the page determines page load speed, the number of images and other elements on the page, and server response time.

It can affect bounce rates, conversions, and user experience.

Mobile Friendly Website

First and foremost, you must ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. Google has started penalizing websites that are not mobile-friendly.

Considering that more than half of internet users access the internet from their smartphones, optimizing your website for mobile users is vital.

Use Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool to check if your website is mobile-friendly or not: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Internal Linking Structure

1. Link to related content on your site.
2. Link to your internal search function.
3. Link to the sitemap page if you have one.
4. Link to the privacy policy page if you have one (or link directly to the legal docs section of your site).
5. Link to social media pages, including links from Facebook and Twitter and any others that may be relevant to your industry (e.g., Pinterest).

This also includes links from relevant blogs and news sites that mention or link back to you (or a specific piece of content on your site) in their posts or articles—these are great opportunities for internal linking!

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file that lists the pages of your website and helps search engines find them. Google does not require you to submit an XML Sitemap but does recommend it, so it's worth considering for your site, no matter what size it is.

Robots.txt File

A Robots.txt file is a text file used by search engine bots to crawl through your website. It's one of the most critical files on your site, yet many websites need to utilize its capabilities.

If you have a robots.txt file, it is essential to ensure that it is configured correctly, as this could cause significant issues for search engines and users alike.

A poorly configured robots.txt file will prevent search engines from crawling some pages on your site; this could lead to those pages being penalized or even removed from the index entirely (if no other links are pointing at them).

Canonical Tag Issue

A canonical tag is used to specify the preferred URL of a page. This tag is used to define the preferred URL of a page. It is used to define the preferred URL of a page.

Broken Links

Broken links are a common problem resulting from a URL structure change. When you change your site's structure, broken links appear because they need to be redirected appropriately.

This can hurt your SEO by lowering visitors' trust in your site and making it look like you need to know what you're doing as an SEO professional.

Broken links can be fixed by 301 redirects that point back to the correct page or resource on your website. The easiest way to find all of them is with Google Search Console, which will alert you when users visiting from specific pages on your site have found content that doesn't exist anymore (and provide statistics about how frequently these visits happen).

Redirects - 301 Code

The most common status code is 301. A 301 means that the requested resource has been permanently moved to another location.

For example, if you want to move your homepage from http://example.com/homepage1 to http://example.com/homepage2, you need a permanent redirect for this process.

Structured Data Error & Schema Markup Tags

Structured data is a way to add more information about your content so that search engines can understand it better.

It also helps users find what they want when using search engines. JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is the most common structured data type.

To check if you have any errors, use the Structured Data Testing Tool: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool.

Schema Markup Tags are used to provide additional information on a page and help both users and Google understand what the page is about in more detail.

This technical SEO checklist will help you in your efforts to improve technical SEO and make your website search engine ready. You can use this checklist for auditing your website for any issues, fixing them, and ultimately getting a higher ranking in Google.

Conclusion

The technical SEO checklist is a valuable tool for any website owner who wants to improve the site's performance and ranking. The best way to validate your SEO efforts are working is by using an SEO tool. We recommend using SEMrush, which enables you to audit your website and track its progress over time fully.

My name is Mandeep Singh, and I am a blogger.