Technical audit checklist pdf

Making your website look aesthetically strong takes a great deal of time. But what takes even longer is having to trawl back and optimise your H1 tags and keyword focuses so that Google actually pays attention to your website. The main aim of an SEO technical audit is to help you determine whether there are any technical issues that are preventing your website from performing as it should.

It allows you to optimise your website as best you can, so that you can get the best possible ranking results. You should aim to conduct quarterly technical SEO audits to ensure your site is optimised to its full potential.

Some actions will be more important than others, but they are nevertheless all required for a good performing website. Here at The Content Works, we're London-based website audit specialists. Our in-house audit process covers more than different aspects of your website, from Technical, to Ranking, Backlinks, UX and more. Drop us a line on if you have any questions. This technical SEO checklist goes through the five key factors to consider when carrying out a SEO technical audit of your website:.

Are you performing a technical SEO audit? We can take care of it for you. Quick SEO audits are a good start, but our in-depth point checklist, part of our technical SEO audit service, will really show you what's working and what can be improved. Just give us a call on 55 99 or drop us an email - we'd be glad to help. For example, if the audit is to be done to find out about the various systems and applications of the IT program, then a system and apps audit needs to be carried out.

Step 2: Determine the Object of the Audit The next step of this process is to determine the object of the audit. In other words, the object of the audit will determine why you will be conducting the audit.

For instance, if you are conducting an innovative comparison audit, the aim will be to establish which innovative techniques are working better.

Step 3: Determine the Scope of the Audit Determining the audit scope is very important as the auditor will need to recognize the IT environment for the audit program and its components to determine the tools needed to conduct a thorough evaluation.

A specific scope assists the auditor in assessing the test points related to the purpose of the audit. Step 4: Do the Pre-audit Planning Pre-audit preparation and planning involve activities such as performing a risk assessment , defining regulatory compliance criteria and determining the resources needed for the audit to be performed.

This step is absolutely necessary to make sure that the actual audit process goes well smoothly without errors. Search Console allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their site to Google.

If you regularly go through a technical SEO audit checklist then you can always check for manual actions here. Usually manual actions only happen because of bad-faith attempts to manipulate the Google search index or to improve SEO through black-hat means. If you find that your site has a manual action then your immediate next step should be to fix it. Fortunately Search Console will tell you what the penalty is for.

If your site has no manual actions then you will see a green check mark instead. Google announced its Mobile-First Indexing in November of and later in March of they announced that the entirety of the web would be moved to mobile first indexing by the end of This new strategy means that a well-designed mobile version of your site is important for long-term and continued SEO relevance.

Google claims that mobile sites do not have a ranking advantage over non-mobile sites, but specifically that the quality of mobile-sites will affect ranking in mobile search results. If you have a mobile version of your site which you definitely should!

Mobile friendliness is very multi-faceted and includes a wide range of variables too many to completely go over here but the Mobile-Friendly Test tool from Google is the simplest and one of the best ways of determining how Google perceives the mobile version of a site.

A simple way to check is to change the size of your web browser window to check for reflexive formatting a viewport tag that automatically adjusts when being resized. Here is another checklist item for auditing technical SEO on mobile, one of many tools Google provides marketers to audit their technical set-up, but this one is designed specifically for mobile.

Visually inspect your site on a mobile device or by using the Mobile Friendly Test Tool. Retry with another URL, check on an actual mobile device, or move on to the next step in our technical SEO audit checklist guide. Finally, if you want to confirm mobile friendliness as part of your technical SEO audit then you can also use Search Console. Each of these should be something to watch out for as part of your website technical auditing checklist.

The Lighthouse tool emulates a smartphone using cellular data to load your page — this way it actually simulates how your site will load over a slow and unreliable mobile connection. The Lighthouse report will share lots of the same information that you can find using the Mobile Friendly Test tool, or Search Console.

In Search Console, select Coverage from the left side menu. Large drops in the number of indexed pages might indicate problems with robots. They might also be a symptom of other issues such as s, or improper redirects. Check for s during your technical SEO audit checklist by scanning your site for s or using some of the free tools available to you.

Scroll down below this report and check for any that are listed as such because they are showing to Googlebot as You might also choose to use software or an SEO site analysis tool to crawl your site to automatically find s.

Many SEOs are aware that the robots. This means, by blocking bots from certain sections of your site, you can make sure that only pages you want to be indexed are getting added to search engines. The first step for your technical SEO audit is to make sure your robots. As part of your technical SEO audit checklist, our guide suggests that if you do have any of the Google bots listed here you make sure that you are not inadvertently blocking them from important directories.

You should also make sure that important theme files are not being blocked either, as this can negatively affect the ability of search engine bots to render your pages correctly. Finally, your technical SEO website audit checklist should include making sure that you are not blocking other Google bots as well.

Unless you have a specific reason to prevent them from looking at certain areas of your site. Indexing status can also be checked via a simple site command. Performing a site command in Google allows you to determine that the site is being indexed properly as well as the approximate number of pages being indexed. However if the number is extremely low it may represent an issue with your indexing — if the number is too high it could mean an issue with your canonicalization is allowing duplicate URLs to be indexed.

The next step in our technical SEO audit guide is to make sure you have your sitemap set-up and submitted properly. A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages and files on a site along with the relationship between them. This file acts as a list of pages which can be crawled by Google to more easily index a site. For your technical SEO, the only way to know for certain is to just submit it directly to Google.

In Search Console, select Sitemaps from the left side menu. Make note of whether or not a sitemap has been submitted and check the date of submission.

For both desktop and mobile search rankings Google has announced that page speed is a ranking factor.