Technical SEO Audit Service

A technical SEO audit is quickly becoming the most important form of SEO audit for any organization wanting their site to rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). Gain Changer’s enterprise SEO services will provide SEO audits with unparalleled levels of detail, many different checkpoints, and will provide you with the information needed to make a clear roadmap for greater SEO optimization.

 

Without a full and semi-regular technical SEO audit, the chances of you achieving your SERP ranking goals lies somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible. It would be like trying to navigate a maze in the dark. The knowledge that a Gain Changer audit will bring you is therefore invaluable to improving your ranking.

What is a Technical SEO Audit?

A technical SEO audit is a way of identifying optimization problems with your site. It is a way of seeing how healthy your site is – what it is doing well, what it is failing at and what needs to be improved.

A technical SEO is not a fix or solution for your site, it is simply the first step. Albeit, a necessary first step: issues can’t be rectified until they’ve been identified.

Once the issues have been diagnosed in an audit, the informed strategy of improving your site’s rankings can be developed and implemented.

Technical SEO audits should be executed on a semi-regular basis. Full, in-depth audits should, at the least, be an annual occurrence. If the health of your site is not maintained, then any initial improvements will be lost.

How to Perform an SEO Audit

Whilst there are a variety of opinions on how to perform an audit, the research and expertise we’ve amassed at Gain Changer ensures that ours is, frankly, one of the best methods.

Integral to our method is knowledge of the audience. Knowing who a site is aimed at, and who actually interacts with it, allows an audit to be focused and relevant. Moreover, the aim and goals of the client are also integral to our audits – with established goals our audits can focus on highlighting the areas which are most frustrated by poor optimization. Together these allow us to conduct highly-focused, detailed audits, tailored to the needs of clients.

At Gain Changer, as a techncial SEO Agency, our audits cover a significant number of checkpoints, but here are a few to give you an idea:

Checkpoint 1 – Robots.txt

All sites will need to use Robots.txt files, as these circumscribe which pages can be crawled by the search engine robots. These files are one of the first things accessed by any web-crawling robot (like Googlebot) at your site. It will either allow them access to certain pages or disallow them access to certain others.

 

Auditing Robots.txt files means the crawl budget of your site (i.e. how much resource the crawling bot dedicates to your page) will be maximized. If you have too few Robots.txt files, then crawling applications will waste their time on unnecessary pages. If you have too many, then key data will be out of reach of the crawl.

Checkpoint 2 - Sitemap

The sitemap for your website is incredibly important, as it both allows search engine bots to better crawl your site and allows users to navigate more freely. Auditing a sitemap will allow for any redirects or defunct URLs to be removed. It will also allow for URL entries into the sitemap to be kept below the 50,000 that Google will crawl.

 

Moreover, it will allow for better penetration into pages of your site that have got less attention. The sitemap allows for search engine bots to uncover new pages on your site.

 

Sitemaps can either be in XML or HTML. XML is the most essential version, as it can be provided to Google directly. Nevertheless, HTML ones can still improve your site.

 

Checkpoint 3 – Keyword Placement

Keywords have always been a means of increasing the ranking of your site, but merely packing a page full of keywords (and the sematic bedfellows) is outdated. In fact, it will most likely lower your ranking.

 

Auditing the placement of keywords will ensure that they are in the right places, the correct number of times and that the content is written for other humans (not search engines).

 

In addition to keyword placement, a technical SEO audit will also identify pages that have very minimal content. If a page has very few words on it, then it will serve very little purpose (be of no use to your site visitors) and will be identified as a clear attempt at keyword packing.

Checkpoint 4 – Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is a very common technical SEO problem for many sites. And, as sites grow larger, this problem can easily become exacerbated.

Content can be frequently duplicated in the body of a page itself, in the meta titles and the meta description, or domain names themselves.

A technical SEO audit will find the duplicate content that needs to be removed, modified, or blocked by a Robot.txt file. This will identify those pages and parts of pages which are causing Google confusion over which to rank in the SERP.

Checkpoint 5 – Site Speed

The speed of your site has become an increasingly significant contributor to your site ranking, as Google has started to become more focused on user experience.

 

Moreover, the speed of your site greatly impacts the bounce rate of visitors. As Google highlights, a load time between 1 to 3 seconds increases the probability of visitors leaving by 31%. Push this time to 5 seconds, and the bounce probability skyrockets to 90%.

Checkpoint 6 – Redirects

Redirects occur when you update your site, which is often very regularly. These occur because the request that is sent to the webserver somehow fails. The most common redirect is the 404, which happens when a page has been deleted.

 

Redirects are bad for your site user as they create an unpleasant user experience, and they’re a drain of your crawl budget. Each redirect link that a crawling bot follows is a deduction in your crawl budget, and, if there are enough redirects, then a bot will simply stop following them.

 

A technical SEO audit will identify these dead links and chains of redirections.

On-page SEO Audit

The on-page aspect of the SEO audit focuses on those aspects which are, to put it simply, on the pages of your organization’s site. These are things like the content of the pages, the keywords used, the headings or titles, or the meta-description.

 

The on-page audit is crucial to a technical SEO audit, because, without quality on-page content, your site will never gain any authority or trustworthiness.

Off-page SEO Audit​

The off-page aspect of the SEO audit focuses on the areas that do not occur on the pages of your site itself. They are ‘off’ your site, so to speak, and occur on other pages you don’t own. The off-page SEO audit revolves mostly around quality backlinks and references to your site. The more backlinks that can be generated, and which occur on quality, high-ranking sites, the greater the chances of higher rankings for your site.

 

The off-page audit is an essential part of the whole auditing process. Without it, although your site may have good content, it will fail to be recognized as such by Google.

Technical SEO

The technical side of SEO audit focuses on identifying optimizations that make your site easier for Google to crawl and index. This focuses on things like the site’s architecture, your sitemap, the load speed of your site, and your dead/redirect pages.

The technical aspect of the audit is the most frequently overlooked part; however, it is quickly becoming the most essential. If the mechanics of your site are faulty or inhibit proper crawling, then no matter how good your content is, your site will always get in your way.

Why Choose Gain Changer for your Technical SEO Audit?

The question remains: why should you use Gain Changer’s technical SEO audit services? The answer: our customer focused services, our enthusiasm for SEO and our expertise.

 

Gain Changer will provide you and your organization with incredibly thorough SEO audits. In addition to those mentioned above, our SEO audits have a large number of checkpoints that enable detailed analysis, and, ultimately, a clear strategy for improvement. Our methodology allows us to uncover areas for improvement that have been previously overlooked. Unlike other technical SEO audits, our process will reveal optimizations that are frequently left out, making the formerly inscrutable issues clear and fixable.

 

In addition, our services are always offered in a timely and transparent manner. We shall set out a clear timeline for your audit and will be there to help with any queries you may have along the way – which you can find out more about at our contact page.

 

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