Enterprise-level companies require big websites. Maintaining a scalable and reliable web presence is crucial to staying competitive, even at the enterprise level. Likewise, an inadequately optimized website can hurt large corporations, causing the loss of millions in potential revenues. A technical SEO audit can help prevent these losses.
Search engine optimization is also beneficial for enterprise-level businesses to boost online visibility and preserve their ranking on search engines. But with thousands or even millions of web pages, optimizing these sites requires extensive time and coordination.
The techniques used for small-scale SEO won’t work for enterprise-level sites. Instead, large corporations need strategies to ensure proper optimization, which is the key to achieving successful conversions.
Start the SEO Technical Audit With a Checklist
A complete and thorough audit inspects many things in different areas. You might miss the necessary steps if you don’t keep track of the process. This is why one of the essential aspects of an audit is keeping a checklist. Your checklist must be understandable, productive, and comprehensive.
An understandable list allows you to delegate tasks. Your teammates don’t know how to read your intuition, so it’s best to be clear about what you want them to do during a technical audit.
Your checklist must allow you to be productive. If you design your checklist to include all the essential tasks, you can easily transition from one task to another. Finally, a comprehensive list lets you efficiently discover all technical site problems.
How to Perform a Site Audit in 7 Steps
Since you already know the importance of conducting a site audit, it’s time to learn how to do it in these easy-to-follow steps.
1. Choose the Right SEO Tools
Conducting a technical site audit is akin to going to war — you must equip yourself with the right ammunition to hit your target. So, start your audit by finding the SEO tools to use. You can choose from the following trusted and reliable tools:
- DeepCrawl
- SEMrush
- Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog has a free plan offering 500 free URL crawls, so you should try this app out.
2. Start Crawling Your Website
Check the quick start guide for the specific technical SEO audit tools you’re using. It will give you an idea of how to start your first crawl. You will be required to set up your spider configuration. The crawl could typically take a few hours, depending on the website size.
Suppose you’re crawling less than 500 URLs. In that case, you can expect the process to finish sooner. Note that crawls take up a huge chunk of your time, so it’s good practice to start crawling as soon as possible.
If you’re using Screaming Frog, you must access its PageSpeed Insights Integration tab. This app feature can help you access your website’s page speed details. With this, you don’t need to enter URLs one by one using technical SEO site audit tools like PageSpeed.
If you get the app’s paid version, you can integrate Google Search Console and Google Analytics into your reports. These integrations provide additional convenience, especially when reviewing your SEO audit.
3. Analyze the Generated Crawl Report
Check out the results as soon as your website crawl is complete. The reports will give you insights into the following:
- Structured data: This insight will capture all structured data-related errors and warnings.
- Sitemaps: This part of the report highlights the missing URLs from your sitemap.
- Response codes: This aspect of the crawl report highlights redirected and broken links.
- Canonicals: With URL tags, you can determine which of the pages are original and should rank better in search results.
- Security: This critical technical audit SEO factor helps determine and fix HTTP URLs, forms on these URLs, or both.
- Hreflang: You need a report to fix URLs with missing x-default, canonical tags, and incorrect region and language codes.
It’s best practice to export your generated reports so you don’t have to re-open your SEO tool to recheck the results. The good thing about most SEO audit tools is that you can open the reports in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.
4. Investigate the Issues Raised in the Reports
The next step is to go over Google Search Console. This technical audit tool offers valuable business analytics data. Aside from that, you will also get insights into how Google views your website. With these reports, you can pinpoint issues related to the mobile-friendliness of your site and other crawl errors.
Here’s a list of the specific reports you can access through the Google Search Console. These reports will help make your audit easier:
- Core web vitals
- Mobile usability
- Sitemaps
- Security issues
5. Go Over Your Google Analytics Setup
Aside from Google Search Console, you can also use Google Analytics to conduct a technical SEO audit report. Suppose you decide to use this tool. In that case, you must start by double-checking your current setup. Follow these steps to check:
- Change from master view to preferred filtered view.
- Input your Google Analytics credentials to log in to your account.
- Go to admin and choose “view.”
- Select “view settings.”
- As soon as you see the dashboard with view settings, enable “Bot Filtering.” This function will keep Google Analytics from tracking spider and bot hits.
- Once you complete the setup, go to Realtime Report.
- Confirm that the tag fires for your Google Analytics.
These technical SEO site audit steps are crucial in report generation, so invest time in it. Suppose you create a new webpage on your website and visit it. In that case, your site visit might register in the Realtime Report. Otherwise, you might need to ask a developer to debug the site error.
6. Narrow Down the Technical Issues That Need Fixes
Once you’re done investigating the technical issues of your website, start organizing and prioritizing fixes. You might want to work with a developer to address these issues. More often than not, these errors happen on the backend.
It’s best to have a website audit checklist to help you prioritize your fixes based on this order:
- Tracking
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Security
- Response code
- Mobile-friendliness
- Structured data matters
- Page speed
To streamline the process, organize and track the completion of these fixes in an Excel document or Google Sheets. The more site audits you conduct, the less you’ll find these higher-priority issues.
As a result, you might spend less time dealing with mobile, indexing, and crawling issues. Instead, you can spend more time improving your page speed and dealing with other critical tasks.
7. Plot the Schedule for Your Next Technical SEO Site Audit
Since you’ve already completed your first-ever audit for technical SEO, the next step is plotting the schedule for the succeeding SEO audits. You must be proactive in monitoring your sites for SEO-related issues. You can maximize and protect your performance with a timely and efficient audit.
Get Audit Help and Expert Guidance from the Pros
It’s good practice to know how to conduct a site audit yourself. It helps you stay on top of your website and business. However, if you need help and guidance since you find these tasks overwhelming, Clicta Digital has your back.
We’ve been in this industry long enough to understand the importance of conducting a timely and efficient technical SEO audit. Our team can help you improve your website’s performance.
Don’t hesitate. Call us today for a free case evaluation.
