Carrying out a technical SEO audit: the 9-point method for a high-performance website

The technical SEO audit of a website is a process that can be carried out at different times in the life of a website: creation, migration, redesign... or when its performance needs to be optimised.

How do you go about identifying the areas that need to be optimised? What key criteria should be observed to identify areas for improvement? And what tools should you use to carry out these technical checks?

Discover all the steps to follow in an SEO audit in order to improve your search engine ranking and, ultimately, your conversions!

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What is a technical SEO audit?

What is an SEO audit? Definition

A technical SEO audit is an analysis of a website based on multiple technical and structural criteria, with a view to its optimisation.

It is the first step in any SEO approach, and may involve the following main areas of verification:

• indexability
• architecture
• web performance
• user experience
• microdata,
• international,
• accessibility.

Why carry out an SEO audit? Objectives

Carrying out a technical SEO audit serves to :

• identify the technical blocking factors that are impacting your ranking on Google (which accounts for 90% of Internet users), and on search engines in general;
• identify practical, operational solutions to improve your site's performance.

☝️ The technical SEO audit differs from the semantic SEO audit, which aims to analyse the quality of content and its interconnections.

This approach has positive effects for your site, which will gain :

• visibility on search engines
• in traffic
• quality of user experience
• and, ideally, conversions.

Technical audit and page indexing

As a reminder, the presence of a site's pages in Google's index is essential if you want to exist on the Internet.

Only 10% of web content is indexed by Google.

💡 Indexing is the process followed by a search engine to give visibility to content.

From the indexing phase to the capture of traffic that can lead to conversions, a URL will follow the following stages:

1. Creation of the URL - page with content ;
2. Crawling of the URL by Googlebot;
3. Whether or not the URL is added to Google's index, with a hidden "score" assigned to the page during the indexing phase;
4. Whether or not the page is positioned on certain queries, depending on the quality score;
5. Generation of visits (or traffic) to the positioned page;
6. Conversion of visitors.

How do you carry out an SEO audit?

The prerequisites for carrying out a technical SEO audit

• Identify the problem at the origin of your SEO audit. Why is it needed? For example
  • because of a loss of traffic following an update or production launch,
  • following an algorithm update (e.g. Speed Update),
  • as part of a site migration (redirection plan), etc.
    
    
• Define the scope that the site audit will cover, bearing in mind that the technique serves the other two pillars of SEO: content and popularity. This involves determining the nature of each action to be taken:
  • the technical SEO criteria to be analysed are mainly on-site, i.e. on the site itself;
  • the off-site parameters are more likely to come into play during a netlinking audit;
  • meshing and structure, which combine technical and semantic aspects.

The tools needed for a technical SEO audit

To carry out a technical SEO audit, you can perform the analysis yourself using specific SEO audit tools such as :

• a crawler (SEMrush, Ahrefs, DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, SEO Spider),
• a log analyser (GoogleBot, Screaming Frog, Oncrawl),
• Google Search Console,
• an Analytics account.

Secondly, you can also call on the expertise of a professional, such as an SEO consultant or an internal resource. This person will be able to interpret and use all this information to propose a prioritised action plan and give you the best ROI.

☝️ A technical SEO audit is essential in all cases, but an inventory to better understand your specific context is essential in order to determine how to proceed and prioritise the various aspects to be studied.

Technical SEO audit methodology

The 3 steps to a technical SEO audit

Step 1: audit the SERP

The SERP, an acronym for Search Engine Result Page, is the search engine results page. By analysing the results obtained after entering your keywords, you can directly identify the content that is competing with you or discover new opportunities for your positioning.

By studying the positioning of your competitors, you can assess the feasibility of your content and determine which keywords are best to position yourself on.

⚒️ You can use tools such as Ahrefs, MozBar and SEMrush.

Step 2: Analyse the performance of your keywords

By carrying out a keyword audit , you can check that your keywords are accessible and relevant. An effective keyword must not be too competitive for your site or page to rank. It must also be carefully chosen to be consistent with what you are trying to sell. It must be both profitable and have good conversion potential.

To track the performance of your keywords, you need to monitor page traffic according to their keywords. This will enable you to identify which pages need to be optimised, which have strong potential and which are experiencing a drop in traffic.

⚒️ You can use tools such as Google Search Console or SEMrush.

Step 3: Audit your content

A content analysis is an inventory of all the content on your site that is indexed by search engines. This inventory should enable you to identify the actions you need to take:

• improve
• maintain
• or delete.

You need to analyse your content and assess whether it is at risk of being penalised by the search engines. There are 3 major criteria to watch out for

1. quality (spelling, grammar),
2. irrelevance (consistency with the theme and your keywords)
3. and duplication.

Your content must be unique, because search engines penalise duplicate content. The Google Panda algorithm filters content when it is indexed, and there are repercussions for your SEO if your pages contain too much content that is deemed to be duplicated. It is therefore not advisable to copy and paste content from different pages on your site.

However, it is possible to set up a canonical tag to indicate to search engines the reference page for a piece of content.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domaine.com/page-de-reference/" />

This tag is used to inform that a page is very similar to a page that is the reference on the site. The reference page will be considered more qualitative and pushed by the search engine compared to other pages.

9 points to look out for during your technical SEO analysis

The technical SEO audit allows you above all to discover the errors on your site that may be preventing it from ranking well and generating traffic.

You must crawl your entire site to generate a report identifying the technical errors.

⚒️ The crawl is made possible by tools such as SEMrush, Screaming Frog and OnCrawl.

Here are the 9 points to analyse to ensure that your technical SEO audit is effective:

1 - Page indexing

A website can only generate organic traffic if its pages are indexed in Google. You therefore need to check that your site is correctly indexed.

To ensure that your pages are indexed, the configuration of your robots.txt file is essential, as incorrect configuration of the file can prevent your site from being properly indexed.

The robots.txt file is a text file used to guide the exploration of your website by search engine robots. It is used to control the indexing of your pages by inviting or not inviting the robots to explore them: depending on their indexing, the robot will either visit them or not.

To encourage indexing, your site must also have a sitemap, i.e. a file that lists all the files on your site and the relationships between the various files.

👉 To access your sitemap, you can type /sitemap.xml after the URL of your site. The sitemap is designed specifically for search engines, the sitemap lists strategic content and gives Google additional information. It is a good indicator for assessing the indexing status of a website.

2 - Analysis of log files

Analysis of the log files enables you to check that new content has been crawled by Google and to identify optimisation actions to be taken on your site. The log analyser provides a report on the actual activity of the Google robot on your site.

In particular, it provides information on :

• the pages of the site viewed (or crawled) by Googlebot,
• pages not crawled by Googlebot,
• the frequency of crawling and the impact this has on visits, making it possible to gauge the load required of Google to scan the entire site, etc.

Log analysis can be based on :

• SEO tools dedicated to log analysis, such as Ahrefs or Screaming Frog,
• a complete technical SEO platform, such as OnCrawl, combining a crawler and log analysis functionality,
• Linux commands,
• Excel pivot tables.

3 - Redirects

SEO performance can be altered by certain redirects such as chain redirects or 302 redirects, which are temporary redirects that do not transmit authority.

👉 Drawing up a redirect plan is a strategic step at SEO level, as redirects can play into the visibility and therefore the traffic of your site. Monitoring redirects allows you to assess their impact on natural referencing and check that they do not degrade the user experience.

4 - Meta tags

Meta tags are HTML tags found in the source code of a web page. They provide information, or metadata, to the browser.

👉 These tags are one of the elements to watch out for; like the rest of the content, they must be optimised. Pay attention to duplicate metas because, like duplicate content, they can harm your website's performance.

By standardising metadata, there is a risk of duplication for similar pages, which forces browser robots to make choices, not always in your favour.

⚒️ To identify duplicate metadata, the SEO tools Screaming Frog and Google Search Console are effective.

5 - 404 errors

When a search engine detects 404 errors, it removes the page from its index because it considers it to be useless for the user. So make sure you keep track of 404 errors, because although in some cases they simply tell the robots that the page is dead, in other cases they can harm your site's performance.

☝️ In fact, some 404 errors can cause your site to lose authority, particularly if the page has backlinks. It is therefore important to make sure that technical problems do not cause pages to receive 404 errors, to avoid a drop in traffic to your site.

6 - Cannibalisation of keywords

When two of your pages are positioned on the same keyword, there is direct competition: this is known as cannibalisation. This can confuse the search engine robots, which may favour one of the pages to the detriment of the other.

👉 You therefore need to ensure that a keyword is specific to a piece of content and that it is adapted to the SERP's expectations.

7 - Internal linking

Your internal linking must be strategic and clear if you don't want to confuse the search engines. The more rigorously and organised your links are, the more optimised navigation within your site will be, and this has a strong impact on natural search engine optimisation.

You therefore need to keep an eye on the way your pages are linked together, as this affects the user experience and the way your site is perceived by the search engine spiders that crawl it.

👉 To ensure that your internal linking is effective, adding a breadcrumb trail can be a good solution. It allows users, but also browser spiders, to see the path taken through the site, so they know where they are and can access the different levels depending on the depth of the mesh.

8 - Site loading speed

For Google, the loading speed of a web page is a ranking criterion , particularly on mobile devices. You therefore need to optimise the loading speed of your website if you don't want to be penalised by the search engine.

👉 To test the loading speed of your site you can use Google Test My Site, which will allow you to assess the technical improvements you need to make.

You'll get :

• a loading time report and
• a report on the number of visitors you've lost because your site took too long to load.

9 - Hreflang tags

For sites with an international dimension, Hreflang tags are essential. They allow you to have the same pages in different languages, aimed at different countries, without the risk of cannibalisation. The search engine uses the tags to ensure that the pages are displayed to the right types of user.

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Follow up the technical audit!

The technical SEO audit reveals all the possible SEO optimisations with the aim of making the navigation path simple and fluid for both users and robots.

It provides a sound basis for a high-performance, fast website with clear, multi-media navigation, capable of hosting and showcasing your content.

Beyond the technical aspects, you can then focus on the other aspects of an SEO audit, making sure you create unique content that engages readers, and working on its popularity through netlinking.

Have you already carried out a technical SEO audit in your company? Do you have any additional points of verification or feedback to share?