Numerous tools can run audits on your site and provide you with all the detailed data you need to improve the technical performance of your website.  Let’s look at some data points that may be found, regardless of which technical SEO audit tool we use.

Structure

• Crawlability Can Google crawl your website easily and how often?
• Security: Does your website have an HTTPS certificate?
• On-page SEO elements: Does every page contain the keyword in the title tag, meta description, and filenames? It should have the same elements on the page as the sites that rank in the top 10 for your target keyword.
• Do you have any internal links to other pages on your site? Site structure, breadcrumbs, and anchor text are all elements worth considering.
• Headings – What is the primary KW for the H1? Are there H2s that include supporting keywords?
• Compliance issues: Does the code on your site contain valid HTML? What is your accessibility score?
• Images: Do your images load quickly? Do they have a title, keywords, and srcset attributes? Are you using new image formats like webP or SVG?
• Schema, semantic Web: Are your schema tags properly set up? You can use schema tags such as WebPage and BreadcrumbList to describe Organization, Product, Review or Author/Article, Person/Event, Recipe, FAQ, How-To, and Person.
• Canonicals Are you using the correct canonical tags?
• SiteMapDoes your site have only valid pages? Are redirects and 404 pages removed completely from the sitemap.

These are just a few elements that you might want to examine and most tools will provide reports on them.

User experience

Google is putting more emphasis on user experience ranking factors. Google is raising standards for user experience as the web becomes more organized. Google will increase advertising revenue by focusing on user experience.

Auditing the user experience on your website is a must.

• Is it quick?
• Is the page interactive quickly?
• Is it possible to navigate the site on mobile devices?
• Is the site’s hierarchy clear and intuitive?

Here are some ways to measure this:

• Site speed
• Web Core Vitals
• Mobile-friendliness
• Structured navigation
• Interstitials or intrusive ads
• Design

You should ensure that you work with a developer who is familiar with the latest SEO elements and can make the necessary changes to improve your SEO performance.

Tools for a technical SEO audit

The following are some of the most used SEO audit tools:

• Audit of the Semrush Site
• Screaming Frog
• SiteBulb
• Website Auditor
• ContentKing App
• GTMetrix
• Pingdom
• Google Lighthouse
• Google Page Speed Insights

We’ll be looking at some of these tools as well as the data points that you can get from them.

Semrush site audit

After creating a project in Semrush you can conduct a site audit. This is how your overview will look:

Click on “Issues”, and you will see a complete list of issues, broken down by Warnings, Errors, and Notices.

Click on any item to see a list of pages that have been affected by the issue.

These data points may not always be valid.

The ideal is to export each issue’s CSV and save it in a folder.

Screaming Frog

This desktop tool will crawl your website using your IP and computer. After the crawl is complete, you will receive various reports you can download.

Here are some examples of reports:

This overview report can be used to track technical audit KPIs.

This report, for example, gives you information about the meta titles of each page.

Bulk export allows you to download all data points into spreadsheets. These can be added to your Audit folder.

SiteBulb

Site Bulb, like the other tools, will perform a thorough crawl of your website. Site Bulb will provide you with more detailed technical information than other tools.

An Audit Score, SEO Score, and Security Score will be generated. These scores will increase over time as you implement fixes.

Google Search Console

You can access the Index Coverage report to find out all that Google has found about your site.

You’ll find a list of errors in the details section. If you click through to each report you will see the list of pages that were affected by each error.

Implementing technical SEO fixes

Once you have all your CSV exports you can make a list and then go through the issues to eliminate duplicate reports that were created by different tools.

Next, assign the department to which each fix is assigned and what priority level it should be. Your developer may be able to tackle some, while your content team can handle others, such as duplicate titles and improving pages with low CTR descriptions.

Here are some examples of what your list could look like:

Notes, observations, or details regarding how to fix a project are important.

Websites will often have many issues. The key is to prioritize them and ensure that your site performs well each month.

Audit E-A-T

Your website should reflect current authority and relevance. E-A-T means:

• Expertise Are you an expert in the field you work in? Are your authors authoritative?
• Authority: Are you considered to be an authority in your field by industry organizations? Are your social profiles, citations, and social shares, as well as link profiles, reflective of this authoritativeness?
• Trustworthiness – Can visitors trust that your site is secure and their data are safe? Is your website equipped with an SSL certificate? This includes privacy disclaimers, refund information, and contact info.

Google employs a team of Quality Raters to manually evaluate websites and make recommendations based on these criteria. Google even made the Quality Ratings E-A-T guidelines available for site owners.

These factors are more critical if your website falls within a YMYL niche (Your Money, Your Life). Google attempts to protect the public against misinformation.

Analytics audit

• Does your Google Analytics code work properly?
• Are you able to identify the right goals and funnels in order to understand how visitors navigate your site?
• Do you want to import data from Google Ads or Search Console accounts in order to see all your data in Google Analytics?

BrainLabsDigital created a Google Analytics audit list to help you evaluate your Google Analytics account. This article will provide a simple and strategic way to ensure that your Google Analytics account is properly set up.

Prioritizing technical SEO fixes

Ensure that you place a high priority on improving your on-page SEO. You may have a list that includes a dozen fixes or several hundred depending on the site. To see the greatest improvement, you should prioritize which pages will be affected by your fixes.

It can be frustrating to see a list that has 85 technical SEO improvements. You will see a change in your rankings as you work through these changes. You’ll find that errors in your crawling tools will become less frequent over time.

These technical optimizations can make your content more relevant, targeted, and well-written.