Tyler Gallagher, CEO and Founder legal assetsis an international alternative asset firm with offices in Beverly Hills, Toronto, London and Dubai.
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Every year, Google’s PageRank algorithm gets a little smarter. No matter how solid a website’s content is, it cannot be ranked unless the technical details of the website are equally perfect. Otherwise, all your hard-earned content will go to waste and be relegated to dozens of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) by PageRank.
To avoid this disaster, you should do a technical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) audit. His SEO elements on-page and off-page are important for ranking performance, but unless you audit your content for underlying technical flaws, you won’t get him the first SERP position.
As the founder of several highly ranked websites, I always make sure my technical metrics are on point. If not, you’re bleeding traffic. And so may you. In this article, we’ve put together his guide to a technical SEO audit so you can see for yourself.
Technical SEO 101: What is it?
Technical SEO includes aspects of search engine ranking that are not determined by content (on page) or hyperlink structure (off page). Instead, Google takes into account various ranking factors related to the digital machinery behind the website.
Mastering the art of technical efficiency can improve your website’s rankings almost immediately. The health and efficiency of a website from a technical point of view depends on his following technical SEO factors (not exhaustive):
• Mobile ready (i.e. mobile native rendering)
• Using schema markup
• Meta description and alternate tags
• Image file size
• Page load speed (that is, time to first byte)
• Redirect optimization (e.g. 301, 404)
• XML sitemap
If you’re not tech savvy, this might sound very sketchy, but don’t worry. Touch on how to improve all the basic aspects of technical his SEO fundamentals to improve your rankings quickly.
Conducting technical audits
The first step is to conduct an audit. These provide a complete profile of the technical health of your website. Various software tools are available to do this, many of which can be accessed through free trials.
I’ve used each of these at different points in my career, and they’ve worked great for my business: SEMrush, DeepCrawl, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest.
These tools scan your website and provide a report showing red flags regarding the technical health of your page. However, it only provides data. It’s up to you to get that data and actually implement it.
In most cases, these changes are implemented in the backend of the website (WordPress, Squarespace, etc.). Or, alternatively, you could write down the changes you need to make and hire a WordPress developer to perform them, for example, if you don’t believe it’s your fault.
easy fix
As your website is crawled, a report will generate a list of duplicate pages that can be removed or deindexed. You’ll also notice redirects (look for the keywords “301” or “302”). This is a severe penalty for ranking positions. Pages with status code 301 should be removed from your website’s backend sitemap.
Similarly, the HTTP version of your website should automatically redirect to the HTTPS version. Recently, Google has started favoring HTTPS websites for their enhanced security and SSL encryption certificates. To do this, here are some helpful HTTPS redirect guides for several web hosts.
Then check the image size. These files tend to add weight to your website, making it slow to load and slow to render on mobile browsers. If it’s over 2 MB, use a file compression tool to minimize the size and upload again. Personally, I aim for files under 500 KB for my website.
Finally, creating a meta description of 160 characters or less with your main target keyword in the text is very important for SEO purposes. When doing so, also insert alt tags into each image file on the page so that blind people (and search engines) can interpret all elements of the content.
tough stuff
Page speed is usually the largest technical ranking factor. Use our site load speed calculator online to find out how long it takes your page to render. If your website loads faster than 3 seconds, you need to make changes to speed it up. If you’ve already trimmed the file size of the elements on your page to less than 1 MB each, you may need to switch web hosts to access faster servers.
Then use an SEO research tool (SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc.) to conduct a full link audit. If a link on a page is not working, broken, or not working in any way, it will need to be fixed manually. Broken links hurt you in the form of Google PageRank penalties.
Finally, optimize your website’s sitemap. PageRank will penalize you if you list too many URLs in your sitemap (e.g. >50k). The same is true for URLs that block indexing. Online guides can help you resolve applicable sitemap issues.
practice
We recommend conducting a full technical SEO audit every 4-6 months or every few weeks after Google updates. This way, you can be sure that your website isn’t being hampered by new technical demands that Google has introduced into its algorithm.
Remember, PageRank exists to make the Internet a more useful tool for users. Rest assured that if the technical aspects of your website create a poor user experience and are buggy, Google will penalize your site and reward competitors for providing a smooth site. .
In short, a technically successful website should be secure, fast on both desktop and mobile, well organized, and free of duplicate elements on the page, such as links and text. If you can meet these criteria over time, you can drive more traffic to your site by avoiding costly Google penalties that can ruin your ranking position.
