The importance of an in-depth, and thorough SEO site audit cannot be understated.
Unlike a traffic drop analysis piece, technical site audits identify underlying technical and structural issues of a website that lead to either decline in organic search performance or create an artificial performance glass ceiling.
A good SEO site audit allows you to better understand the technical and structural health of your website, and how the areas audited influence Google’s processes and ultimately influence your performance within the search engine results pages (SERPs).
By overlaying experience, the ability to understand data, and by using trusted industry data collection tools a bespoke audit report can be produced outlining technical issues, structural issues and opportunities, issues with Schema usage, and much, much more.
Some platforms carry specific issues out-of-the-box and have their own nuances. Over the years I’ve worked with (and audited) almost all platforms. Some of which can be found below:
What Is A Technical Site Audit?
The objective of any site audit is not to produce a 200+ page document outlining a large number of issues and showing off how brainy the SEO is. The purpose is to create value.
Dan’s report was insightful and helpful. It brought some clarity to the problem and gave me actions to tackle the issues that we’re facing.
Barry, Automatic Mosquito Control
When it comes to establishing value within a site audit report, this means that all recommendations need to be concise and actionable, and as well as highlighting the issue, the audit needs to convey:
- The potential for implementing the recommendation
- The importance, both in terms of issue severity and internally alongside the other issues raised for context
- The assumed relative ease of implementing the recommendation based on both experience, and conversations with those responsible for the implementation
The technical SEO site audit framework I use covers more than 300 checkpoints, broken down into 20+ categories ranging from speed optimization and JavaScript usage to website structure and information architecture.
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