Who Else Wants to Know How Website Audits Can Help You Find and Fix Your Site’s Technical SEO Issues?
If you haven’t recently, or ever, done an audit of your website, you need to add this to your to-do list asap. Because website audits can play a huge role in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your website, including helping you get more referrals from search results. Along with increasing your website performance and traffic audits ultimately allow your company to expand online.
By doing website audits on a regular basis you’ll help ensure that your website is performing at its best. Because website audits help you find the technical SEO problems that could be impacting your website performance, ignoring these issues could be detrimental to your business. Even though you may currently be getting traffic, you may not be getting all that you could be or converting as many as you could either.
Just What is Technical SEO Anyway?
Technical SEO is the various elements of your site design that you can control, and which also have an impact on the search engines finding (crawling), indexing, and ultimately ranking your web pages. The main components include page addresses (url’s), page titles, web page responses, page metadata, element tags, and sitemaps.
Technical SEO doesn’t have anything to do with social media profiles, linking strategies, analytics, or even keyword research. These all come later. So this is the first of many steps you need to take for your visitors to have the best search experience, because technical seo is really the foundation of an effective website. But, I know it can be difficult for a business owner to stay on top of potential SEO problems. That is why I offer this service to businesses who want an expert to handle it.
The unfortunate fact is that most digital agencies overlook many of the technical SEO issues revealed below. And this can explain why some results are hard to get. These need to be fixed to improve your overall search visibility.
Revealed! The Top Technical SEO Issues and How You Can Fix Them Today…
#1 The Speed of Your Website and Web Pages.
A significant factor in how well your web pages will rank in the search results is based on how fast you pages load. A fast loading page creates a better experience for visitors and ultimately the search engines reward that experience. Slower sites get sent to page 2 or beyond (no man’s land) effectively reranked because when a page is slow the search engines send less crawlers, which means less pages getting found and indexed..
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Page Speed Solution:
Search engines have tools that can help you determine your page load speeds. For example, the Google PageSpeed Insights tool can help you fix this problem. The tool will run tests to calculate your website’s performance on both mobile and desktop machines. It will also send alerts when it finds pages that are poorly-optimized. Another nice feature of this Google PageSpeed Insights tool is that it also tells you what you could do to fix the slow pages.
Some of these suggestions will likely be along the lines of optimizing your images, minimizing (or minifying) the code on your site (the javascript, and cascading style sheets (CSS)), and caching your content.
This is one big reason you want to have hosting that has good uptime and speed.
#2 Not Having a Secure Website (HTTPS security)
You don’t want your website to shout “not secure” to your visitors, and scare them away from your site, do you? This is what can and does happen if you don’t have HTTPS security in place across your website. HTTPS or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, is the internet communication protocol that protects the confidentiality and integrity of data transfer between a user and a website.
Website Security Solution:
Luckily, it’s actually pretty easy to check to see if your site has HTTPS security turned on. Just type your website address into your web browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, etc…) like this:
https://(your website address)
For example for my website type: https://areyoulookingforthis.com
If you see a “secure” message or shield in the URL bar, then you are good to go as you have the security in place. If not though, then you need to convert your site over to being secure with an SSL certificate. You can usually get these from your hosting provider.
#3 Broken Links (404 Errors)
Have you ever gone to a website and clicked on a link only to get a page that says something cryptic like 404 Error? Yeah, not a good experience, right! So you want to avoid having your visitors experience it on your site. It is a big factor in how people perceive the quality of your site.
Broken links also have a big impact on the crawl-ability of your website. In fact, when the search engines find too many broken links like this, they could stop visiting and indexing your site all together. And then your site won’t show up in the search results at all.
The Solution to the Dreaded 404 Page Not Found Errors
The search engines are again very helpful in sharing the results their web crawlers get. Simply go to the Google Search Console and click on “Crawl Errors” which is under the “Crawl.” section. Here you will find a list of all the pages that Google expected to find but didn’t, i.e. the ones returning a 404 response. You either need to make pages for the ones listed as missing, set up temporary or permanent redirects for them, or get them removed from the crawlers list.
Wrapping Up Lesson One
As you learned earlier in this lesson, an SEO audit will help you detect the technical SEO issues with your website, so you can fix them and improve your search profile and search results.
In the next lesson, we’ll continue the discussion on the top technical SEO issues with text-to-HTML ratios, alt tags, and indexing issues.
EaiMark Meyers Digital Marketing & SEO Expert
Now, if you don’t have the technical skills to identify and fix these issues, or if you’re looking for a digital marketing and SEO expert to fix these issues; thereby helping your website to rank higher on search engines, I can help you with this.
Email me at audit[at]areyoulookingforthis[dot] com