Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the lifeblood of the online world. While it does have a lot to do with keywords and backlinks, the more visible aspects of your website, you'll have to go deeper to see real returns.
The first step to improving SEO is a technical search engine optimization audit (SEO audit). It's like a physical exam for your website, looking at structure, speed, searcher experience, and much more.
You need a technical SEO audit to pinpoint performance issues and incorporate the latest SEO best practices. Better performance will lead to more traffic and more conversions.
The foundation of a technical SEO audit is to make sure your website is indexable and functional. It dives into the sitemap, speed, subdomains, canonical tags, internal linking, and a host of otherwise invisible properties to make it readable by search engines like Google.
Google and other search engines' ultimate goal is to make it easy for web searchers to find the answers they are looking for. This means the end goal of a technical search engine optimization audit is to make it easy for people to find your website, information, products, and services.
When you request a technical SEO audit, you can expect information on the following:
If you want to advertise your business online, you have to ensure your audience can find you. In the SEO world, this means improving crawling and indexing — i.e. making sure the likes of Google and others can find your website and understand it.
According to Google:
The web is like an ever-growing library with billions of books and no central filing system. We use software known as web crawlers to discover publicly available webpages. Crawlers look at webpages and follow links on those pages, much like you would if you were browsing content on the web.
Indexing is slightly different. Even if a search engine can find your website, can it understand what it offers to serve searcher intent? If your website is indexable, individual pages are filed appropriately into the "ever-growing library" of the internet.
A technical SEO audit will find issues that limit both crawlability and indexability. Some of the problems an SEO audit may encounter include:
Your website should draw your audience in, encourage them to linger, and answer their search queries. If it's slow to load, has readability issues, is hard to navigate, or is rife with broken pages, nobody will stay long enough to find out what you're selling.
When it comes to search engine optimization, many of the same issues that play into crawlability and indexability also impact the UX. But, it also covers ease of navigation, page loading, and content value.
When your SEO audit results come back, you'll want to pay particular attention to the following:
Yes, keywords play a big role in funnelling traffic to your website, but they are still only a small piece within a much bigger puzzle.
You need an SEO audit to dig into your website's visible and invisible parts. Is it crawlable and indexable by search engines? Is it useful for searchers? Does it convert?
A technical SEO audit helps get you there by detailing the most glaring issues and suggesting options for the more subtle ones. Of course, it offers guidance on useful keywords, but a true technical audit will offer much more than just a handful of search terms suggestions.
Even if you've performed an SEO audit in the past, you'll want to incorporate this into an ongoing routine on website health. Backlinks come and go, servers shift, and search engines update their algorithms all the time. So what was once effective might need tweaking to get better future results.
The long and the short of it is that search engine auditing leads more traffic to your website, encourages that traffic to stay longer, and ultimately will improve conversion rate.
It's about satisfying your audience with the information you've provided by following the rules of Google and other search engines.
Although there are many helpful tools, like Ahrefs and Screaming Frog, which do SEO reporting, having an SEO expert in your pocket makes a big difference.
The Amplify team of SEO professionals is up to date on the latest changes to the algorithm. We translate the thousands of data points into legible SEO health scores and provide specific, actionable steps. What's more, we work these into a larger digital marketing strategy to get measurable search engine optimization results.
