SEO Auditing Services

 

 

 

Page cache and crawl budget review

Another important element in any technical SEO audit is a review of the websites cached pages and how crawl budget is being used. Page caching is a good indicator of page value and caching frequency can be an indicator to whether or not a page needs more frequent content updates. We no longer are able to provide page caching checks within our SEO audits as Google has now retired the cache functionality.

 

Technical checks including a code review, tag checks

As well as the technical SEO audit items above – we’ll conduct thorough technical checks on everything from code compliance through to utilisation of tags, deprecated tags, issues with page performance, issues with Googlebot and content accessibility & lots more.

 

Tag checks including Google Analytics, Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager

As part of your audit we’ll check for tag implementation to ensure tracking is set up correctly.

Some of the tags checked include:

• Google tag manager
• Google analytics (standard implementation / UA4 implementation)
• Standard GTAG
• Google Optimise
• Google ads / conversion tracking

 

 

Blocked resources, elements and media files summary

Your audit will include analysis of any pre-existing resource blocking. We essentially need to make sure Googlebot can access files, resources such as CSS/JS used to render pages. We also work to eliminate the generation of media file URLS to reduce index bloat.

 

Website URL integrity checks (HTTP / HTTPS / WWW / NON WWW)

As part of the auditing process – we perform a series of URL integrity checks to make sure your website has a CONSISTENT internal link profile as well as protocol handling for NON STANDARD URLS i.e. HTTP / Non trailing slash / trailing slash. We effectively want a clean, solid index so that Google cannot mistakenly crawl URLS that are anomalies/duplicates etc.

 

Index bloat & weak content checks

Within your SEO audit you can expect a full analysis of index bloat / weak content checks as well as recommendations on culling/keeping/revamping or managing accessibility. We highlight best practice around manging / dealing with dead pages & content that’s not of value.

 

Duplicate content & copyscape checks

Duplicate content creates issues for websites including indexing issues, omitted results and potential for cannibalisation. We actively scan for duplicate content, we also perform content plagarism checks with copyscape. We will provide you with clear guidance on addressing / eliminating duplicate content.

 

Internal linking checks

A highly valuable but commonly overlooked SEO tactic, internal links are key to any SEO strategy and as such, form a key part of the technical SEO audit. Internal links help to improve user journey by making it easier to access other content within a website.

As long as contextual internal linking is done properly it can also boost SEO performance as well as improving user experience.

Within the technical SEO audit, there will be a full website check to evaluate average internal link counts, anchor text use and to identify whether there are any orphan pages within the domain.

Internal links also support link profile efforts externally – better internal linking provides a better distribution of link equity across pages within your website.

Internal linking can also be updated to weed out broken links & crawl errors between web pages on your website.

 

Cannibalisation and canonicalisation checks

Cannibalisation and canonicalisation checks refer to 2 very different tags, but both of high importance. Cannibalisation refers to the issue of 2 or more URLS within a website competing for the same keywords. Cannibalisation causes issues because it makes it more difficult for Google and other search engines to understand WHICH page to return – this can lower the average position for target keywords thus having a negative impact on a websites keyword positions in a search engine.

Canonicalisaion refers to the process of using a tag to tell Google that a page should be “consolidated” or “given parent status” – canonicalisation allows 2 or more similar pages to remain active within a website – the canonical tag TELLS Google which page is the master page and that page will then likely rank.

Canonical tags are a “directive” meaning that they are not arbritary but guidance for google and search engine alike.

Tools like screaming frog SEO spider and Deep Crawl can highlight canonical tag usage.

 

ROBOTS.txt file checks

No technical SEO audit would be complete without a check to make sure the robots.txt is configured properly. Many SEO campaigns omit regular robots.txt checks when in reality, robots.txt is a great way to limit the crawl and indexing of sensitive content as well as content that should be excluded for security reasons.

Within the audit I can make sure that all entries are correct and that Google ignores content that shouldn’t be indexed whilst having sufficient permissions to access media used for page rendering.

Outside of an SEO audit, it’s important to regularly take a look at robots.txt to ensure there is no instance of site wide content blocking.

 

Page header tag and content affinity checks i.e. H1 TAGS, H2 TAGS ETC.

Perhaps one of the older “SEO” factors – header tags have been around a long time as has their relevance for SEO. Making sure primary keywords/terms exist within a H1 is still basic SEO with some weight, but, as Google has evolved & now has a much better understanding of content (Google BERT), header tag usage should be constructed in such a way that the content is broken down into topical entities.

During a technical SEO audit, a full header tag evaluation will take place to look at how header tags are used within the site, if they follow a basic step down the process with PARENT TOPIC, CHILD TOPIC (with the respective H1 tags / H2 tags / H3 tags / H4 tags etc. tag usage).

Content affinity checks look at the relationship between a heading and the following paragraphs of content / media

 

Title and meta description checks

Within the technical seo audit there will be a site wide export of URLS with the respective title and meta descriptions to look for all the usual issues relating to

• Excessively short titles
• Excessively long titles
• Short Meta Descriptions
• Excessively long meta descriptions
• Abnormal character formatting

 

We’ll also be looking at CTR and truncation.

In more than 70% of cases, Google can and does rewrite meta descriptions, or, excepts are taken from page content and shown instead of pre-set meta data.

Meta is refined for the target audience to improve user experience.

 

CTR evaluation

A valuable process for SEO yet, something often omitted from most technical SEO audit processes. CTR or click through rate is the % calculation of the number of clicks that originated from a share of impressions.

Click through rate can be an indicator of title and description quality and is something that should be optimised over time with experimentation.

A technical SEO audit will take into consideration keywords currently on page 1, top 10, top 5, top 3 and will look at average CTR rates over time. Again, another weighted SEO factor, CTR is something that should be present in every SEO audit.

Minor improvements to CTR can make a significant difference to clicks as well as increasing average positions.

 

Page indexability &resource accessibility

Page indexability refers to “how easy it is for search engines to actually index content on a website”. Whilst it might seem like an insignificant part of any technical SEO audit it’s actually very important, especially for larger content-driven websites.

Resource accessibility is important because it looks at how Google can pull in required resources such as JS (javascript), CSS (cascading style sheets) etc. when crawling a site.

Page indexability will look at things such as orphaned pages – which can occur in large websites with a disorganised internal linking configuration or when pages are only accessible via an xml sitemap.

 

Internal links and external links check

Internal link and external link checks look at the relationships between various link types. Internal links (contextual) help people to navigate between internal pages, it also bolsters how search engines treat content.

Within a technical SEO audit an overview of pages by link count is provided, highlighting pages that have poor internal link counts as well as pages that have excessive internal link references (outside of navigation links).

 

Speed and performance checks using Think with Google / Pagespeed Insights

Unlike beginner elements of an SEO audit, speed and performance checks can get a little more complex, especially when things such as FCP (first contentful paint), CLS (cumulative layout shift) and LCP (last contentful paint) are thrown around.

Speed and performance checks involve looking at a page on your site and testing site speed – pagespeed insights provides a page-level overview whereas think with google’s test my site feature gives a hollistic view of mobile speed across the entire website.

Site speed is becoming more and more important and is a common feature within most technical SEO audit documents. Google search console now has core web vitals included so you are able to see performance by device as well as how many pages are considered slow, fair or good.

For the May 2021 core update, it’s important for website owners to make sure their technical SEO is up to shape, including improvements to page speed as well as core web vitals. SEO performance can be further boosted by addressing speed.

Within the technical SEO audit – will be a section that breaks down first contentful paint, last contentful paint, cumulative layout shift and render blocking.

Google and search engines alike are expecting website owners to make their websites fast, quicker, easier to interact with – not having to wait to put it simply.

 

Core Web Vitals report

 

Core web vitals is connected with page speed, but, the concept is slightly different in that core web vitals takes into consideration how quickly a page loads and how quickly users can interact with it. Google knows that improving page speed by consolidating and deferring scripts can cause layouts to shift or time to interact to deteriorate.

Core web vitals looks at how quickly a user can interact with a page and whether or not their user experience is impacted during a page load – the most common of these being CLS (cumulative layout shift) which happens when scripts load after content causing the pages content to “shift” – which, is annoying and considered poor for user experience.

Within the seo audit, a check of the websites core vitals is taken as well as a waterfall evaluation from Google Chrome Developer Tools.

 

Best Practices Overview

 

Within the technical SEO audit will be a best practices overview to see how well your site / client site conforms to key SEO factors. Using a traffic light system to highlight priority SEO factors over lower value factors – it’ll be easy to see what factors are weighted against the current version of your site and what can be done to find and fix everything.

An audit checklist is provided to give a summary view of all the factors evaluated (as well as any skipped).

From crawl errors to content marketing, from broken links to google analytics configurations – nothing is left unturned during the audit.

 

Development and coding feedback

 

There will be a section that takes a look at general coding composition as well as development feedback for security, custom web functionality, single page applications, javascript functionality such as dynamic javascript content & more.