A hitchhiker s guide to technical SEO auditing Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It is about partnering with Google to provide the best search results for Google s users -: Phil Frost If you think about it, the above statement makes absolute sense. At the end of the day, it is all about your prospects and how easily they can reach you. While many believe SEO is about getting your website live and trusting Google to take you up the ladder, we totally disagree with this thought. SEO happens when you keep auditing, improving as per Google s guidelines and don t just set up your site and pray to Google to push it to the top. Jokes apart, you will need to ensure that Google trusts your website and sees it as a friend. Only then will you have taken your first step towards partnering with Google. To help you with that, we have compiled an elaborate (yes, sit tight and get something to eat!) technical SEO audit guide -cum- checklist for you. All of the common but critical SEO mistakes that you re likely to commit have been mentioned in this reader-friendly guide. We ll discuss the various metrics against which you need to diligently check your website. And, we ll discuss the fixes, too, and how to go about them. In essence, we ll talk about all the crucial items that, if worked upon, will make your website userfriendly, functional, efficient, and visible in the search engine results page (SERP). is this how you ve been doing SEO so far? 1
Before we get started, here are the Questions we ll be tackling:? A search result for a resource having a short load time relative to resources having longer load times can be promoted in a presentation order, and search results for the resources having longer load times can be demoted. 1. Is your website loading fast enough? a. Optimizing images and reducing the image size b. Setting a browser cache policy c. Minimizing the render-blocking JS and CSS d. Minifying your resources 2. Is Google able to crawl your website easily and accurately? a. Making sure all the resources are crawlable b. Testing the Robots.txt file c. Reviewing the sitemap d. Building search engine friendly URLs e. Moving over to HTTPS The ideal load time for your website should be around 3-4 seconds. As you inch closer to this mark, you ll experience greater conversions and lower bounce rates. The most recommended tool for checking your website s speed is 3. Is your content user-friendly? a. Fixing broken images b. Getting rid of duplicate content c. Keeping a reasonable number of links on the page Now, let s get rolling, shall we? Q.1 Is your website loading fast enough? You wouldn t want your prospects waiting (im) patiently while your website displays a preloader screen, would you? It goes without saying that a good page load time is imperative for leaving a lasting first impression on anyone who clicks on the URL that redirects them to your ground. A poor load time has an adverse effect on your audience s user experience, and for the same reason, Google announced - as far as back in 2010 - that page time will play a significant role in improving your website ranking, saying: The tool has greatly improved over the years and can give you great insights into different parameters that might be holding your website from loading fast. What s best is that you get to know the exact pain-points of your website, and how to go about them. Google s pagespeed insights tool Some of the fixes that ll help you massively improve your website s load time and therefore get a higher score in the Google s PageSpeed test are: (a) Optimizing images and reducing image sizes Images, and any other visual content for that matter, form the heart of any engaging website. But you should also know that images, if not optimized and compressed properly, can often hold back your website from loading quickly. 2
The simple reason that images need special care and attention is that they download lots of bytes on the page, making the server take more time to load them. The Trick? Optimize the images by removing the additional bytes from your image file. The fewer the bytes, the faster a browser will be able to download the image and render it on the screen. The most commonly used image formats are GIFs, PNGs, and JPEGs, and gladly enough, there are free tools on the internet that ll help you (b) Setting a browser cache policy The browser automatically caches or stores the resources in your visitor s computer the very first time they visit your website. So, when a user re-visits the page, those resources help the website load faster. Further, if your visitors want to return to a page that isn t accessible at the moment, the SERP gives them the option of viewing the cached version. ContentNinja.in Marketing Communication made easy Cached compress your images. Off the top of our head, Google giving the option of viewing the cached version The best way to improve your page load speed significantly is by leveraging the browser cache policy and setting it according to your needs. You can pick the type of resources you want cached, and what not! Here s an elaborate article that walks you through various methods of leveraging browser caching. Free compression tools Run all your images by these tools and see your website load faster than earlier! 3
(c) Minimizing the render-blocking JS and CSS The PageSpeed Insight tool we mentioned earlier also displays a message saying Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in the above-the-fold content. Besides pointing out the resources, this tools also offers great SEO tips regarding: Removing the render-blocking JS; Optimizing CSS delivery. (d) Minifying your resources When someone lands on your website, an immediate call is made to the server to access all the resources (which include the images, but we ve talked about them already, so by resources, we essentially mean the HTML, CSS, and JS). The larger those files are, the higher will be the page load time. The best step here will be to delete all the unnecessary resources and minify/compress the remaining ones. PageSpeed also tells you about the files that need to be minified: To remove the render-blocking JS, you can simply follow Google s guidelines and avoid the use of blocking JS using these three methods: Inline JS; Make JS Asynchronous; Defer loading of JS. You need to optimize CSS delivery in case Google detects a page which renders late because of blocking stylesheets. In this case, you have two options to go about it: For small stylesheets, it is recommended to keep it inline; For larger stylesheets, you have to use Prioritize Visible Content in order to reduce the size of your above-the-fold content, inline the CSS necessary for rendering it, and then defer loading of the remaining stylesheets. Depending on the resource you need to minify, there are various free tools at your disposal: CSS Nano for minifying CSS HTML Minifier for minifying HTML Free Minifying Tools UglifyJS for minifying JavaScript If, however, your website is built on Wordpress - there are tonnes of plugins and you just need to plug them and turn on the switch, they ll take care of most of the heavyweight work. Some plugins that can help you here are Autoptimize and W3TotalCache. Other than the things discussed above, one more important compression for text-based content is the Gzip compression. In the process of Gzip compression, you re able to compress the HTML and CSS before sending them to the browser. It works beautifully especially for HTML and CSS files because they have a lot of white spaces and repeated text. 4
If everything is in place till now, Google should be easily able to crawl your website, and rank you higher. But... (b) Testing the Robots.txt file Your robots.txt file tells the Google about which of the domains/pages/resources you want it to not crawl. By using this method, you give Google the access to the specific parts of your data that you want crawled. Q.2 Is Google able to crawl your website? A typical robots.txt file looks something like: Secure https://www.abc.com/robot.txt All of the minifications, compressions, and other things that we ve learned about in the previous section are of NO USE if Google isn t able to crawl your website. Let s look at some of the some of the steps you can take to ensure your website is easily crawlable: User-Agent: * Allow: / Allow: /abc (a) Making sure all the resources are crawlable Having crucial resources non crawlable will hurt your website more severely than you can imagine. Crawling is what comes even before indexing, and any hindrance to that can adversely affect the performance of your website when it comes to SEO. For instance, if your stylesheets are disallowed from being indexed, the Google CrawlBot won t be able to see your website like a user does. The scenario is similar, although a bit complicated, for the JavaScript files too. If your website is heavily built using AJAX, you should write server-side codes to send the most accurate version of your website to Google. A sample robots.txt file To find your robots.txt file, simply visit www. yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If it returns an error page, that means you don t have a robots.txt in place. And do you know what does that mean? That Google is crawling and indexing all of your resources/pages - even the ones you don t want it to! Google recommends using Fetch as Google to let the Googlebot easily crawl your scripts. 5
(c) Reviewing the sitemap An XML sitemap is what explains to Google the structure of your website. A typical XML sitemap looks something like: Crawlers will go through the XML file to better understand the structure of your website. The There are various free tools that help you generate your site s sitemap. Some of them include: better the structure, the easier will it be for the bot to crawl through your website. Google has a tool to help you here as well - the search console! You can locate the sitemap report using which you can add, test, and manage your website s sitemaps. You can enter your website s sitemap here, and the console will throw a list of Xml Sitemap Generator errors along with their fixes to get your sitemap in place. 6
(d) Building search engine friendly URLs Again, a very important aspect keeping in mind both the crawl bots and your users. Your URLs are of no use if they don t stick to the user. Make sure to create URLs that are not only short, but convey exactly what the user can expect from the page that they re going to be taken to. URL because that way, you won t be able to keep track of it in the Search Console. If your website is built on Wordpress, you have an option of personalizing your permalink structure. Make good use of that feature and ensure that your URLs are completely user-friendly. You MUST avoid having query parameters in the Well, to be very honest, it isn t that difficult to create user-friendly URLs. All you need to do is: Use dash (-) instead of underscore (_) Make the URLs shorter Incorporate the keyword into the URL (your focus keyword for the page) 7
(e) Moving over to HTTPS If you ve still not taken the secure route, you re either living under a rock, or you don t give two cents about your website (and, therefore, its visitors). Come on, it s 2018, do we really need to emphasize on the importance of an HTTPS connection? As far as back in 2014, Google announced that the Cool! So, by now, we ve ensured that our site is functionally up to the mark and is easily accessible to the Google bots. Next comes something that proves that at the end of the day, it is all about your user and their experience. HTTPS protocol will play a major role in ranking the websites and recommended all the HTTP websites to switch over to HTTPS. Fast forward to 2018 - Google s default browser, Chrome, started flagging all the HTTP sites as not secure. So, if you re still on HTTP, your users are probably seeing something like: Is your content Q.3 user-friendly? The days of fluffing your content with keywords are long gone. If your content is not adding any value to the reader, it s as good as non-existent, and Google takes this very seriously. By content, we mean everything that goes on your website - the text, images, their structuring, and Not pretty, isn t it? An HTTPS connection ensures that the data being transferred through your website is encrypted, and therefore immutable during the process of data transfer. All in all, it protects the data from any kind of a middle-man-attack. All of this plus a green flag! more. Here are some quick fixes that will ensure that your content is user-friendly and therefore, Google-friendly: (a) Fixing broken images and links They say a picture is worth a thousand words. What they don t say, is that an error icon in place of a picture is worth just three words - bad SEO practice Green means secure A broken image So, if your website is still running on HTTP, and you really care about your users and their experience, and you don t want Google to flag your site as not secure - please make the switch to HTTPS. Doesn t look particularly pretty, does it? Neither does it to the people who re landing on your page. To add to this, if you have broken links - links that redirect to a 404 or an error page - you ll have just frustrated your visitor a thousand times more. 8
Now, there can multiple reasons for broken images/links: The href attributes of your <a> or <img> tag redirects to a resource that has been moved elsewhere The href attribute of your <a> or <img> redirects to a resource that has been renamed The image that you are pointing to is corrupted/broken. The fix for this is simple - check the path that is mentioned in the href attribute and see where it leads to. You ll know what to do after that. (b) Getting rid of duplicate content Duplicate content is one of the more serious problems when it comes to technical SEO, and yet it remains one such issue that is comfortably ignored by many. To know if your website needs improvements here, visit the Google Search Console and have a look at Search Appearance > HTML Improvements: This will give you an elaborate picture of how your website performs when it comes to unique titles, metas, and content. You can find the URLs of all the pages where Google detected duplicate content and that is what you need to fix. Review each of the elements and craft other titles and metas wherever needed. After all, Google loves clean and fresh content, and they ve re-iterated it more times than we can count. Another fix for this would be the canonical tags. This tag (rel=canonical) will inform the search engines the location of your original source. Also, it is an important practice to canonicalize all the irrelevant URLs in order to avoid content duplication. 9
(c) Keeping a reasonable number of links on the page The crux of it all is user-experience. And keeping the SEO factor aside, your UX is going for a toss if you ve decided to make your website/page a warehouse of links. The visitors will be distracted and you ll fail to offer them any significant piece of information if most of it is linked to another source. Add links only and ONLY where you think it is relevant, and can offer your user some extra information that goes with the content you ve linked with it. And while we re at it, always remember to search for natural ways of adding links without violating Google s guidelines for link building. You don t want to be blacklisted now, do you? The same rule also applies for internal links. One of the most important things to keep in mind while internal link building on the homepage is linking the content to the most important pages of your website. If you have a page that you think adds great value to your business proposition or could attract more leads, don t bury it 15-pages deep. While it is an important and a widely accepted method of getting your website indexed by Google, excessive internal linking, too, can badly hurt your website s SEO. In Conclusion... If you act upon the points mentioned above, you ll keep both your customers as well as Google happy. And a happy Google rewards you with a higher rank. A win-win scenario, if you ask us! Don t hesitate - check your website against these parameters as soon as possible, and keep making the fixes like we suggested. And if you feel stumbling anywhere, do drop us a comment. Or better still, visit us - we might be just what you need! 10