Technical SEO audit is the process of checking for errors on a website or blog that prevent it from appearing on SERPs or create barriers to crawling by search engine bots. Check my-
16 Steps SEO Site Audit Checklist
Keep URL Structure Short: Google stops showing URLs on SERP but other search engines are still showing them on SERP. An effective technique to explain to a potential site visitor what a page is about is through the URL. Wherever links are shared, using URLs properly can increase click-through rates. Additionally, shorter URLs are more user-friendly and convenient for sharing, so always keep URLs short.
Fix Broken Links: Multiple broken links have a bad impact on user experience and may lower your website's ranking in search results since crawlers may assume that your website is poorly written or maintained. So, always check your website's inbound and outbound links while performing a technical SEO audit.
Remove Duplicate Content: Never use the same content on your website pages because when there are many versions of a piece of content, it can be challenging for search engines to choose which one to index and display in search results. Due to the competition between the pages, this reduces performance for all of them. So always keep unique content on your website pages.
Optimize XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap of a website should include only the relevant and existing website pages, not the pages that are deleted, non-canonical, and have no index tag. Always make sure your website's XML sitemap only includes the pages you want to show on the SERP.
Optimize Robots.txt file: A robots.txt file instructs search engine spiders which URLs on your website they may crawl. This is mostly intended to prevent your website from becoming overloaded with crawl requests. You should never block pages in robots.txt on which you have added the no index tag, because if you block them in robots.txt, then bots will never learn about their no index tag. Optimizing Robots.txt files should always be given first priority in the Technical SEO audit checklist.
Use Valid Structured data: Structured data, often known as schema markup, is a type of coding that simplifies the crawling, organizing, and presentation of your content by search engines. Structured data helps in the semantic understanding of your content by search engine bots. Always test the structured data on your website pages with Google rich snippets, and adhere to Google's recommendation to use the JSON-LD standard.
Check Image Compression: Large images increase the website's loading speed. Website images should be compressed in the right format and they should have actual size ratio that is required on the pages, not less or not larger. There are many types of image compression tools on the internet. The best tool is the website speed test cloud.
Check JS Embedded Content: The important content on your website should be in HTML and not embedded in Javascript. Although Google can display and index anything that is incorporated into JavaScript, it is still highly advised to put all content (including links) in HTML. This improves your website's crawling and indexing.
Pillar Page Linking: All important pages of a website should be linked to the homepage of the website. This helps Google to crawl and index other sub-pages of the website easily.
Crawling Budget Optimization: Non-important pages of your website should be blocked from crawling. This helps in optimizing your website's crawl budget. Non-important pages of the website include: non-canonical pages, 301 redirected pages, and pages that have no value on the website.
Optimize Website Speed: Site speed, or page speed, has been identified by Google as one of the signals utilized by its algorithm to rank pages. The user experience is also impacted by page speed. Longer loading times are associated with higher bounce rates and shorter average time on page. Make sure your website code is optimized and images are compressed properly.
Block Internal Site Search: If your website has an internal site search option, then you should definitely block it's crawling because internal site searches create duplicate content on your website, which again confuses search engines, so the best practice is to block crawling of internal site search.
Add Proper Redirection: A URL that contains both www and non-www is considered a duplicate. Make sure your website has proper redirection. It should be properly redirected to any one version www or non www.
Check Trailing Slash: A URL that ends with both a / and a / is regarded as duplication. Make sure that the server-side redirect rule that moves the wrong version to the right version is specified in the HTaccess file of your website.
Internal Link Orphan Pages: Orphan pages are those that are included in the XML sitemap of your website but are not properly linked internally. Make sure all of the pages that are listed in your website's XML sitemap are correctly internally linked because orphan pages often don't perform well in SERPs or receive a lot of organic search traffic.
Validate Canonical Tag: A canonical tag tells search engines that there is a master copy of the page. Canonical tags are an effective method for avoiding the problem of duplicate content. Make sure canonical tags are implemented properly.
I hope this SEO Website Audit Checklist will help in doing your site audit.