How to perform a technical SEO audit

Technical SEO audits: they can be very useful to find blind spots in your technical setup that can help search engines better interact and understand your websites. But sometimes it doesn't do that, does it? But finding technical issues is just half of an audit. It should also make sense in the context of the audited website and help prioritize low hanging fruit rather than just arbitrary listing findings. So, let's dive into technical SEO audits. Technical SEO audits often look like this: a nice graphic overview with some scores. Sometimes it also has priority ratings. Unfortunately, sometimes they look like this. Reports with arbitrary scores or limits on numbers are quite hard to interpret. Do they even make sense? Let's dive in a bit deeper. In my opinion, a technical audit should make sure no technical issues prevent or interfere with crawling or indexing. It can use checklists and guidelines to do so, but it needs experience and expertise to adapt these guidelines and checklists to the site you audit. A technical audit needs to do three things, kind of. You use tools and guidelines to identify potential issues. You then create a report tailored to the specific site in order to make sense of the data you found in the first step, and then you make suggestions based on the specific site's needs. So, we first need to understand the site, then find potential problems, and then give reasonable recommendations. If we go a bit deeper on this, we need to figure out how the site works first on a technology level, then use our tools properly to identify issues that affect this kind of technology basis, then group our findings according to the amount of effort and the amount of impact a fix will have. It also helps a lot to talk to the people who are familiar with the site and its technology to figure out if your evaluation makes sense for them. A few things to look out for during the audit are routing issues or network issues, HTTP headers and metadata, redirect chains or loops, canonicalization and linking issues, as well as markup and rendering issues. With many of these, your choice of tools will definitely help. Crawling tools, for instance, can identify redirect chains or loops and linking issues quite quickly. HTTP headers and information like HTTPS certificates and their validity can be investigated right in your browser. You can also use Google Search Console's Crawl Stats report to find out how your server interacts with Google bots. Please note that not everything these tools find is equally problematic. A high number of 404s, for instance, is expected if you removed a lot of content recently. That's not a problem. It's a normal consequence of that. But if you have an unexplained rise in 404 responses, though, that's something you want to point out and investigate in the technical SEO audit. Where does it come from? How can we fix that? There are a lot more aspects you should look into for a technical audit, but the specifics can vary depending on the site. For example, an international site with different language versions should get an hreflang audit as part of a technical audit. But that doesn't make sense for a single-language website. Let us know in the comments if you'd like us to dive even deeper into this topic. Let's put it all together. For technical audit, you need to understand the site, examine it properly, evaluate your findings and explain what you recommend and why. Please, please don't follow your tools blindly. Make sure your findings are meaningful for the website in question and take the time to prioritize them for maximum impact. Thanks so much for watching this video, and hopefully we'll see more technical audits that are helpful and make the web a better place for us all. Stay tuned for more Lightning Talks, and let us know in the comments which topic we should do a video on. Like and subscribe if you want more of our videos in the future. Have a great time and bye bye!