• Optimizing your content for SEO to provide more value to the human audience.
• Optimizing the technical SEO of your site so Google and the other search engines can properly index it.

Thus, in performing an SEO audit, we actually only need to focus on these two areas. It’s a very common mistake to perform a too technical SEO audit, that can take weeks to complete—and even by then, due to its very broad approach, we end up with a confusing result—.

Here, we will show you that an SEO audit is actually very simple, and you won’t really need to understand all the technicalities to understand—and even perform— this SEO audit.

Let us start from the very beginning: the concept of SEO audit.

What Actually Is an SEO Audit?

Simply put, an SEO audit is a process to evaluate how well Google and the search engines can index and recognize your site, and on the other hand how optimized your content is according to the search engine’s standard.

In reality, however, these two factors will involve many different technical and non-technical factors, and a proper SEO audit will provide you with a better insight into your website, your content, and organic traffic, among other aspects.

Typically, an SEO audit must be performed at the beginning of a new SEO campaign, and then regularly every quarter or at least every six months.

Common Insights Gained From an SEO Audit

Below are some of the most common issues and information that are revealed by a proper SEO audit:

1. Keyword optimizations

Both the home page and internal landing pages (content-rich pages) must include keywords that are specifically targeted to capture our ideal audience. Include 3-6 mentions (in an average 1,000-word content) of highly relevant keywords with decent search volume.

On the other hand, a landing page and/or product-service description page might be optimized for more than one keywords. For example, a single page might be optimized for “data extraction software”, “data migration tools”, and “data analytics solutions” almost equally between each other. This practice will prevent the page from ranking optimally (on the first page of the SERP) for any of these keywords.

Ideally, a separate page must be created and optimized for each keyword (or each set of keywords for one topic) with at least 800 words of content.

2. Technical issues on the site, including but not limited to:

• 404 and 500 errors
• non-secure site due to the absence of SSL certificate (the site is still using http:// instead of https://)
• broken external and inbound links,
• Non-optimized robots.txt file
• improper structured-data markup 
• Existence of .htaccess files, can block Google crawlers and cause indexation errors

3. User interface issues including but not limited to:

• Slow loading speed, leading to a high bounce rate. There can be various causes for this, including:
  • Unused and resource-heavy plugins/extensions
  • Non-optimized images and vides
  • Slow hosting service (slow server response time)
  • Non-optimized site structure (XML sitemap)
• The site is not (fully) mobile-friendly or mobile-responsive:
  • Test your site using Google’s mobile-friendly test tool
  • Switching to a mobile-responsive template
  • Simplify your site’s navigation and menus

Step-by-Step SEO Audit

1. Check The Canonicity of Your Site

The first, and also the most important thing to do is to check whether only one URL for your site is currently browseable—and thus, indexable by Google—.

Due to the nature of a web address, there can be various ways to type your website’s address into the internet browser, for example:

• http://thisexample.com
• https://thisexample.com
• Http://www.thisexample.com
• Https://www.thisexample.com
• Thisexample.com

Decide one “default” URL for your website. Typically you should choose a URL that already uses https. Https is a confirmed ranking factor today. So, if you have migrated your site to HTTPS and already got an SSL certificate, you might as well make full use of it.

Use 301 redirects to redirect all other URLs to the chosen canonical URL.

2. Check For Basic Crawl and Indexation Issues

Here, ideally, we’ll need a tool of software capable of crawling your site. That is, this tool can “crawl” or “spider” your site similar to how Google would. This will give us an important insight into how Google actually sees and perceives your site.

You can use tools like BeamUsUp (free), Screaming Frog, or Ahrefs, among others to do this. Then, analyze the resulting crawl errors (if any). Fixing these errors should be one of your main priorities.

Next, use Google Search Console to check whether your site is properly indexed. Remember that if your site is not indexed, you won’t get ranked, ever.

Alternatively, you can search in google using the site: search operator, for example:

Site: nameofyoursite.com

Using this search operator will also tell you how many pages of your site have been properly indexed. In general, however, using Google Search Console will provide better accuracy.

Keep in mind, however, if your site is brand new, it might take some time before Google can properly index your site. There are ways to speed up this process, but in general, patience is usually enough.

3. Check Your Site’s Performance for Branded Keywords

Search for your brand name in Google.

Your site should be the top result. There are only two exceptions here: First, if your site is brand new. Second, if your brand name is too generic (in such cases, we’d advise of rebranding your business).

There are, however, possible solutions when you rank further down the SERP for the branded keywords:

• Link building services can help you more branded backlinks
• Optimizing your brand presence on all major social media platforms (and make sure all of your social media profiles properly link to your site’s URL).
• Build citations on online business directories depending on your niche/industry and location
• Claim your Google My Business listing
• Implement a PR campaign to get media coverage from authoritative websites, and media

Do these steps consistently, and you should climb up the ranks, little by little.

If, however, your site is nowhere on the first page of the SERP, or nowhere at all, it’s a strong indication of being penalized (assuming your site is “old” enough).

4. Manual SEO Audit for On-Page Optimizations

Here, we will manually assess several key areas of on-page SEO.

We mainly start with your site’s homepage, unless there’s another page that’s generating more organic search traffic than your homepage.

Below are some of the important areas to assess in this page:

• How optimized the title tag is, and whether the title tag is already clickable
  • Use this tool to simulate how the title will look on Google SERP, so you can assess whether it’s too long or too short
  • Check whether the title already include the target keyword(s) naturally
  • Check the search volume(s) of the included keyword(s), if there are any related keywords with higher search volume, consider re-optimizing the title.
• How optimized the Meta Description is.
  • It’s important to note that meta description won’t affect your search ranking directly, so your main focus in optimizing the meta description is to improve CTR (click-through-rate)
  • CTR, on the other hand, is a direct ranking factor. So, focus on writing a meta description that can appeal to the human audience
  • In general, communicate your product/service’s unique value proposition within the meta description to encourage CTR. If you are selling a cheaper product than your competitors, say something like “guaranteed cheapest price!”
• There must be only one instance of the H1 tag, and it must be thoroughly optimized
  • H1 tag is a direct ranking factor, but not critical, if it’s appropriate to include a H1 tag, do so and make sure it’s well-optimized, but don’t force it.
  • As mentioned, make sure that there’s only a single unique H1 tag
  • The H1 tag must provide value for your human audience, so make sure it’s comprehensive
  • Include relevant target keywords if possible, but make sure they are naturally included
• Check the structure of H2, H3, etc. usages
  • The main purpose of subheadings is to break up the page’s content in a logical way, to enhance the reading experience (improve the content’s readability)
  • Again, include your target keywords and semantically-related keywords when possible, but make sure they are natural
  • Make sure your subheadings are interesting and engaging, they are often a strong factor in keeping your audience’s engagement

You can also use various tools (i.e. SEMRush or Ahrefs) to generate a crawl report for these pages, which will automatically detect errors like when the title is too long, multiple H1 tags, and so on.

5. Check for Content-Related Issues

It’s fairly obvious that we should avoid duplicate content in most cases. Ever since Google implemented the Panda algorithm update in 2011, you can get penalized when you use duplicate content, especially in fraudulent ways (i.e., when you steal other people’s content and use it in your site).

However, there can be cases where it’s your content that gets stolen. In most cases, it shouldn’t bring any problem to your site, but you can always report the site to be safe (and so this thief won’t steal your traffic).

You can use tools like Copyscape to help find this duplicate content.

Important: even if you are 100% sure you always use original content, there’s always the possibility of duplicate content like—as mentioned— when your content is stolen by others, or when you are using a stock/template-based section in your content (i.e. when you use a stock disclaimer for your contact us).

Make sure to use rel=”canonical” in your original content, and always make sure duplicate or syndicated content links back to this canonical content.

Also, check for pages with thin content. While thin content typically won’t cause a Google penalty, it’s still a waste of resources (and site space). In general, consider updating or deleting pages with fewer than 200 words of content.

6. Check Your Site’s Load Speed

Your website’s (and individual pages’) load speed is both direct and indirect ranking factors.

Simply put, more than half of site visitors will leave the site if the site loads more than 3 seconds (in a standard 3g connection). In turn, a high bounce rate will affect your site’s ranking.

You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check your site’s current performance. However, admittedly PageSpeed Insights is a little difficult to use (not very intuitive interface), so you can use additional tools like Pingdom (and others) to analyze your site’s current speed and possible issues.

While optimizing your site’s speed is a pretty deep and complex subject on its own (and you might want to check here to get a better picture), there are five important areas to focus on:

1. A good hosting service

One of the most common causes of slow site speed is the slow server response time, which is the amount of time required to load a website’s files from the server—so the client’s computer can begin rendering the page—.

The most common cause of the slow server response time, in turn, is a bad hosting service or a bad server. So, it’s important to choose a fast, reliable hosting service that also provides an included SSL certificate.

2. Caching your website

Caching—in a nutshell—, is putting your website’s data in a temporary storage area so the client can load it faster. There are various caching plugins available if your website is WordPress-based.

Also, you might want to check Google’s guidelines on leveraging browser caching here.

3. Optimize image sizes

Pretty self-explanatory, images and videos can eat a lot of storage space—and thus it will take a longer time to load these images—.

In general, however, here are some important things to remember:

• First, always crop the image to its appearance. If, for example, an image should appear as 768px in width, then resize the image to that width to avoid any unused space
• There are various compression tools and even plugins that can help reduce image sizes without a significant reduction in quality.
• In most cases, a JPEG format is your best bet. PNG typically uses a slightly larger file size, but is still manageable. Avoid TIFF and BMP formats.
• GIFs tend to be very heavy in size, so avoid them unless they are absolutely necessary, and use them in small sizes.

4. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Simply put, a CDN is a network of servers that can store and publish your content, thus reducing the strain of your main server that hosts your site. A CDN will typically deliver your site’s static files from a network of servers that is closer to the user’s physical location, and so can significantly improve load speed.

Check your hosting service whether they also provide CDN packages (some, like Bluehost, include CDN in their hosting plan).

5. Minify your codes

“Minifying” codes generally refers to eliminating extra spaces, line breaks, comments, and various unnecessary elements of your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML codes. This can significantly reduce the size of your codes, and speed up your site’s loading time.

Again, there are various tools and WordPress plugins that can help you in this aspect, for example, WP Super Minify.

6. Analyze Structured Data Implementation

Assess the site’s current implementation of structured data markup (if any) and check any pages that should have structured data but aren’t.

In general, structured data markups will allow the pages to be eligible for featured snippets, and should be implemented in as many pages as possible. Here are the common elements of a web page that often have structured data markups:

• Embedded objects (audio, image, video)
• Any event
• Organization
• Any person mentioned in a website
• Creative entities: books, movies, music, recipes, TV series, etc.
• Products and service offers
• Review
• Health and medical

Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to check your site’s existing structured data markup, and take notes of any errors.

Implementing structured data markup should be an important aspect of your SEO strategy, especially if you plan to aim for featured/rich snippet spots.

7. Analyze Ranking Performance

Here we will analyze how our site’s rankings are progressing.

We will need a tool or software that can display our site’s ranking history here. For example, SpyFu, SEMRush, Ahrefs, and many more. There are also free alternatives available—although they might not be as accurate—.

There are several things to consider in this aspect:

1. Check whether the site’s ranking is rising—albeit slowly—. If the site’s ranking is declining, there can be various reasons to cause this (penalty, outdated content, missing backlinks, etc.)
2. Analyze various pages according to the various target keywords, and take notes of pages that are currently decreasing in rankings.
3. Check whether there are pages that are already performing quite well—that is, ranking in positions 5 and above, or at least already in the first page of SERP—. These pages should be your main priority in the near future, since you can get to the top spots with just a little boost, in most cases.

How can we boost these high-performing pages into the top? There are a few approaches we can try:

1. Update the content with newer, more relevant information and relaunch the content
2. Get more backlinks/inbound links to the page
3. Improve the page’s internal linking structure, and add more internal links
4. Check the page’s overall keyword optimization.

If possible, analyze all of your pages’ keyword optimizations. You can check this section on what to assess on your pages regarding keyword optimizations. The main principles, however, are that:

1. Include 3-6 mentions of the target keywords every 1,000 words
2. Make sure the keywords are included naturally. Focus on maintaining readability and comprehension for human readers
3. Make sure the target keywords have a high enough search volume, relevant to your business, and manageable (in terms of competitions).

8. Assess Your Backlinks Profile

The quality and quantity of your backlinks are some of the most important factors in determining your site’s ranking.

Again, here you’ll need a software or solution that can analyze your backlinks profile. You might want to check our previous guide on link building here, but here are some important areas to consider:

1. Check the total number of your inbound links, but also your internal links and outbound links.
2. The quality of your inbound links, based on the E-A-T principle
3. Relevance and diversity of anchor texts for the incoming inbound links
4. The frequency and consistency of how you get these backlinks
5. Overall history and integrity of your inbound links

9. Assess Inbound and Outbound Broken Links (404 and 500 Errors)

Simply put, broken pages and links on and to your site are wasted opportunities, so you’d want to find and fix these links as soon as possible.

These broken links commonly come in the form of 404 and/or 500 errors:

• 404 error: 404 Not Found mainly means the page you are trying to reach (or in this case, linking to your site), cannot be found on their server for one reason or another
• 500 error: is a more obscure server-side error that generally means something has gone wrong on the site’s server, but it can’t identify the actual error

Various tools (i.e. SEMRush or Ahrefs Site Explorer) can generate reports for broken links and broken pages (your own).

For broken pages on your own, prioritize pages with the highest SERP rankings and pages with the most inbound links. However, you should decide either to fix all of these broken pages or to eliminate non-performing ones altogether.

For these broken pages, you’d need to:

• Replace and/or update the content
• Redirect the broken page to a live one
• For pages with no backlinks, you might want to delete it.

For broken links, since you can’t directly control the source sites, there are various different approaches you’d need to take on a case-by-case basis. You might want to check out this guide on link reclamation for a more in-depth discussion of the topic.

10. Find Content and Keyword Gaps

Our main focus here is to check for keywords that your competitors currently rank for, but you haven’t yet.

Several tools, most notably Ahrefs, can automatically generate reports for content gaps by analyzing competing sites.

The main idea here is to find sites with a lot of overlaps on keyword rankings with your current site, and thus we can find these keyword gaps.

If you find any content gaps during this SEO audit, analyze these keywords whether they are really good fits for your brand. If yes, they should be your main priority.

11. Content Performance Audit

Underperforming—or even, nonperforming content pages— can significantly slow down your site in the long run, and can also affect your site’s structure and overall user experience.

If, for example, a user that is currently interested in your brand stumbled upon your older, low-quality article, it can be a major turnoff and might affect their purchase decision.

In general, in this step you should:

• Check for non-performing pages with very little organic traffic and very little inbound links
• Look for ways to improve them if possible:
  • Update the content with more relevant information
  • Leverage the content in another form (i.e. non-performing textual content can work better as a video)
  • Improve the content’s structure, add more images, etc
  • Optimize the keywords and get more inbound links to generate traffic
• Otherwise, you might want to permanently delete these pages and use 301 redirects for the URL to a live, relevant page

By default, you should always try to fix, update, and relaunch the content to perform better in the future.

End Words

By following the essential steps of SEO audit above, you should have gained various useful insights into your website’s performance and should provide you enough information on how to plan your B2B SEO strategy.

Keep in mind that these steps are not exhaustive, and certainly, you can commit to hiring an SEO expert that will analyze more aspects of your site and your content and even conduct a full-blown SEO forensic which can take days or even weeks to complete. However, this basic SEO audit we’ve discussed should provide you a great way to assess your site’s current condition and plan a new SEO campaign.

If possible, you should work with a B2B SEO agency to conduct this SEO audit regularly every quarter or at least every six months to analyze your progress and gain insights that might be useful in adjusting your strategy whenever necessary.

The post How to Do SEO Audit to Boost Your Google Rankings and Traffic appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Arguably, technical SEO is the most challenging of the three, and often becomes the cause of headache for marketers that are not familiar with coding. Technical SEO is also where issues often occur, which can lead to major confusion if we don’t know the root cause.

Here, we will share our version of the technical SEO checklist, listing all the important elements that are important to ensure the performance of your site and its visibility in Google’s SERP.

Let us begin with the first section.

I. Improving Website Speed

Loading speed is now a very important aspect of user experience, where half of users will abandon a website that loads in 3 seconds or more. On the other hand, the average load speed of websites in 2018 is 8.66 seconds with a standard 3g connection. Meaning, if you can improve your load speed, you are well ahead of most competitors.

Before anything else, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to assess your current page’s loading time. You will see various metrics that are relatively technical, but the color-coded metrics (green=fast, orange=medium, red=slow) are very helpful. Below, you will see the “opportunity” and “diagnostic” sections where Google will suggest key areas where you can improve your load speed.

Here are some of the important optimizations you can attempt for a faster website:

1. Image Optimizations

Images are often the main culprit for the slow website for a simple reason: they use a lot of data.

With all the information contained on a single image, the user will need to download a lot of data just to display the image—not to mention if our page consists of many different images—. On the other hand, reducing the image’s size in data might compromise its quality.

The answer is compression, and here are a few tips on optimizing your images for speed:

• PNG file format is usually your best bet, unless you need it to be an animated GIF. PNG generally offers the best visual quality for each byte size.
• There are various tools (i.e. Optimizilla or Compressor.io) and various WordPress plugins where you can compress a lot of images at once automatically. Use these to your advantage.
• Check whether the image has any transparent pixel. If not, remove transparency.
• For JPEG, you can reduce the quality to 80-85% which usually won’t affect the visual quality significantly.
• Google recently recommended the usage of newer image formats like JPEG2000 or WEBP, which indeed offer better efficiency in size. However, remember that not all devices and browsers are optimized for these formats. In the near future, however, they will be the better alternatives, so stay updated.

2. Improve Server Response Time

Server response time—in a nutshell— is the time required to load the necessary code from your server to begin rendering a page. Before your server gives the OK, we can’t load anything else, and according to Google, the ideal server response time is below 200ms.

First things first, the most common reason for slow server response time is, well, the server’s quality. It’s important to choose a good hosting option from the start since server migration can be difficult with various potential issues. Big companies have the option to have their own dedicated servers, but not so with smaller or newer companies—or personal bloggers—.

You might want to check this list discussing the fastest web hosting services today to help your choice.

3. JavaScript and CSS Optimizations

Google recommends us to minimize—or avoid altogether— the use of blocking JavaScript, as well as to optimize CSS delivery. You can follow Google’s guidelines to do this.

Also, PageSpeed insights might recommend you to minify CSS, HTML, and JavaScript resources. You can simply use the tools recommended by Google to do this:

• HTMLMinifier to minify HTML resources
• csso and CSSNano for CSS resources
• Closure Compiler or UglifyJS for JavaScript
• Google’s PageSpeed Module can automatically optimize your site and minify resources

If your site is WordPress-based, there are various plugins that can help you with this process, such as:

• AutoOptimize to automatically minify resources, fix render blocking JavaScripts, and optimize CSS
• WP Rocket, a caching plugin, but has a well-rounded set of features like minifying resources and database optimization.
• W3 Total Cache, a WordPress plugin to minify resources and fix render-blocking JavaScript

4. Minimize Number of Redirects

In the world of SEO, redirects are like double-edged swords: they are certainly useful in many cases including link reclamation, but if you have too many of them, it can hurt your SEO results, mainly because they will slow down your website significantly, among other things.

First, you can use various tools to check your site regarding the number of redirects you currently have:

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider
• Redirect Checker
• Redirect Detective

In the world of SEO, there are two important types of redirects:

1. 301 redirects

A redirect signalling the search engines that a page has been moved permanently. When a 301 redirect is in place, Google will remove the old page from being indexed, so this will affect SEO.

So, use 301 redirects carefully, for example to direct people from “xxx.com “to “www.xxx.com”, or if you purchase a domain that is going to be sent to the primary domain (misspellings of your brand name, variations, etc.

2. 302 redirects

As opposed to 301, 302 redirects will signal Google that a page has been moved temporarily. When used properly, a 302 redirect won’t significantly impact your previous SEO efforts, and the original page will still be indexed.

For most SEO purposes, the 301 redirect is the one to use. It’s a common mistake to use 302 redirect in place of 301, which won’t impact (or can even hurt) your previous SEO. and the main idea is to avoid any redirect chain.

So, three things to keep in mind:

• Don’t use redirects unless it’s absolutely necessary
• Know when to use 301 and 302 redirects, in general you should use 301 always unless it’s a temporary redirect
• Avoid redirect chains or redirect loops. For example, if page A is redirected to page B, then page B is redirected to page C, change it so that both page A and page B are redirected to page C.

II. Improve Website Indexability and Performance

The performance of your site will affect user experience metrics, which is now important ranking signals. Also, your SEO results will highly depend on whether your site is crawled and indexed properly by Google.

1. Mobile-Friendliness

It’s no secret that Google now prioritizes mobile-friendly sites, and with more people browsing exclusively from mobile devices, making sure your site is mobile-friendly is a must.

It is also important to note that nowadays, having a mobile-friendly site is about responsive design, not about having a separate mobile site.

First, use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test to assess your page. If your site is no longer mobile-friendly, you might want to check out this guide to fix the possible issues.

2. Optimize Your URLs

There are four main principles in optimizing your URLs:

• Shorter is always better
• Make sure your URL is understandable by human readers
• Use your main target keyword in the URL, if you can put it upfront, the better, but go back to the previous two rules.
• Use dashes instead of underscores

Also, make sure all other URL variations for your site are pointing to the right—preferred URL—. Use 301 redirect to do this, for example, if your preferred URL is https://www.yoursite.com, then 301 redirect http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com to the preferred URL. Various SEO tools can also help to automatically redirect these variant URLs.

3. Migrate to HTTPS

If you haven’t already, migrating your site from HTTP to HTTPS can significantly boost your SEO results.

• HTTPS is now a major ranking factor. So, very important for SEO purposes
• More users are now conscious about security, and having a HTTPS site helps ensure them that your site is safe, preventing bounce rate—another ranking signal—

Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS, however, can come with various potential issues. You might want to check out this guide to make sure it went properly.

If you are, however, planning to start a brand new site, make sure to use HTTPS from the beginning.

4. Fixing Crawl Errors

A crawl error is when Google has a trouble in viewing your site— or a page on your site— which can be caused by various reasons. However, when Google can’t crawl and index your site, it simply won’t rack, and this is why identifying and fixing crawl errors are very important.

To check for these crawl errors, you can go to Google Search Console and check the Coverage report. When there is any error, you’d want to fix it immediately.

There can be various reasons causing crawl errors, and this guide by Moz will be a good place to start.

5. Test (And Fix) Robots.Txt

Robots.txt is essentially a small text file that is telling Google about which pages to crawl (and which to avoid). You can view your robots.txt file by visiting http://yoursitename.com/robots.txt.

You can then use Google’s robots.txt test tool to check whether there’s any crawl error. Keep in mind that in most cases, you wouldn’t need to edit anything, but in the case of an error, you can also use the Google Search Console to edit it.

You might want to check Google’s Guidelines for robots.txt to understand common errors and how to fix them.

6. Canonical Link Elements

Canonical link element is a HTML code—HTML element— to prevent duplicate content issues. The code will specify which page is canonical or preferred, and this will be the only page accounted by Google.

For example, if you have:

http://yoursite.com

and the preferred version/URL is

https://yoursite.com

then you add a canonical tag like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://yoursite.com/>

You might want to check out this guide by Moz to learn further about canonical tags.

7. Verify Indexed Content

Within Google Search Console, go to the Google Index section, and then Index Status. This way, you’ll get a lot of useful information regarding the status of your indexed pages.

Ideally, you’d want all of your pages indexed—except the ones you don’t want to be indexed for technical reason—. Check again your robots.txt file, and your sitemap (discussed in the next step) to make sure Google is indexing (or not indexing) the right pages according to your SEO strategy.

8. Update Your XML Sitemap

Your XML Sitemap’s main function is to tell Google about the structure of your site, which will affect how your site will be indexed. Good structure will translate to more efficient and accurate crawling.

Again, use the Google Search Console and go to the Sitemap Report section. here, you can test and edit your sitemap file. Google Search Console will show any errors, so make sure they are all fixed before you submit the sitemap.

Update your XML sitemap regularly according to these principles:

• Ideally you should update the sitemap anytime a new content/page is added. If this is not possible, set a regular time to update the sitemap (for example, once a week).
• Eliminate outdated and bad content regularly
• The sitemap must not exceed 50MB in size and shouldn’t contain more than 50,000 URLs. Generally it’s better to have a shorter sitemap so your important pages can be crawled more frequently. If necessary, break down the sitemap into smaller parts.

9. Optimizing Crawl Budget

Google assigns a “crawl budget” for each site, which essentially means how many pages on the site are crawled in a specific time period. The bigger your site,the more you should worry about crawl budget.

In general, you should optimize the crawl budget of your site to make sure that your important pages are indexed frequently—daily if possible—, and here are some things you can do:

• Remove duplicate content if possible
• Remove hacked and compromised pages
• Update your sitemap regularly, and make it as short as you can (discussed above)
• Eliminate infinite space
• Fix soft 404 errors, delete the page if necessary
• Check your site regularly for low-quality content, and eliminate them

10. Setting Up Proper Analytics and Tracking

Tracking your website’s performance and make the necessary improvements are important aspects of SEO.

Set up the necessary tracking systems in place, according to your website’s goals, and make sure they are working properly.

Some optimizations we have discussed above, like HTTP to HTTPS migrations, or minifying JavaScript might disrupt the tracking code, so check whether your tracking is working properly from time to time.

III. Content-Related Optimizations

First things first, the most important optimization is the quality of the content itself, and no amount of optimizations will help a bad content to rank.

However, these technical optimizations below can help enhance the performance of the high-quality content:

1. Optimize Readability

Content readability will significantly affect bounce rate and dwell time, both important ranking factors today. Readability will also affect user engagement and conversion rate,so it is a crucial optimization for any piece of content.

In general, keep your paragraphs and sentences short, and add a line space (hit enter) between each paragraph. If your site is on WordPress, you can use plugins like Yoast SEO that will provide suggestions on readability.

2. Fix Broken Resources and Links

It is quite often to have broken links, images, or even embedded videos on your content page. Make sure to fix all of these, which again, will significantly affect user experience.

There can be various reasons for this issue, whether the source site is already gone, corrupted file, changed URL, etc. The main approach is to check your content regularly and find the possible issues, and there are various SEO tools that can help with this.

3. Improve Internal Linking Structure and Fix Linking Issues

You might want to check out this guide by Moz on internal linking best practices.

In general, you should check for:

• Broken links (discussed above)
• Make sure all redirects are placed and working properly
• Click depth
• Check for orphan page and link to it

4. Structured Data (Schema Markup) Optimizations

Structured data markup, in a nutshell, is assigning the appropriate properties and attributes for each element in your content (using schema.org language).

There are two main benefits in implementing structured data markup: first, Google will have an easier time in crawling and indexing your site. Second, your page will be eligible for rich results, a very important aspect of Google SERP—and thus, SEO— today.

Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to help with this. The tool can actually help you in inputting the schema markup, not only for testing purposes.

5. Link Building

While link building is a pretty broad subject on its own, there are several important considerations—from the technical SEO perspective— to focus on:

1. Avoid nofollow links, as only dofollow links will help with your SEO
2. Quality over quantity. Building too many links to a page—and from the page— can be counterproductive and get you penalized. Just 2 to 3 high-quality links each month are sufficient, and keep a reasonable number links within each page.
3. Optimize, but don’t over-optimize your anchor texts.

6. Test On Different Devices and Platforms

Test your content on as many devices, browsers, and platforms as you can.

You can do this manually via Google Chrome, right click and go to Inspect. Then, toggle the Device toolbar on where you can select different devices to display your site. Keep in mind, however, that it won’t be as accurate as actually testing your site on a specific device. However, it will help you avoid crucial issues.

End Words

We have divided this technical SEO checklist into three major categories: improving your website speed to prevent high bounce rate and improve user engagement; improving your site performance to make sure it’s properly indexed by Google, and optimizing the technical aspect of your content, which is the heart and soul of SEO.

While technical SEO can be challenging at times, it is definitely doable, and there are many different tools that can help you along the way. You can also contact a B2B SEO expert to get help with technical SEO. It’s important to maintain a regular schedule to optimize your site periodically, instead of doing all these SEO optimizations at once.

The post Technical SEO Checklist: Guide For Non-Technical Marketers appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.