Search engines help websites gain a large proportion of their web traffic.
In fact, 68% of all web traffic comes from search engines. This puts a lot of pressure on companies and website owners to improve their search engine optimization. By now, everyone should be aware of what SEO is. As a brief explanation, it’s the process by which you make your website more search engine friendly. Thus, search engines index your site and place it higher in the rankings for your specific search terms.
There are many elements that go into improving your performance in search engines. Every web page should include meta descriptions, and you really need to focus on site speed. A fast page speed, good keyword density, and a well-structured site will all help you boost your SEO. Of course, you have off-page factors too, like link building with internal and external links.
However, many website owners still struggle to see improvements in their search engine optimization.
Why is this the case? Well, this is where a technical SEO audit becomes important…
What is technical SEO?
Firstly, technical SEO is a specific branch of SEO that focuses on certain elements of your website. This largely includes things that ensure search engine bots can crawl your web pages with ease. As a result, it is easier for search engine crawlers to index your site and place it on the search engine results pages.
In essence, technical SEO is all about improving the technical aspects of your site. This doesn’t involve anything like the visual design of your site, and it barely covers your content or keywords. Instead, you’re really sort of digging deeper into the structure of your site so it is favorable for those search engine bots to crawl through.
What is the purpose of a technical SEO audit?
You now know what technical SEO is, but what is the purpose of a technical SEO audit?
As with all audits, the main focus is assessing your website. A general SEO audit might look at everything from the page code to the web design and UX. With a technical SEO audit, the focus is on all of those technical elements that make your site tick. We’re talking about things like HTTP status code, crawl errors, site structure, and so on.
By understanding how the technical SEO of a website shapes up, it is very easy to identify where things are going wrong. Thus, we can see why a site isn’t doing well in search engines.
Why are technical SEO audits so important?
It all comes down to the importance of technical SEO itself. When you look at all the different branches of SEO, this is arguably the most crucial as it looks at some of the key elements that influence website performance in search engines.
Investing in a technical SEO audit will provide your business with the following benefits:
Improve your search engines rankings with technical SEO
The whole point of these audits is to ensure that your SEO gets a big boost. Technical SEO often gets overlooked as it tends to involve things that happen behind the scenes. We’re talking about things that you don’t necessarily see or notice when you view your website, such as:
- Site speed/page speed
- XML sitemaps
- Mobile optimization
- Broken links – including both broken internal links and external links
- URL structure
- Site security
- Image formatting
- Duplicate content
- Duplicate pages
If you don’t undergo a technical SEO audit, you have no idea whether or not these things are causing problems. You might have a website that looks stunning, implements a great use of keywords, and has meta descriptions – yet still fails to perform well in search engines.
This is because the technical SEO isn’t optimized.
It could have all of the great stuff mentioned, but it lacks things like an XML sitemap. It might also have internal and external links that are broken. The technical SEO is bad, so search engines still don’t rank the site highly.
Perform a technical SEO audit, and you can instantly improve your performance in search engines by addressing anything that’s holding your site back.
Save money on your SEO strategy
The problem with a lot of SEO strategies is that you spend a lot of money on things that don’t make improvements to your site. As such, you keep spending more money on your SEO strategy, yet continue to see terrible results.
A technical SEO audit will stop this from happening.
You understand what to invest money in and what needs to be done to get your web page up the search engine rankings. Therefore, you can avoid wasting money on stuff that doesn’t work, allowing you to operate on a tighter budget.
Your money goes a lot further when you use a technical SEO audit. You may find you can significantly decrease your investment in other areas of your search engine optimization as a result.
See continuous improvements
Furthermore, technical SEO audits let you compare site metrics.
You can open up Google Analytics and see how your site has changed from month to month. Google Analytics is always a useful tool for assessing your technical SEO strategy, but combining it with a technical SEO audit will show you when things have worked.
For instance, you may update your content so you remove a lot of duplicate content and broken links. Test what this does, then view the results in Google Analytics. You should already see improvements because you’re improving your site architecture.
A technical SEO audit lets you continuously make changes, test their impact, and see improvements. This helps you see the benefits of good SEO over a longer duration.
Gain more web traffic & make more money
Ultimately, the goal of any technical SEO strategy is to drive as much traffic to your site as possible.
Invest in a technical SEO audit, and you will definitely gain more traffic in every search term you target. From here, you can convert more leads on your website, potentially making more money.
If your technical SEO is poor, you will struggle to gain traffic and make money. This is a cold hard fact, which is why investing in a high-quality technical SEO audit is essential.
Overall, technical SEO is one of the most critical aspects of your website. You need to do everything you can to bolster your SEO efforts. A technical SEO audit is by far and away one of the finest investments you can make. It will improve your site structure, boost page speed loading times, remove broken links, and help your website climb up the rankings to be seen by many.