Improving Your Technical SEO Audit

SEO (search engine optimization) involves both internal aspects of the site (on-page SEO) and external aspects (off-page SEO). Technical SEO plays an important role in on-page SEO. Performing a technical SEO audit demands knowledge in several areas and can reveal numerous opportunities for improvement.

This article is aimed at SEO professionals but can also help you, as the person in charge of a website, to better manage your contracted SEO services. If you are not interested take a look at the blog, you will probably find some content that interests you.

Many technical SEO audits are quite bad. That is when they are realized! They are not bad because of lack of technical knowledge, but because whoever did the auditing did not know what to do with the information collected.

I look at my audits from two or three years ago and see that in some of them I was not able to deliver a good result. Not because I wasn’t knowledgeable but because I couldn’t communicate clearly what I was auditing.

The idea of this article is not to present a checklist for a technical SEO audit (you can find templates on Google if you wish). It’s a reminder, when you go to do a technical SEO audit, to think about what’s going on.

Read also: 10 Important items for on-page SEO

What is the purpose of a technical SEO audit?

The two fundamental goals of a technical SEO audit are:

1. Finding technical problems on a website.
2. Help the company solve these problems to get more traffic.

If a technical SEO audit does not achieve these goals it can be considered a bad audit.

How can we fail to achieve these goals?

1. Unsolved problem:
   1. The problem is not solved because we were not persuasive. If we cannot convince someone (company/customer) that the problem is important, it will not be solved.
   2. We persuade someone that an issue is important but, due to a variety of reasons, it falls by the wayside.
2. Problem solved, no results:
   1. We fixed the problems but couldn’t show results.

Let’s look at some common mistakes of a technical SEO audit.

Mistake 1: Trying to do everything in one document

It is very difficult to make a single document accomplish two very different things.

If we only have a document, which succinctly explains a problem to developers, it is probably not good at convincing people (we will fail to persuade) and vice versa (in which case we would fail to do).

Solution

Prepare two or more audit documents.

• A presentation to present people with the results. The moment of persuasion. It can be done in person or by video conference.
• A document that contains the details missing from the presentation. The technical specifications of the tasks so that they can be easily assimilated by the developers. The idea here is to make it easier to do the work.

I, in some cases, break the audit document into smaller pieces and deal via e-mails with the responsible parties. With devs, I work directly through a project manager (I like Jira a lot).

Why a presentation to persuade people?

We have all seen terrible slide shows. It is not the fault of the tools (Power Point, Google Slides) but of the presenters. If the content/presenter is good the presentation can have 50 slides and still be good. If it is bad it only takes a half dozen slides to completely lose everyone’s attention.

Suggestion for a technical SEO audit presentation for non devs:

• present only the main topics;
• bring together all the people responsible for the project;
• What you say usually doesn’t need to be on a slide (don’t be repetitive);
• his knowledge is much greater than the presentation. Try to answer as many of the participants’ questions as possible right there.

Mistake 2: Providing symptoms and not the cause

When you provide the symptoms and not the root cause, you don’t actually make anyone’s job any easier. Still, it shows a lack of knowledge about the site and this makes it more difficult to convince whoever is needed.

Below are three common phrases in technical SEO audits:

• Your site has 10,000 titles that are above the maximum recommended length.
• Your site has 5,000 internal links that are 302 redirects.
• Your site has 20,000 images without alt tags.

These statements are technically true, but they miss something crucial about websites: websites are not built with 10,000 custom pages. They are built with templates.

It is much more likely that there are 1 or 2 problems in the templates than 10,000. A better version of these statements would be:

You have 10,000 titles that are above the maximum recommended length. There are 3 problems that cause this:

• Your category pages add 2 times the site name to the title. (5.000 : 50%).
• Your blog pages are adding the category to the title. (4.000 : 40%).
• Your page titles are too long. There are 1,000 pages that need to have their titles rewritten (10%).

You have 5,000 internal links that are 302 redirected. There are two problems that cause this:

• You have 5 links in the main menu that are HTTP and not HTTPS.
• Your HTTP protocol redirects 302 to your HTTPS protocol.

We want to give people the cause of the problem to be corrected, not the symptoms.

Solution

In a technical SEO audit you will probably use one or more tools (I don’t see how doing an audit without tools) that will present you with a lot of data. Your job is to take all this data and group it by behavioral patterns.

As sophisticated as the tools are here a good deal of knowledge and experience still comes in to understand what is relevant and what is not. Understanding how websites are made also helps at this time.

How are the sites made?

Web sites are usually built with a series of templates and associated rules. This is how CMSs (WordPress, Drupal, etc.) work. A problem that exists on one page of the template will probably exist on others.

When you encounter a problem, check to see if it appears in other URLs with the same template. Try to find the most specific template. Most likely it will not be at the page level. If the problem is on all pages of the blog, but is in the related articles block (in a sidebar, for example), the problem is with that specific template and not with the page template.

There may be hidden templates. You are probably thinking of templates being post or event pages that look the same, but they don’t have to be. Remember that we are only looking for patterns. The categories of a blog, for example, may have:

• A template and a set of rules for category A.
• A template and a set of rules for category B.

Both pages can look the same, but with two different rules, even if there is a unique visual template.

Read also: 10 SEO Tools Every Website Should Use

Mistake 3: Not making choices

You have given multiple answers with pros and cons, but you have not chosen the one that should be adopted.

You just handed the burden of decision entirely to the customer, which is almost certainly not what they wanted.

Solution

Choose one of the options below:

Option 1 – You know both the impact and the difficulty.

Choose an answer! There is no reason for you not to make the choice.

Option 2 – You know the impact, but have no idea of the difficulty.

Choose the best for your searches. Still you can take a guess at the difficulty (many SEOs have the technical knowledge to do this).

Option 3 – You don’t know the difficulty or the impact.

Make tests. It is a good and honest approach. Better than lying to the customer.

Can’t do tests? You are in trouble. You can try your luck and adopt a solution employed by another team or in another project to choose an answer, just be sure to make a decision.

Option 4 – One of your options is super risky.

There is no harm, in some (rare) cases, in passing the decision to the client or one of his teams.

Sometimes you don’t know what level of exposure the customer is willing to take on.

Mistake 4: No prioritization (or poor prioritization)

In technical audits we often ask for many things but do not prioritize them.

We do it all the time. We fill Jira or Trello with a bunch of tasks but don’t say what should be accomplished first. We end up being undervalued and have a hard time getting things right.

Why do we do that?

• We get attached to (our) reported problems but often forget the business context. Look at the context (teams, budgets, goals).
• SEO problems are, in some cases, difficult to measure. This makes them often unappreciated.
• The “mysticism” about the search algorithm has made us suspicious. We want to cover all possible points so as not to take any risks.
• Results with SEO take time. Some quick changes can generate results in 60 or 90 days, but structured work usually takes more than 6 months for consistent results.

All these factors end up combining and the result is that the SEO department (or the consultant) ends up being forgotten in a dark corner of the organization. He is known to cry and make constant recommendations/demands without evidence.

This makes successful technical SEO auditing difficult.

Solution

All items in the technical SEO audit should be given a priority scale. We need a table/list with each action, sorted by impact and ideally also by effort/complexity.

What can we use to prioritize the impact?

• Instinct: not the most convincing way but better than nothing.
• Previous experiences: for some just a refined intuition, but we actually remember what happened rather than it being a vague feeling.
• Records: keeping track of the records will help you understand the results of the suggested actions.
• Traffic or revenue: although we may not be able to estimate the exact impact, we can at least know how important the pages we are changing are.

What can we use to prioritize effort?

If our audit report is getting long, it is time to take a look at our really unimportant items. Should we include them?

I often prefer to leave it out and address the less relevant items only when the others have been resolved. However, check with whom you are receiving the report. If they are paying you for a one-off audit, it is likely that they want all the details, even if for future correction (or non-correction).

Mistake 5: Not being ready for the commitment

No matter how good our intentions and solutions are, they may not survive the rest of the business.

Many audits do not take into consideration the maturity level of the organization and its situation in the market. We fail to convince and/or implement. This is linked to the prioritization mentioned earlier.

Solution

We need it:

• Prioritize based on return and effort.
• Be committed to adjusting the project if our recommendations are not promptly addressed in the first audit.

This is never easy and requires experience.

How can we estimate the effort?

There are two major sources of effort:

• Development work.
• Other people/departments.

Development work

Each case is a case.

• On some sites it is easier to change the whole permalink structure than the title pattern.
• On other sites it is easier to move an entire category than to change its title.

Other problems of the departments:

• Get to know all the other departmental KPIs.
• Look at what all the other departments are doing. If they are changing something frequently, they are likely to be concerned about it.
• Look at the responsibilities of the other departments. If you are sticking your nose in their stuff they will probably care.
• Find out which department has the largest number of employees. It can also be the department with the biggest budget and the easiest to get things done.

Still, there may be a very large legacy hidden in the structure of the site. It is very easy to look like an idiot for not understanding the complexity or effort required for some correction.

What can you do?

• Talk to everyone and every team you can. The longer a person has been with the company probably the more background this person will have.
• Interact with developers (internal and external).
• Have your say. If you are wrong about something, go back and fix what you did wrong to build experience in the subject.

In conclusion

We have seen that a technical SEO audit for making some mistakes, especially of convincing and failing to implement the necessary corrections.

I have cited 5 common mistakes:

• try to do everything in a single document;
• provide symptoms and not the cause;
• not making choices;
• lack or poor prioritization of activities;
• not being ready for the commitment.

Communication is fundamental. Be aware of the context in which the organization is inserted, know the teams, and relate well with the people.

In your next technical SEO audit remember this guide.

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