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You are here: Home / SEO Consulting Services & Audits / Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO Audit

If you’re concerned that your website is technically optimized for proper search engine crawling, indexation and ideal ranking, it may be time to hire an SEO expert to conduct a technical SEO audit. Time is money, and the spending hours trying to understand the complexity of technical optimization can be costly. Technical SEO elements such as sitemaps, robots commands, canonical URLs, rel=prev/next, javascript indexation, crawl errors, redirect chains and other elements can be daunting.

Kern Media takes the guesswork out of technical SEO and can audit your website to provide specific recommendations to ensure your website is properly technically optimized.


technical-seo-audit

Benefits of a Technical SEO Audit

  • Improve search engine ranking potential by fixing internal broken pages, redirects and other technical SEO issues.
  • Improve user experience by fixing broken links, broken images, orphaned pages and other user experience issues.
  • Improve compliance with Google’s quality guidelines by ensuring Google renders your pages just as users do.
  • Enhance your search engine listings with schema markup to make your content more discoverable in search engines.
  • Take the guesswork out of technical SEO, implement professional recommendations and move on to your other online marketing efforts.

 

Conducting Your Technical SEO Audit

Kern Media offers technical SEO audits that ensure websites are properly optimized for search engine crawling and indexation so that your content strategy and promotional efforts can have maximum impact. The process is a very data-heavy, but recommendations are provided in a manner that knowledgeable website owners and developers can understand and implement.

Crawling Your Website to Identify Technical Issues

screaming frog logoThe starting point for a technical SEO audit consists of crawling your website in a manner similar to search engines in order to identify issues that may limit indexation, ranking potential and usability. Tools such as Screaming Frog are used to execute the crawl and identify issues such as the following:

  • 4XX errors (404, 410, 400, 401, 403, etc.)
  • 3XX redirects (301, 302, etc.)
  • 5XX errors (500, 502, 503, etc.)
  • Redirect chains
  • Pages blocked by robots.txt
  • Incorrect meta robots tag implementation
  • Incorrect canonical URL implementation
  • Incorrect rel=prev/next implementation
  • …etc.

The crawl data will be thoroughly analyzed and clear recommendations provided to fix any issues discovered.

Reviewing Indexation in Search Engines

search-engine-indexationYour website’s indexation in search engines is important to keep in check. With too many low-quality pages indexed, or important pages excluded from search engine indexes, your overall “content quality” (in terms of indexation) can be put at risk.

Situations of “indexation bloat” can potentially hurt your site’s overall ranking potential in search engines (especially Google), and situations of important pages being blocked from indexation (due to any number of factors) can limit your organic search traffic potential.

Kern Media takes a close look at your website’s indexation by analyzing data in Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and comparing to the crawl data mentioned above.

Reviewing Google Analytics & Search Console

google-analytics-logo-smallGoogle Analytics and Google Search Console provide important data for analyzing SEO efforts. Important data includes traffic sources (especially organic search traffic), engagement metrics, traffic history, demographic and interest data, conversion rate, revenue, goals, etc. Google Analytics settings can also be reviewed and improved as needed.

Google Search Console offers very important data regarding overall indexation, sitemap indexation and errors, HTML improvements, search query and page-level metrics, etc. Google Search Console settings can also be reviewed to ensure a “Preferred domain” is set, URL parameter handling is specified (if needed), etc.

Analyzing Website Architecture & Taxonomy

website-architecture-taxonomyA well-structured website uses topical hierarchy to provide a logical organization of content for both users and search engines. This also allows internal link equity to be passed through the structure in a manner that will flow PageRank through a site for optimal ranking potential in search engines. Taxonomy will be reviewed and recommendations will be made to improve it (if necessary).

Optimizing the Robots.txt File

robots-txt-fileYour website’s robots.txt file offers instructions to search engine “bots” on how to crawl your website. Disallowing crawl of important pages will limit search engine ranking (and traffic) potential. Furthermore, allowing crawl of low-quality pages will cause “indexation bloat” in search engines and put your website at risk of Google’s various algorithms. Kern Media has the expertise to ensure that your robots.txt file is optimized for proper search engine bot crawling. Read my blog post on How to Write a Robots.txt File for insight into how I will approach your robots.txt file optimization.

Auditing the XML Sitemap

xml-sitemap-analysisYour website’s XML sitemap offers a roadmap of URLs for search engines to crawl and index. Having errors in your XML sitemap (4XX response codes, 3XX response codes, etc.) can decrease search engines’ trust in your XML sitemap and limit its effectiveness. Your XML sitemap can be reviewed to ensure accuracy and limit errors reported in Google Search Console. Read my blog post on How to Audit an XML Sitemap to understand how I approach XML sitemap analysis.

Analyzing Page Load Time

page-load-timeYour website’s speed will contribute to its ranking potential in search engines, especially Google. The faster your website loads (especially on mobile devices), the more likely your visitors are to stay and read your content. Google has therefore taken notice and incorporated page speed into its ranking algorithm, and page speed best practices (i.e. – image optimization, caching, minification of javascript, etc.) will be reviewed and advised upon.

Reviewing Mobile Friendliness

mobile-friendlinessIn April, 2015, Google began incorporating mobile friendliness into its ranking algorithm due to the explosion of mobile usage among internet users. Your website will be reviewed to determine if it’s mobile friendly and whether the mobile optimization is implemented properly. Responsive design is usually recommended, and the preferred choice of Google. However, mobile subdomains can be okay as long as the proper rel=alternate and canonical coding is used in the <head> of each page on your desktop and mobile sites.

Identifying Structured Data Opportunities

structured-dataSearch engines, especially Google, are encouraging websites to use structured data in order to enhance search results for users. Appropriate structured data (schema markup) opportunities will be provided for your website, depending on the content types. There are many different schema markup coding sets that can be used for websites ranging from E-Commerce, recipe sites, review sites, instructional websites, etc.

Reviewing Duplicate Content Issues

duplicate-contentInternal and external duplicate content issues limit your pages’ value to search engine indexes, and eradicating these issues (as much as possible) can have a good impact on your overall content quality rating with search engines. If your website has duplicate content issues, specific recommendations will be provided to ensure that you know how to handle them and improve your content and ranking potential in search engines.

Reviewing Javascript Content

javascript-contentJavascript content is becoming increasingly popular, however, it presents some technical SEO issues. Google wants to ensure that you’re allowing it to render and crawl your javascript like a user will see it. Bing and other search engines are not as advanced as Google, so they present their own problems. Any javascript content on your website will be reviewed to determine if your site is allowing Google to crawl Javascript/CSS/AJAX, if your site is guilty of “cloaking” and in violation of Google’s quality guidelines, and if the content is visible when javascript is turned off (for less sophisticated search engines).

Ready for a Technical SEO Audit? I Can Help

Stop the guesswork and get a professional tech audit of your website and start improving your SEO. Contact Kern Media for a free consultation.

 

Dan Kern | Colorado SEO Expert Consultant I'm Dan Kern, a veteran Colorado SEO consultant. I help businesses to grow their revenue online through "white hat" SEO and content marketing, and help other online marketing professionals enhance their skills.

Need Help? Let's talk. I'm for hire.

Qualifications & Certifications

Have confidence when hiring Kern Media for SEO consulting services. Dan Kern is Google Analytics Certified, Inbound certified, and featured with quality reviews amongst other top SEO agencies.


What Clients & Colleagues Say

"Dan Kern has the unique mix of analytical and technical skills blended with creativity that mark a successful SEO these days. His expertise goes beyond "just" SEO in all its facets. Dan is also a solid marketing strategist with direct experience in most online marketing channels. I highly recommend working with him." - Everett Sizemore

 

"I've just finished reviewing your technical SEO audit - it's awesome. Thank you for taking the time to be thorough, clear and providing your personal commentary on items in the document." - Ed Caraballo (Seer Interactive)

 

"I had the privilege of working with Dan for five years where he helped transform the way the company thought about and utilized SEO and inbound marketing. Traffic skyrocketed, increasing 7x over the course of six months." - Winter Thielen

 

"Kern Media has provided only positive results for Costa Rica Explorations & Escapes since beginning our working relationship in 2012. Dan Kern continues to exceed our expectations on a daily basis as he works tirelessly to keep up with industry trends and keep our site optimized. " - John Rabenau

 

"Not only is Dan admirable at his profession, but he's also an incredible leader and teacher. He knows how to talk to someone to convey information clearly, and is driven by the goal of getting everyone educated and "on board" for a particular project or strategy." - Corey Hartford

 

"Dan is by far, the most passionate about SEO and strategic content development of anyone I know. He takes each project on with determination for success and positive results. Dan is innovative, strategic, and results-focused, and there isn't a responsibility that he doesn't put his full energy into." - Jill Simonds

 

"Dan uncovered several problem areas of our site, resulting in us being penalized by Google’s Panda algorithm, and contributing to decreasing organic growth. With his guidance, we were able to fix our SEO-problem areas and have since seen tremendous growth in our organic traffic year over year! He transformed not only this business, but provided a proven model with best practices we continue to employ today." - Amanda Ferm

 

"In short, Dan is fantastic -- a true SEO guru, who is also a pleasure to work with. He is diligent, creative and his excitement for SEO & Online Marketing is both deep and genuine." - Dan Sargent

Still looking around? What are you looking for? If you contact us, maybe we can help.

Simply email us. We like to help people, whether they're curious about a technical SEO issue, ranking troubles, content optimization, or anything else related to SEO and inbound marketing.

SEO Services

  • ECommerce SEO Services
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  • Staff SEO Training + SEO for Publishers
  • SEO Content Audits
  • Content Marketing Strategy
  • Technical SEO Audit

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