How can an SEO expert help you with technical SEO audits? 

SEO is a vast topic and there are so many things to consider when optimizing a website. Technical SEO audits are an essential part of the process because they can reveal some of the more technical issues preventing your client’s website from ranking well. 

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Technical SEO is the ‘behind-the-scenes’ function of a website that ensures it follows basic elements of SEO from canonical tags to mobile optimization. It is the foundation of a successful website that allows it to build authority, load quickly, and be easy for search engines to crawl and index. 

A technical SEO audit will examine how a website is constructed, including the page hierarchy and internal linking, to ensure that it is easy for search engines to navigate and understand. It will also check for broken links, duplicate content, and schema markup. A good way to start a technical SEO audit is by using a tool like GTmetrix to capture data and provide a site performance report. This will show if your client’s site has any speed or loading issues that should be addressed immediately. 

Next, you’ll want to use a crawler to find the pages on your client’s website that are not being indexed by search engines. This is an important part of a technical SEO audit because it gives you an accurate picture of how search engines see your client’s website. A good crawler to use is Screaming Frog. It’s free and provides you with a detailed report on the pages that are being indexed and those that are not. 

Make sure your client’s website has a sitemap displayed on the homepage and submitted to GSC. This will give the bots a heads-up to crawl and index your client’s website. It’s also a good idea to test the structure of their structured data with a tool like SchemaGraph. Structured data helps Google better understand your client’s website and can lead to rich results or Knowledge Panel features. It can also help with expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) in search results. 

You’ll also want to check your client’s internal links to ensure they are logical and consistent with their overall architecture. This is another important aspect of technical SEO because it prevents search engines from penalizing your client’s website for poor structure or irrelevant internal links. 

Lastly, you’ll want to run a quick search in Google and Bing to make sure that only your client’s brand appears as the first result. This is because John Mueller has said that if a competitor’s brand is appearing before your client’s, this can negatively impact their SEO rankings. This is easily done by running a manual search in both Google and Bing to see what’s happening. This should give you a rough estimate of how many pages are being indexed.