Technical SEO Audit Checklist: Ultimate List (2022)

Great SEO means that you need to be consistent and that you nail the basics. If you want your website to perform optimally in search engine rankings, you must ensure that your technical SEO strategy is flawless. This is where a technical SEO audit comes in. 

It is the process of checking or evaluating various website technical aspects (anything that relates directly to search engine ranking factors) to ensure that they align with the best practices for search optimization. 

Many online marketers know that SEO is crucial, but technical SEO auditing may be a challenge for some since it is complex. A technical SEO audit checklist can assist you in determining what you need for the overall health of your website. It helps you detect any loopholes.

Why does your business need technical SEO services?

Search engine algorithms send crawlers on websites to analyze different aspects like structure, performance, and more. 

This is why a fully optimized website is essential. Most technical SEO elements are HTML elements, JavaScript, appropriate meta tags, and website extensions. 

Technical SEO is essential since it translates to checking the innermost aspects of your website to determine more complex issues that you may be unaware of. 

Additionally, it means looking for technical problems that may be negatively impacting user experience from poor functioning. Once you find any issues, you can address them accordingly. 

Ultimately, all these results in an excellently optimized website for search engine performance and improved visibility. 

Google search algorithms keep changing, and you need to adapt to the changes. Therefore, technical auditing is critical to ensure that you are in line with the best practices recommended by Google.

Unlike other SEO audits that primarily focus more on the content build-up of internal and external linking, technical SEO does not. 

Instead, it assists you in finding out how Google sees and indexes your site and how particular page elements affect speed and user experience. 

An excellent technical audit also includes assessing language, frameworks, technology, and the magnitude of external resources used for your site. It is mainly a situation analysis to make recommendations for change and improved performance. 

Technical SEO Audit Checklist

1. SEO Core Web Vitals

Google began including Core Web Vitals as one of the ranking parameters. They gave developers a better understanding of this metric’s status by making Search Console changes. Now, there are tools for Page Experience and Core Web Vitals. It is recommended that you optimize the Core Web Vitals for both desktop and mobile.

Core Web Vitals are three metrics that assist you in measuring how best your website has been optimized for user experience. They include:

• • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This depicts the time taken by the most significant element in a site’s page to load within the very first view. It can be a slogan, an extensive menu, a photo, or an animated text. It shows how fast users see the main content of your site. A good ranking is below 2.5.
  • First Input Delay (FID): It indicates how interactive your page is. It is the time between a user’s call to action and the page response. An FIB of below 100ms is good.

• Cumulative Layout Shit (CLS): It measures a page’s visual stability, such as the appearance of new sections, ads, and so on. Have it at 0.1 seconds or below.

2. Optimizing the Google Passage Rank

It is crucial to the audit process that you ensure your page meets Google quality guidelines with no violation. Double-check that you do not have sneaky redirects, cloaking, doorway pages, and limit user-created spam. 

Avoid anything that gets in the way of page content, like large popups and banners, as these can rank your site lower. Popups like cookie consent take small space and aren’t typically causes for concern. 

Google may penalize you for heavy ads above the fold, whereby they find the ads distracting. Look at heavy ads, popups, and banners using a mobile browser to see how easy it is to access the content. 

If you find it difficult, you may want to highlight that on your audit and focus on reducing the ad flow. 

It is necessary and convenient to use iFrames. However, you should avoid them, if possible. Even Google doesn’t recommend it. 

It is problematic if your content does not load in the iFrame, or Google can’t access it. Make sure that your content does not rely on Flash. It can kill your rankings since most browsers ignore it. 

Check that lazy-loaded content is visible and accessible in your viewport. If you want your page to look important, other pages must link to it. To best implement infinite scroll, use paginated loading, whereby the URL changes as the user scrolls down your site’s page. 

As a result, they can bookmark and share specific content pages. It also allows for individual search engine content indexing.

3. Do focus on the featured snippets

You need to have structured data that is supportive of the Google-rich snippets. Whether it’s an article markup, author or organization identification, an upcoming event, or a product review, focus on clarity and detail. 

Structured data may not be a ranking factor by itself, but it can help Google understand page content and rank your page higher. It can also influence the click-through rate (CTR). 

If you find any errors in the structured data, you need to audit them. Google has a Structured Data Testing Tool you can use to discover if your structured data is well implemented or not.

4. EAT principle

The quality of your page plays a role in its ranking. To an extent, people make decisions from search results. Hence, Google considers the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of creators, the content, and the website. 

This is mainly applicable to sites that impact financial decisions, happiness, health, and people’s safety. 

It is also valuable for sites that offer information about news and current events, law and government, and claims about groups of people. If you don’t meet these criteria, you need to focus on making the necessary changes. 

5. Supporting multiple long-tail keyword phrases

It is good to see that your page includes related phrases and target keywords in critical places. At this point, you also want to get rid of irrelevant keywords. 

Appropriately use relevant keywords and make sure they are in context to drive site traffic. You can use search engine result pages (SERPs) to see user intention and effectively support and optimize keywords. It helps that you find out what topics your users are interested in. 

Analyze which keywords are associated with the most conversions and see if they help you achieve your SEO goal. To enhance positive user experience and ranking, explain long and complex keywords. 

Use headlines, title tags, subheadings, meta descriptions, the body text, etc., to make all these aspects clear. They should be to the point and unique.

6. Creation of new content

During the audit, check that majority of your content is not duplicated and try your best to make it original. 

Small quantities of copied content are natural and unproblematic, but when most of it is similar to that of another site on a substantial level, it can cause problems. 

Solve duplicate problems using canonicalization, robots.txt control, and non-index tags. You can find out if the content is duplicated by:

• Running a site crawl with your preferred SEO tool
• Using Google’s exact match search operator for single pages
• Using a plagiarism detector like Copyscape

7. Updating the old content

Web content may not affect your rankings directly, but it can influence user engagement and CTR. 

Therefore, constantly update old content. Search results display dates that may affect user engagement and clicks. 

If you choose to show dates, it’ll indicate the last modified or updated date. This shows users that you have fresh and relevant content. 

Display dates that are visible to the user primarily close to the top of the page. In your Schema markup, including the date published and the date modified. Additionally, keep the dates consistent. Having multiple page dates can be confusing to Google.

8. Focusing on user experience

You need to keep your users in mind during the design of your website and the audit. You can test if it is accessible by previewing it using a browser but with your JavaScript turned off, or you can use a text-only browser like Lynx. 

Indexing is crucial. It means organizing web page information and storing it in the search engine database to respond to any user queries quickly.

Having an XML sitemap helps index main web pages, but you must focus on the entire website quality and not just what sitemap.xml reports.

Evaluate how your content performs in light of the metrics that matter, the content gaps, and carry out a targeted audit. Speed is essential for users, and it typically influences factors like bounce rate. 

The website content needs to load within a reasonable time fully. Therefore, you need to address any issues that may be slowing down your website, like the server, themes, plugins, the database, and a lot more. 

For fast websites, you can enable file compression to reduce the sizes of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. To optimize, you may:

• Minify CSS and JavaScript
• Remove any unused CSS
• Reduce the JavaScript time of execution
• Focus on eliminating any resources that render-blocking

To find user trends and information, you can use Google Analytics for web optimization. For more website exposure, you can use social media sites. This way, you can generate more connections and possible conversions.

9. The content image matters a lot

Images play a critical role in SEO. They need to contain descriptive alt attributes. Additionally, they need to have defined heights and widths to enhance usability. They also need to have descriptive titles, texts, captions, and file names. 

These help users determine what an image is about and its relation to the content. For maximum visibility, these elements need to be defined, descriptive, and unique. 

Listing images in a sitemap or an image sitemap will be helpful for discoverability and indexing. Page image text(s) are almost invisible to search engines. 

If your image contains important text, communicate the same in the alt text, caption(s), title(s), or the text surrounding the body, it can be helpful in ranking.

Images can slow down websites. Therefore, you need to ensure that the files are not very large. You can use the below-mentioned techniques:

• The use of image CDNs
• Image compression
• The use of WEbP images
• Using video instead of animated GIFs
• Serving responsive and correct dimension images

10. Building the backlinks

Typically, backlinks aren’t included in most technical SEO audits. However, one of the main reasons a page may not have a ranking potential is the lack of backlinks. Therefore, it is good to take extra measures to have the backlinks in order. 

First, build actual backlinks from real sites. Limit the number of links you present to search engines. Having excessive page links dilutes link equity and can make it more difficult for Google to determine the important ones. 

Finally, you must ensure that your page links to the redirect chains by fixing any redirect chains.

Ensure that all the backlinks used are relevant and make sure they are from trusted sources and pages. Let them have anchor phrases that describe the content accurately. 

Please ensure they do not violate Google’s guidelines on manipulative link building. Google will demote any site with a spammy backlink profile.