Key Elements Included in an SEO Audit
Here at Ditto Digital, our bespoke technical SEO auditing services are tailored to your website. All websites vary and whilst SEO best practice is right for almost all websites, if you have a particularly large website (e.g. several thousand pages) then you may need a different approach.
Our technical SEO experts have over 15 years’ experience in all aspects of search engine optimization. As a specialist SEO agency we have the knowledge and skills, backed up by real-world experience, to deliver audit services that have a positive impact on website performance, search engine rankings and business revenue.
Our technical SEO audits are data-driven and prioritised for maximum impact. They come with a full SEO report, with prioritised SEO recommendations. We will discuss the report with you either face-to-face or via Teams/Zoom and, if required, will liaise with your web developers about all the technical aspects of the audit report.
Our SEO audit service involves a deep dive into the following key areas:
1. Website Crawlability and Indexation in Search Results
Our analysis ensures that search engines and their crawling software or bots can efficiently crawl and index your site without encountering barriers (such as external links or internal links pointing to non-existent pages).
- Robots.txt file analysis (including robots meta tag)
- XML sitemap validation
- Crawl budget optimisation
- Crawl error identification (404 errors, 500 errors, redirect chains)
- Review of noindex/nofollow meta tags
- Canonical tag implementation and review
- Pagination and infinite scroll checks
2. Site Architecture and URL Structure
A clean, logical site structure improves both user experience and a search engines efficiency so our technical audits will examine the following:
- Hierarchical navigation structure
- Consistent and SEO-friendly URL patterns
- Internal linking analysis
- Detection of orphan pages
- Breadcrumb navigation checks
3. Page Speed and Site Performance (Core Web Vitals)
Site speed is a major ranking factor and user experience booster. For that reason it is a key part of all our technical SEO audits.
- Performance testing using Google Lighthouse
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) assessment
- First Input Delay (FID) diagnostics
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measurement
- Image compression and format optimisation (e.g. use of WebP images)
- JavaScript and CSS minification
- Removal on unused JavaScript and CSS
- Server response time and hosting environment review
4. Mobile Usability
With mobile-first indexing, your site must perform perfectly on smaller screens so our technical SEO audit includes mobile optimisation checks for the following, which are reported in Google Search Console:
- Mobile responsiveness check
- Viewport configuration and scaling
- Font size and tap target assessments
- Mobile load time analysis
- Cross-device rendering checks
5. HTTPS and Site Security
Security is both a trust element and a ranking factor on search engine results pages (SERPS).
- SSL certificate validation
- Mixed content checks
- Secure redirect configuration (i.e. HTTP URL versions have permanent 301 redirects to the HTTPS version)
- HSTS and security header implementation
- Malware and blacklist scanning
6. Structured Data and Schema Markup
Technical SEO auditing also analyses structured data because the right structured data (schema markup) will enhance how your pages are understood by search engines and how they appear in search results. For instance, whether it will appear as a featured snippet or rich snippet or with a thumbnail image.
- Schema.org validation using Google’s Rich Results Test to ensure schema markup are correctly implemented
- Review of existing structured data (e.g., Product, FAQ, Organisation)
- Identify opportunities for rich snippets (e.g., Reviews or Events)
- Correcting JSON-LD syntax issues
7. International SEO (If Applicable)
If your business targets consumers in other countries then we specialise in international SEO – either for businesses with locations in both the UK and overseas, and also for UK-based businesses selling into other countries but without a physical base in those target countries.
We have experience with multi-lingual websites and overseas search engines. We know the best approach to reach an international audience via online search because we have run international campaigns and have data and case studies to show what we achieved.
Talk to our specialist SEO team about our International SEO strategies.
For multilingual or multi-regional websites our technical SEO audit service includes:
- hreflang tag implementation and validation in search engines
- Language and region configuration in Google Search Console
- Canonical and alternate tags review
- Geo-targeting best practices
8. Full SEO Website Audit Service for E-commerce
Our SEO auditing services are designed to pay special attention to common e-commerce SEO challenges.
- Structured data for products, reviews and prices
- Faceted navigation and parameter handling
- Product page duplication and duplicate content
- Pagination best practices
We’ve looked at some of our competitors using a free SEO audit tool and they have multiple technical errors on their websites yet they are still out ranking us. We have very few errors so clearly something else is going on as we also have more content and it’s better!
Check your backlinks and compare them to your competitors for quality and quantity. Free SEO tools can be useful but rarely pinpoint all problem or even tell you how to resolve the problems they do report.
We’ve also run our site through a free SEO audit tool and found the same as DC . No errors showing up but we still struggle with getting organic rankings and visitors. We add new content every month too.
How important is it to check backlinks?
Hi Robyn,
I see you left another comment on our Bespoke SEO page and the reply I left there addresses your question in part too.
Optimising your website so it passes an SEO audit is necessary, as is the content you create every month, but there is a lot more still to be done. That mostly involves checking your own backlinks and competitor backlinks, then building good-quality links that are better quality than your competitors’ links.
Analysing backlinks (yours and your competitors) and building new links is an ongoing process and essential for SEO success.
Does your technical SEO audit include an audit of all the backlinks to a website. And does it include recommendations of how to build new backlinks? Some of the standard methods suggested online don’t really work – as in we are not able to get backlinks via these methods.
Hi Ellie,
Thanks for commenting – we do a whole range of audits depending on requirements and, yes, a full backlink audit can easily be included. This produces a list of all backlinks and the relevant SEO attributes of these backlinks. It also analyses all backlinks as a whole (the “backlink profile”) because this is also important to identify, for example, if you have too many image links with no anchor text or a lack of anchor text diversity. It recommends what type of backlinks to focus on acquiring to improve the backlink profile.
Is an assessment of Core Web Vitals included in your technical audit? We have a WordPress website and speed performance is poor because of the number of plugins we’re using. Also warnings appearing about an excessive DOM size. Can performance issues like this be fixed without rewriting the site?
Hi Pete,
Yes, indeed, part of our technical SEO audit includes an assessment of Core Web Vitals metrics and other speed performance metrics such as INP (Interaction to Next Paint) which will replace FID (First Input Delay) as a Core Web Vitals metric in March 2024.
WordPress is a great platform for many types of websites but, as you have already found, it can bloat a site when too many plugins are used, and create an excessive DOM size (Document Object Model) if focus is not on speed performance. Fortunately there are some solutions to that such as removing unused Javascript and CSS from certain pages (that would otherwise be automatically added by plugins whether needed or not).
However, solutions are obviously dependent on how a site is currently built so we cannot say definitively that any website could have speed performance issues resolved without a re-write. You would need a Website Audit to make that assessment. What I can say is that we have resolved speed issues on many WordPress websites without needing to develop a new site.
Send details of your website to contact@dittodigital.co.uk or call on 01494 530233 and we can give you a better idea of what is possible.
Does your technical audit include checking things like meta data as well as performance issues and technical errors? We’d like to get a full 360 audit of our website.
Hi Rob,
Yes our Technical SEO Audit does include all basic on-site SEO checks such as meta data and image alternative text. We provide full 360° SEO Audits that include:
These can be fully tailored to your needs and can include a review of your competitors’ SEO strategy, content and technical status.
If you send an email to contact@dittodigital.co.uk with details of you website I can provide a better idea of how we could help…
Seems to be a bit of a common theme going on here – Audit tools and optimisation tools show our site is in pretty good shape but our main competitor is outranking us even though their optimisation doesn’t seem to be as good and we have more/better backlinks.
One thing worrying me is that for some keywords the wrong page is appearing in Google – could this be a problem?
Hi Jess,
SEO Audit tools are great for identifying basic on-site and technical SEO issues and I would always recommend fixing all the errors and warnings raised by whatever tool you are using. However, they fail to provide a broader and more in-depth picture. You raise 2 points:
Get in touch at contact@dittodigital.co.uk with some more details and we’d be happy to help resolve the cannibalisation issues.
Thanks for the solid overview of a tech SEO audit. You mention websites being designed on large screens not offering a great UX on mobiles but what exactly are the issues to look out for?
This is such a common problem that I have seen even on brand new sites. Typical problems are:
Check your pages on a desktop by clicking F12 to see how they look on a small mobile device.
And, remember that successful SEO requires a good UI/UX.
Why aren’t web designers/developers putting more emphasis on the UX (whether on a large or small screen) so that actual customers of a business can find what they want on the website quickly and easily. Seems to me that too many business websites want to tell their potential customers how great they are without thiking about whether the customer can find/do what they want – especially B2B sites. Rant over!
It’s good to rant sometimes! You might be interested to know that much of the work we do with our clients – while ostensibly SEO – is about improving UX and conversion rates. Doing that supports the SEO results. However, we work closely with a number of web developers and designers to ensure any new website does deliver for the customer experience from the outset.
We have pretty good organic traffic – and even some traffic from ChatGPT – but are about to embark on a website re-design because of technical issues that are impossible to resolve with the dated WordPress template we’re using. At what stage should we be thinking about analysing the performance – we don’t want to lose all the good SEO work done to date, but the web developers are saying the performance will be fine with a modern template. I don’t feel quite so confident. Any advice?
Hi Chris,
It’s essential that your web developers are aware of the type of performance issues that will impact SEO visibility (keyword ranking positions) in Google. And also factors that are (congrats!) impacting GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) resulting in traffic from ChatGPT. In my experience these are not the areas of expertise of a typical WordPress developer.
Here is my advice on the best place to start to avoid losing the search visibility your website already has.
Make sure your web developers: