Whether or not you’re technical-minded, using a technical SEO checklist to keep your site performance healthy makes a huge difference.
If a technical issue is affecting your SEO performance, addressing it quickly will keep your Google rankings from dropping. Performing an SEO audit will help you determine improvements, fixes, and updates that will keep your SEO goals on track.
Here’s an essential technical SEO checklist to get you started.
Have The Right Tools
Marketing is all about having the right tools at your fingertips. When it comes to improving SEO, these are the tools you need to have at the ready:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Yoast SEO (if you have a WordPress site)
- Raven, Moz, SEM Rush – or other tools that help audit your SEO regularly
Investing in a more robust tool can help when you’re not necessarily knowledgeable in the technical side of things. Helpful tools should be able to monitor for broken links, correct errors and redirects, and perform in-depth keyword analysis to help you optimize for better rankings.
Check Site Speed
Both your desktop and mobile sites should be tested for speed regularly.
The speed of your site directly impacts your bounce rate. If it takes more than 3 seconds for something to load, the possibility of a user leaving increases by 90%.
You can run your website through Google’s Test My Site tool to see how it’s performing and get suggestions on how to make it better.
Replace Broken Links
Links have a significant impact on how a user interacts with your site. If someone clicks on a broken link, it leaves a negative impression.
Put yourself in their shoes. You’re invested in an article you’re reading and want to learn more, only to find the link doesn’t take you anywhere.
Any number of the SEO tools we mentioned before can help you find and replace broken links.
Pull Index Status Reports
To see how your page is showing up in organic search results, you should run an index status report regularly. Google Search Console allows you to run a report and see what pages might be blocked.
Typically, your pages are blocked because of bot activity. To fix this, you’ll want to edit your Robots.text file.
For those of us not technically minded, this might be something you want to push to an engineer or ask for help with.
Check for Duplicate Content
Believe or not, Google can tell when you’re using the same content on multiple pages or from another website entirely.
It will prevent those pages from showing up in search results, which can hurt your SEO. Use a tool like siteliner.com to check for duplicate content and address it with canonical link elements or redirects.
Review Your Content Marketing Strategy
SEO is boosted by content marketing. But Google knows when you’re phoning it in, and that can affect your rankings.
Go through your content and make sure it’s adding value. It should be engaging and offering information that is unique or different from similar sites out there.
If something isn’t working? Remove it and replace it with better content.
There’s a whole host of things you can do to audit your site for better technical SEO performance. Start by taking care of any of the ones mentioned above and watch your site rankings improve.
