Technical SEO audit components for your website

Over the last couple of years, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has changed dramatically, and webmasters must rapidly transform their strategies to fit in the new order. From JavaScript crawling support to the pending shift to mobile-first index, and expansion of search results to answers, SEO consultants can no longer relax. To remain on top of SEO for your brand, there are a couple of technical items that help to enhance crawlability, indexing, and visibility.

Here are some of the most important SEO technical audit components for your website.

Use of structured data

The search engine result pages are always changing, and your efforts cannot be effective if you do not evolve at the same pace. The common universal results were mainly local packs, videos, and images. However, this has been expanded to new and very important features such as answer boxes, knowledge panels, rich cards, and rich snippets.

The new features mean that getting more clicks using marketing SEO efforts can now be achieved by maximizing site visibility with SERP components. To get these display enhancements, you have to implement structured data, crafting content for answer queries, and adopting the right formatting. Note that it is important to be specific with the SERP feature that you want to rank for.

Amplified Mobile Pages (AMP) Configuration

Searches from mobile phones account for more than 50% of all searches today. Google has indicated that it is dividing its index with mobile being the primary index, getting a mobile website is no longer an option. In fact, AMP is now required to be part of news carousel and presence has gone up by a great margin in Google news. It is, therefore, very important to regularly audit your site and ensure it is compliant with Google requirements for AMP. Some of these requirements include ongoing monitoring, page level validation, and site-wide validation.

Mobile site crawling

As more websites continue to redefine their design to make access via phones easier, it is important to test how Google bots crawl mobile pages. To validate the website’s mobile crawlability, consider using the following tools.

• SEO crawlers that have phone Googlebot option
• Google page-level mobile validators
• Search engine specific log analyzers

By evaluating the mobile site crawlability, it is easy to identify errors that make page access difficult or redirects. You can also identify pages that are blocked and work on them to ensure they are reproduced in SERPs.

HTTPS configuration

Starting from mid-2014, Google included HTTPS as one of its ranking signals. To assist users to enjoy safer browsing, site owners are encouraged to migrate to HTTPS to make browsing more secure. Now, migrating to HTTPS is not simply good because of SEO, it also guarantees clients a more secure user experience. If you establish that the website is yet to migrate to the secure HTTPS, you need to do that immediately.

Before migrating to HTTPS, make sure to follow the best practices including the following;

• Ensuring that all content, as well as resources, can be migrated
• Audit the web structure to ensure that all links are consistent, implement 301 redirects appropriately, and canonicalize duplicated pages
• Consolidate the top pages from a conversion and visibility point of view for easy review after migration