What does our Technical SEO audit include?

When we engage our clients who are interested in SEO, our first step is to do a "Technical SEO Audit" to make sure their site is ready for a full SEM campaign. If our clients are going to invest significant resources in marketing their site, they expect the site to be optimized to get the best results from their campaign. The process involves 8 steps:

Identify Goals

• Is there an issue we are trying to address or do you want to just rank higher in the SERP?
• If there is any issue, we will identify and research that specific issue and suggest a direction to fix that issue.

Benchmark

• Review Analytics to baseline average overall visits, new visits, search engine traffic, page views, bounce rate and SEO score.

Hardware Architecture assessment

• Identify the hardware topology to understand the environment.
• Briefly review server error logs to determine if there are any technical issues that need to be addressed.

Bottlenecks

• Are bots able to access your pages?
• Are your pages being indexed?
• Are you being penalized for a specific reason?
• Is there an error free XML or html sitemap?
• Are there pages being restricted by robots.txt?
• Does your navigation work without JS or Flash?
• Are URLs not found, not followed, unreachable or timing out?
• Are there HTTP errors?
• Do you have a preferred domain (Is www is the same as without www)?

Onsite Optimizations Assessment

• Identify broken links
• Do you need a custom 404 or 500 page?
• Do you use external JS cache files?
• Is your JS at the bottom and CSS at the top?
• Is there JS that can be replaced with CSS?
• Do you use flash or Silverlight? If so, do you use sIFR and swfObject?
• Do you have inline style blocks?
• Do you use a robots meta tag?
• Do you use 301 or 302 redirects?
• Are you W3C web standards compliant?
• What is your site’s code to content ratio?
• Is the architecture of the site (folder names, etc) optimized?
• Do you use session IDs?
• Do you use description (friendly) URLs?
• Do you use rel="nofollow" and rel="canonical" tag on your pages?
• Are your internal hyperlinks linking to the proper canonical form of your URL?

Content Specific Optimization

• Do you have duplicate titles?
• Do you have duplicate meta descriptions?
• Do you use alt and title tags on site assets?
• Do you use long descriptions?
• Are you using too many images without enough text on the landing pages?
• If you have a lot of images, do you use a CDN?
• Is there non-indexable content issue?

Best Practices Optimization

• Do you have a favicon?
• Do you use a blog and for what purposes?
• Are you using expire headers?
• Are you logging errors?
• Do you have excessive database queries?
• Do you gzip?

Propose Solutions

Beyond going through this list, Swipht can also provide detailed cost estimate for the work involved to fix any problems that we discover. If you use Swipht to implement the proposed solutions, we will credit the cost of this audit back to the project.

Download the Technical SEO Audit (PDF)