Is there any definitive guide to the standard technical SEO audit and services I will need to run a quick-check for my website?

Website SEO audit is among standard services and procedures needed to check your overall online performance on a frequent basis. Note, however, that unlike a traditional audit, technical SEO audit and related services are commonly performed for marketing purposes solely. Ideally, with a properly done scheduled website checkup, you can have good in-depth insight into your website’s or blog’s overall performance – both regarding each separate web page, and from a broader prospect of traffic-generating potential. Keep in mind that the experts in search optimization usually recommend to handle a complete website SEO audit among recurrent services that should be carried at the beginning of a new online project, to be followed with occasional procedures at least once per quarter. That being said, below I’m going to quickly outline the very basics of particularly technical SEO audit, with services and basic instructions you may need to complete the task the right way. Well, let’s delve.

Technical SEO Audit: Services, Actions, and Basic Approaches

Before anything else, let’s face it – your medium sized web resource will need basic SEO audit services mainly for the following actual reasons (rather than for the sake of the very procedure itself – otherwise, that would be nothing but a waste of your valuable time):

• When you launch a new online project and need to establish the primary goals.
• When you want to be more informed on your current and expected level of niche competition.
• When you detected a sudden drop in web traffic.
• When you haven’t performed a timely checkup for too long.
• When you feel that something is definitely wrong with your website – and you need to discover the root of the problem.

How It Works

The thing is that comprehensive SEO audit services are arguably among the most time-consuming procedures, they are intended to give you in-depth research and analysis of different major areas of your website and overall business performance. Ultimately, to help you understand exactly what is going fine so far, and what areas could be probably improved to finally give a spur to your ranking progress over time. Luckily, now we’re going to outline only technical aspect of this really broad doing, so your main tasks as a beginning website auditor will be revolving mainly around the technical analysis of your website performance. I think it’s not that daunting as it may seem at first sight.

So, Technical Analysis – is the first thing to be done with your website or blog, just to make sure the technical side of its overall performance is doing all right. Put simply, technical analysis is a backbone element giving a solid foundation to your further research – in terms of accessibility (i.e., both Google’s and the live user’s ability to access the web source and see every page displayed correctly), and indexability (minor issues related to incomplete or too slow indexing with search crawling bots, as well as double-check for any existing ranking penalties you’ve probably overseen so far). 

What Makes User Experience, Accessibility, and Indexability

From the viewpoint of website SEO audit and standard services related to it, the concept of good User Experience (otherwise, UX) is dedicated mainly to these aspects of accessibility and on-page content properties. Put simply, a sufficiently good UX can be achieved with unique page content of high quality, that makes you:

• Findable and welcoming – right from the list of the relevant SERPs.
• Accessible and easy to browse, with every web page displayed correctly for the user.
• Desirable, otherwise your content subject must be well-demanded by the main target audience or a certain group of interested people.
• Valuable for every visitor, as your unique content is expected to be good enough for delivering more actual value to the end users.
• Credible name of your online business or really trustworthy source with rock-solid content base – no unsolicited materials, untested data, or illegitimate third-party referrals are allowed.
• Usable navigation and smooth browsing experience to be provided with a sufficiently fast page loading speed, mobile responsiveness via smartphones/tablets, as well as clean & clear logic of the website’s structure, on the whole.

Technical SEO Audit: Services, Issues, and Initial Actions 

Most commonly, you’re going to face the following issues – here is what can usually be discovered throughout the earliest stages of your technical SEO audit, with services and basic actions recommended for each of them accordingly:

• Check your website for any shreds of evidence related to clearly visible access restrictions – before anything else, quickly run through your robots.txt file and related meta tags. Don't skimp your time and effort on completing a manual double-check procedure to make sure nothing prevents Google from accessing your web pages
• Next comes your XML-sitemap – it’s the second most important element found over there. Make sure it’s correctly formatted and properly submitted for one-stop access via webmaster tools account.

• Overall website architecture is also related to the most common accessibility issues. All you need over there is just to make sure that every visitor (as well as Google’s crawling bots) can easily reach any given destination page – right from your homepage and without making even single unnecessary or optional click. Remember, the fewer steps are needed to find the way through your website page sections – the better it will be for you, both in terms of machine indexing, and live human browsing.
• Minimize your potential with the average bounce rate – make sure the visitors aren't leaving your website due to the lack of page loading speed, or improperly optimized mobile browsing experience. That way, don’t forget to pay attention to redirects. Given that you could occasionally remove or relocate a piece of your content, you may be suffering from incomplete accessibility by crawlers – should it happen so, you will have to create a redirect pointing the way to the actual page location.
• Given that you have everything in place over there – the last reason why your pages aren’t well-shown to the users upon entering a relevant search request might as well root from content indexability issues. Put simply, it’s time to review your webmaster account for existing Google penalty. But no need to worry – if you have actually overseen a minor penalty lately, now you will see a clear message to that point. Once you discovered the problem, try to identify the reason for taking that action by Google. Next, rectify the issue and make sure everything is finally in place. Face the charges and deliver all the necessary changes to be able to request reconsideration from Google search engine at least without prolonging such a negative course of “development” – and you're done!