If there’s one thing a website and the person who created it have in common, it is imperfection. No website is perfect; even the big ones like Bunnings, Amazon, and Woolworths have flaws. Especially since the World Wide Web is constantly evolving, it’s literally impossible to create a website that will remain functional and spot-on for a long time. Perpetual updating is necessary to maintain a website’s search engine ranking and overall online presence.

This is why technical SEO audit is extremely important. It’s the process of checking every section of a website’s architecture for elements that don’t conform to the most current standards set by search engines, particularly Google. A huge percentage of internet users use search engines as their landing page when they are trying to look for a specific website, which explains why many advertisers invest so much in search engine marketing.

Whether you are just planning to build a website or have an existing one, you must set aside sufficient time for SEO audit. But if you don’t know how to perform a technical SEO audit, you can’t expect your website to go very far towards the front page of search results. Same goes if you are a digital marketing company offering technical SEO audit as one of your services. Even if you have the knowledge, it’s likely that you won’t be able to carry it out at 100 percent because it requires focus and precision. You need a white label digital marketing company like White Label Club who knows how to do SEO website audit to help you out. Let me give you an idea of how they can help you.
 

Run a Crawl Report to Identify Errors

When your website does not appear on at least any of the first five pages of SERP, it only means crawlers (Google’s search bots) can’t see it. Their view is blocked by the errors in your website’s structure, such as duplicate content, low page speed, or missing H1/H2 tags, which they are designed to avoid. A white label digital marketing company can run a crawl report to identify the reasons why crawlers are avoiding your website and fix them.
 

Inspect the Status of Your Website’s Sitemap

It’s not news to advertisers that a website must have a sitemap, an XML sitemap to be exact. Google has programmed their crawlers to crawl into websites through the sitemap, hence its name. So if your website doesn’t have one, the white label digital marketing company you hired will recommend that you create one or else your website remains completely invisible. They will also advise that you format the sitemap into an XML document, include all updated webpages in it, and ensure that apart from following the XML sitemap protocol, it is also submitted to the Google Search Console.
 

Alert You of Keyword Cannibalisation

Competition for online presence happens not just among websites but also among webpages. And since your website is made up of multiple webpages, there’s a significant chance that some of those webpages are competing against each other. This can happen in a variety of situations, of which the most common is what is known as keyword cannibalisation. This happens when two or more pages in your website are optimised for the same keywords. While it seems fine, keyword cannibalisation actually hurts your online presence as each webpage gets a lower click-through rate, conversion rate, and authority, and that’s largely because crawlers virtually treat them as a single page and divide the rating among them.
 

Evaluate the Security of Your Website

Most recent updates on search engine algorithms give emphasis to security. It’s become one of the strongest ranking factors that a website should possess. Crawlers are now programmed to sidestep unsecure websites, so if your website lacks at least basic security features, it’s not going to rank high. One obvious sign of a security issue is when your website still has “http” URLs. Webpages with this kind of URL are open channels for hacking and illegal monitoring through your website. Make sure they are all switched to “https”. You don’t have to scan through your webpages one by one to find them though. Just check your site crawl report and you will see a list of webpages that aren’t fully protected.
 

Calculate Your Site Speed

Try to open your website and calculate how long each of its main pages loads up. If it takes more than 5 seconds, it’s considered “slow” and that has a tremendous effect on your ranking. Even more critical, ranking is the least of your concern when you find that your site’s load time is too high. Keep in mind that site speed is all about user experience. If your website is slow, don’t expect your visitors to stay for long. Once they get annoyed from waiting, they won’t hesitate to visit another site that offers the same information, which is basically your competitor, and never consider visiting your website again.
 

Check If Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

Until a decade ago, people used to set aside a definite amount of time for internet browsing each day, so they normally do it on their laptop or desktop computer. Now, as the world becomes increasingly digital, the need for instant internet access has also increased. We’ve become so obsessed with the Internet that we want to be able to access it wherever we are. This is why mobile browsing became an important development in the internet world. So if your website doesn’t load properly on mobile, you are bound to lose not just ranking but organic leads too. Your white label digital marketing company can perform a full sweep of your website to identify pages that are not mobile-friendly and fix them.

There are various other features on your website that need to be fully inspected to ensure that they are not pulling down the stats. Of course, Google provides all the necessary tools to allow website owners like you or your clients to perform the audit on their own. Unfortunately, interpreting and analysing data as well as creating a strategy for site improvement is a skill that only a seasoned digital marketing professional has. It requires knowledge and experience to successfully accomplish a technical SEO audit checklist. And it takes time, too, so you really need a separate team to do the task or else you’ll be swamped.