An Easy Checklist for Technical SEO: Issues to Fix Right Away

Nearly every business with a website needs technical SEO, yet many tend to overlook it due to its perceived complexity. In reality, it’s a straightforward concept: identifying and resolving technical issues that hinder the user experience and lead to poor search engine rankings.

Here’s a simple checklist you can use to conduct technical SEO audits and optimize your website for long-term SEO success.

1. Check Site Indexing

Before you take the time to check website redirection or your URL paths, start with the basics. First, check if your site is indexed; if not, it won’t show up in search results. You can use Google Search Console’s ‘Pages’ report to see which pages are indexed and which aren’t. Here are some of the reasons why pages aren’t indexed:

• Low-quality content
• Content is too similar to other existing pages
• Robots.txt files are accidentally blocking Google from crawling the page
• Accidentally placed noindex tags that prevent Google from indexing the page

2. Fix Slow Loading Issues

A slow website often translates to lost leads and declining profits. More importantly, a slow-loading website means users will bounce off it more often, and a high bounce rate ultimately harms your Google rankings.

You can use a good website analyzer to get a comprehensive report on your website’s loading times to uncover what’s slowing them down. Usually, fixing loading speeds involves things like:

• Optimizing images by reducing their file size without compromising on quality
• Minimizing webpage code
• Minimizing redirects wherever possible
• Limit the number of HTTP requests

3. Optimize the Internal Links

Users browse through your website via internal links, which is why they’re important. During your website audit, check whether any internal links require adjustment. The more optimized they are, the more the link juice flows through your pages and enhances your rankings.

You can optimize links by:

• Giving them relevant anchor texts that provide context to users about what the link will redirect them to.
• Ensuring that all internal links are dofollow; otherwise, search engines won’t be able to crawl the linked pages.
• Writing internal links in HTML so that search engines can easily crawl them and index the pages.

4. Look for Broken Links

Broken links, both external and internal, are one of the most significant reasons behind poor site experience, which also tells search engines that your site isn’t good enough to be ranked. Again, you can use analyzers and site audit tools to check for broken links, and given how common they are, it’s a good idea to schedule a weekly audit.

If you do identify broken links, here are some common solutions:

• For Internal Links:
  • If possible, restoring the discarded pages that the links are redirecting to
  • Implementing 301 redirects to send users to similar pages on your site
• For External Links:
  • Removing the link if there’s no relevant replacement
  • Replacing the links with updated pages if they are available
  • Linking with new pages that have similar content

5. Check for Broken Images

Similar to broken links, there can be broken images on your site. They can negatively affect your site but offer faster load times. However, if your website loads faster but with empty blocks of images, is it really worth it?

You must always aim for excellent UX design, and that’s hardly possible without putting up images. So, if you have broken images (that don’t load up), your website will suffer.

Broken images can be due to minor issues like errors in their URLs or the images getting removed from your host server. These are typically quick fixes, and if you’re still facing the same issue, you can always replace the broken images with new ones.

6. Check Your On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is equally important, and it’s not just about content. On-page SEO also involves technical elements, such as page titles, meta descriptions, ALT attributes for images, and H1 tags. So, the next time you’re focusing on technical SEO optimization, don’t forget about these:

• Page Titles: Every page should have a title, and it should be concise. Moreover, no two titles should be the same.
• H1 Tags: Also, ensure that your page has an H1 tag.
• Meta Descriptions: Pages should each have unique meta descriptions.

Closing Thoughts

It’s no secret that technical SEO can feel overwhelming. Therefore, the next time you need to address it, consider using this checklist as your guide to streamline the process. These practical steps can help you break down common technical SEO problems and address them one at a time.