Imagine a Rolls-Royce Phantom with its classic, athletic structure in a polished midnight black. Imagine the uninterrupted glass enclosure and the Pantheon Grille adorned with the Spirit of Ecstacy spotlessly shining. Imagine the sumptuous Scivaro Grey leather seats and the starlight headliner. Imagine then that you get behind that hand-stitched steering wheel with the promise of a whisper-quite ride. Yet, when the moment arrives to bring this vehicle to life, your heart sinks at the realisation that the car won’t start. You’re left with an immobile masterpiece, an unmoving feat of engineering. That is the heartbreaking result of a beautifully designed website with exceptional content and stunning visuals. It promises to be a digital marketing marvel, only to be left with inferior performance and lacklustre rankings because of technical search engine optimisation (SEO) issues.
Websites have lots of moving parts, just like a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Technical SEO, and more importantly, an SEO site audit, is crucial for the ongoing success of your business.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is a subcategory of search engine optimisation and refers to optimising a website’s infrastructure. By improving the technical aspects of a website, it can easily be crawled and indexed, essentially making the website faster and more understandable for search engines. In a nutshell, SEO can be divided into three categories:
- On-page SEO – The interior and exterior of the Rolls-Royce
This will include elements like content, images, metadata, and internal linking of your website, everything you see on a website.
- Technical SEO – The engine of the Rolls-Royce
This includes elements like page speed, schema markup, mobile friendliness, and the XML sitemap, everything you don’t see on the website.
- Off-page SEO – The Rolls-Royce dealership
This includes backlinks, social signals, and brand mentions, everything that points you to the website.
What is a technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit evaluates the technical aspects of your website that will identify and address any issues that can affect its search engine visibility.
In many cases, thorough website audits can highlight the invisible problems your website has that you may not be aware of, and small changes can sometimes yield significant results. The goal of a technical SEO audit is to ensure that your website is optimised for search engines and increase the overall online presence for users too.
Why is technical SEO important?
Technical SEO is vital because it ensures that your website is easy to navigate and free of technical issues that prevent it from being understood and ranked by search engines. Google wants to give users the best possible results for their search queries as fast as possible. Therefore, when Google’s robots crawl and index your website, it will evaluate all the flashy on-page elements as well as the mechanical interior elements.
When should you perform a technical SEO Audit?
Our SEO experts suggest that an SEO audit should be done once every 6 months as part of the ongoing maintenance of your site or when:
- a website has just been launched
- a website publishes new content on a regular basis
- a website has just gone through a migration
- you notice a significant drop in rankings
What are the benefits of a technical SEO audit?
Performing a technical SEO audit on a website is essential for ensuring that your site is optimised for search engines and can rank well in search results. Here are some of the key benefits of conducting regular technical SEO audits:
- Improved Search Engine Rankings
By identifying and addressing technical issues, you can improve your website’s performance in search engine rankings. This can result in higher visibility and increased organic traffic.
- Enhanced User Experience
Technical SEO audits help you identify and fix issues that can negatively impact the user experience, such as slow loading times, broken links, and mobile responsiveness. A better user experience can lead to higher engagement and lower bounce rates.
- Faster Page Loading Times
Optimising technical aspects of your site, such as image optimisation, server response times, and code efficiency, can lead to faster page loading times. Speed is a ranking factor, and faster websites have better user retention.
- Mobile Friendliness
With the increasing use of mobile devices, ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is crucial. A technical SEO audit can reveal issues related to responsive design and mobile usability, helping you cater to mobile users.
- Indexing and Crawling Efficiency
By identifying and addressing issues that hinder search engine bots’ ability to crawl and index your site, you can ensure that your content is discoverable and displayed correctly in search results.
- Identification of Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can harm SEO efforts. A technical audit or an SEO content audit can uncover duplicate content issues and guide you in consolidating or canonicalising duplicate pages.
- Improved Security
Auditing your website’s technical aspects can help you identify security vulnerabilities and ensure that your site is protected against potential threats like hacking and data breaches.
- Enhanced Structured Data
Implementing structured data markup can lead to rich snippets in search results, enhancing the visibility and appeal of your content. A technical SEO audit can identify opportunities to use structured data effectively.
- Better Website Architecture
Audits can help in optimising your website’s structure and navigation, making it easier for both users and search engines to find and access content.
- Compliance with SEO Best Practices
Staying up-to-date with SEO best practices is vital for maintaining and improving your site’s performance. A technical SEO audit helps ensure your site follows current guidelines and standards.
How can Relevance help with technical SEO audits?
Having an SEO audit performed on a luxury website is one of the most essential things that can be done to develop a robust website and marketing strategy. By contacting Relevance, a leading luxury digital marketing agency, our SEO experts can conduct a thorough and comprehensive technical audit of your site, taking the time to identify and address the issues that will improve its performance.