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How to perform a
Technical SEO audit
Barry Adams
16 June 2016

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Barry Adams
• Doing SEO since 1998
• Founder of Polemic Digital
• Senior Editor at State of Digital

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Audit Process:
1. Crawl Optimisation
2. Index Optimisation
3. International SEO
4. Miscellaneous Elements

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My Technical SEO Tools
• Google Search Console
• DeepCrawl
• Screaming Frog
• WebPagetest.org
• Structured Data Testing Tool

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Excel Is Your Friend

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Start with a crawl

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1. Crawl Optimisation

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What is Crawl Optimisation?
Ensuring search engine spiders waste as little time as
possible crawling the right URLs on your site.
If you waste crawl budget, the right pages are unlikely to
be crawled & indexed.

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Google’s Crawl Sources
• Site crawl
• XML Sitemaps
• Inbound links
• DNS records
• Domain registrations
• Browsing data

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Identifying Crawl Waste

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Identifying Crawl Waste

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Identifying Crawl Waste

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Crawl Waste
• Check URLs in XML Sitemap

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Optimise XML Sitemaps
• Check if the sitemap contains final URLs only
• Identify 301-redirects or other non-200 status codes
• Check usage of multiple sitemaps

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Crawl Waste
• Paginated Listings
• Faceted Navigation
http://website.com/jewellery/?page=2&cat=5&color
=silver&style=glass&collection=autumnsort=a&…

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Optimisation of Paginated Listings
• Check number of items on a single page
• Check implementation of rel=prev/next pagination meta tags
• Check blocking of sorting parameters in robots.txt
 Disallow: /*?sort=*

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Optimisation of Faceted Navigation
• Decide which facets have SEO value
 Recommend creating static pages for these
• All other facets:
 robots.txt disallow
 ‘rel=nofollow’ on facet links

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Check Configuration of URL Parameters

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Crawl Waste
• Check crawling/indexing of internal site search results

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Block Internal Site Search Pages
• Block in robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /SearchResults.aspx
Disallow: /*query=*
Disallow: /*s=*

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Crawl Waste
• Check internal redirects

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Minimise Internal Redirects
• Find redirects with Screaming Frog
• Internal links should all be 200 OK
• Flat site structure

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Check HTTP Status Codes
The most important ones:
 200 OK: everything is fine, here is your content
 404 Not Found: the page you are trying to view doesn’t exist
 301 Permanent Redirect: the page you are trying to view has moved permanently,
here’s the new URL
 302 Temporary Redirect: the page you are trying to view has moved temporarily, here is
the new URL
 500 Server Error: there’s been a massive fuck up, I can’t serve you this page

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Check HTTP Status Codes
Less common:
 410 Gone: This page is gone and there is no alternative version. Useful for getting a page
out of Google’s index quickly
 503 Service Unavailable: The site is temporarily down. Use this when your server is
having issues, as it will not impact rankings

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Check Soft 404s
When Google detects a Not Found error
page but the HTTP status code is 200 OK.

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Crawl Waste
• Check URL Duplication
http://website.com
http://www.website.com
http://www.website.com/index.php
http://website.com/index.php
http://www.website.com/category
http://www.website.com/category/
http://website.com/category
http://website.com/category/
+ httpS://

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Crawl Waste
• Canonicalised Pages

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Use Canonicals Wisely
• “rel=canonical” is primarily for index issues
It is not a fix for crawl waste
Search engines need to see the canonical tag before they can act on it
Ergo, pages need to be crawled before rel=canonical has any effect
Ditto with meta noindex tags

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DON’T use Canonicals for…
• Faceted navigation
• Pagination & sorting
• Site Search pages
• Avoidable URL duplication

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OK to use Canonicals for…
• Separate mobile URLs
• Session-specific URL parameters
• Content syndication
• Unavoidable content duplication

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Crawl Waste
• Slow loading pages

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Load Speed Optimisation
• Time to First Byte
• Lightweight pages
• Caching
• Compression

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2. Index Optimisation

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Index Optimisation
• Ensure Google indexes & ranks the right pages
• Minimise indexing of zero-value pages
• Optimise all technical relevancy factors

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Google Search Console

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Human-Readable URLs
Bad URL:
http://domain.com/default.aspx?p=43351&s=abx&ref=ps-2301-g&…
Good URL:
http://domain.com/safety-boots/caterpillar/steel-toe-safety-boots.html
• Don’t overdo it – no keyword stuffing
• Use a logical structure that makes sense to humans

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Hierarchical URLs
Homepage
Category 1 Category 2
Subcategory
2.1
Subcategory
2.3
Subcategory
2.2
Product 2.2
A
Product 2.2
B
Product 2.2
C
Category 3
http://domain.com/
http://domain.com/category/
http://domain.com/category/subcategory/
http://domain.com/category/subcategory/productA.html
http://domain.com/category/subcategory/productB.html
http://domain.com/category/subcategory/productC.html

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Always use Canonicals
• Duplicate URLs can originate from various sources…
http://www.website.com/page1.html
http://www.website.com/page1.html?utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=social&
utm_campaign=seo

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Use Full URLs in Canonicals
<link rel=“canonical” href=“/page1.html”>
<link rel=“canonical” href=“www.website.com/page1.html”>
<link rel=“canonical”
href=“https://www.website.com/page1.html”>

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Meta Robots Tag
<meta name=“robots” content=“…”>
• ‘noindex’: don’t index this page
• ‘nofollow’: don’t follow any links on this page
• ‘nosnippet’: don’t show a search snippet for this page
• ‘noodp’: don’t use the ODP/DMOZ description for this page
• ‘noarchive’: don’t show a Cached link for this page
• ‘unavailable_after:[date]’: stop crawling and indexing of this page
after this date
• ‘noimageindex’: don’t use this page as the referring page for an
image that appears in Google search results
• ‘none’: same as ‘noindex, nofollow’

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Code Bloat

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Structured Data

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Structured Data
• Schema.org markup

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JSON-LD Markup
• In the <head> section
Separate from body code
Easier to implement

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Google Search Console

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Structured Data Testing Tool
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

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Expired Pages
• Google’s advice: serve 404 Not Found
 Downside: potential loss of link value
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tz7Eexwp_A

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My Advice
• Keep the page up
• Recommend alternative
products

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High-churn Listings Sites
• Pages with a limited lifespan, potentially thousands of new
pages every week
 Online auctions / ‘… for sale’ classified sites / Job listings / etc…
 301-redirect old URL to most relevant new URL
 Minimum 180 days
 Serve 410 (or 404) on old URL after 180 days

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3. International SEO

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International Domains
• Check if they’re using the right TLD;
 Generic TLDs: .com, .org, .net, .info, …
 ccTLDs: .co.uk, .ie, .de, .fr, .it, .nl, …
• Generic domains can be geo-targeted with Google Search
Console
• Country-code domains will be assumed to target that country
It’s almost impossible to get a .ie website to rank in google.co.uk

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Google Search Console

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Website Structure
• Subdirectories:
 website.com/gb
 website.com/it
• Subdomains:
 gb.website.com
 it.website.com
Verify separately in
Google Search Console
and set the geo-target

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Country & Language
www.website.com/be-fr/
www.website.com/be-nl/
www.website.com/be-de/
Use official ISO country
& language codes where
possible

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HTML Language Tag
• Use the ‘lang’ attribute:
• Don’t forget to change when you launch your international
version!

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HREFLANG Meta Tags
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-ie" hreflang="en-ie" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-ca" hreflang="en-ca" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-au" hreflang="en-au" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en" hreflang="en" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="x-default" />
More info: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077

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Google Search Console

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IP Redirects
• Google primarily crawls from
US-based IP addresses
• If a site uses IP address
redirects, make an exception
for all ‘Googlebot’ user-agents

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4. Miscellaneous
Elements

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Mobile UX

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Mobile UX

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Rel=Alternate Meta Tag
Desktop page:
<link rel="alternate" media="only screen and
(max-width: 640px)"
href="http://m.example.com/page1.html">
Mobile page:
<link rel="canonical"
href="http://www.example.com/page1.html">

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Site Security

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Site Security

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SSL Certificate Quality
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

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Summarised

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Technical SEO Audits Summarised:
• Identify Crawl Waste:
 XML Sitemaps
 Sorted & Paginated Listings
 Duplicate URLs
 Load Speed
• Check HTTP Status Codes
• Review On-Site Technical SEO:
 URLs
 Code Quality
 Structured Data
• Minimise indexing of zero-value
pages
• Check implementation of
international SEO:
 TLDs & IP Redirects
 Subdomain / Subfolders
 HREFLANG meta tags
• Check miscellaneous elements:
 Mobile UX
 Security
 SSL

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Create Your Report

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Create Your Report
• Make it actionable
Give examples
• Explain WHY something needs changed
Sometimes devs can come up with a more elegant solution
• Prioritise
Provide a recommended timeline of changes

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Questions?
barry@polemicdigital.com
www.polemicdigital.com
@polemicdigital
@badams