There are many factors that are undertaken with a full site technical audit, however, if you want to quickly assess whether there are any ‘biggies’ that could be preventing or compromising the organic performance of your website, check out these 5 quick spot checks.
1. Status Codes & Response Headers
Do all versions of your domain redirect to one (canonical) version?
Why is this important?
Technically, if your website is able to be served using more than one version of your domain, i.e., protocols (can be served using both http & https) and subdomain (both www & non-www), there is technically more than one version of your website, which of course can lead to (potential) duplication issues which may dilute the value of your landing pages and overall organic value.
For a visual representation of this scenario, consider the following versions of my website domain:
- http://elementalsearch.co.nz
- http://www.elementalsearch.co.nz
- https://elementalsearch.co.nz
- https://www.elementalsearch.co.nz
So, here we have four versions of my website. The last one is my canonical (preferred) version I want search engines to crawl and index. This means the other three versions should redirect browsers to the ‘https://www’ version using a permanent 301 redirect, and should all return a ‘200’ status code.
Check your domain using this useful free tool (ensure to tick the Canonical domain check option)
Tip: Individual URLs can also fall into the duplication trap in cases where URLs can be served with or without a trailing slash at the end of a URL. This is typically handled with redirect protocols using a server side script – so something to check with your web developer or SEO expert.
2. Speed Report
No matter how much effort and attention I give a landing page, if its unusually slow to load due to whatever reason, there’s a high probability its not going to perform well organically against active competitors.
With Google’s upcoming Page Experience algorithm update that shines the light on LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) and FID (First Input Delay) factors, (layout shifts aside) not prioritising site speed is no longer something to put aside in the too hard basket for later.
Now, most issues associated with these two factors can be a little daunting on first impression and tricky to address without an experienced web developer or SEO expert, however, some common causes such as excessive image file sizes and redundant JavaScript (especially WordPress sites with excessive numbers of plugins) can be easier to manage.
If you’re comfortable using Chrome Tools, the Google Lighthouse report is a pretty convenient resource. Alternatively, check out Google PageSpeed Insights or GT Metrix.
Tip: On the subject of WordPress, there are also useful plugins that can address many site speed factors, so do some research and consider highly rated plugins that are compatible with your version of WordPress.
3. Canonical Tags
This unassuming tag can be the difference whether a given landing page can be indexed or not. The canonical link element allows you to set the preferred version of a URL, and is typically used to control duplication scenarios (which is a wider topic).
For the purpose of this post, when viewing the HTML source code of a given URL (Ctrl+U), check the URL used for the canonical tag (do a Ctrl+F using ‘canonical’ to find the tag if its buried in the HTML source code). If the URL used within the tag is not an exact match (or self-reference) the actual URL I can see within the browser address bar, the page is technically ‘non-indexable’ (or what is referred to as ‘canonicalized’).
If you’re familiar with Google Search Console, run a ‘URL inspection‘ by copying and pasting the URL into the ‘Inspect any URL’ search bar you can see at the top.
Now, there may be a good reason for this, i.e., the URL may append a bunch of parameters to the URL due to filtered results or similar, however, if I am looking at a primary product and/or service page linked to from the main navigation, I can safely assume this page is important and should be able to be crawled and indexed.
Here’s a visual example used for a post on my site https://www.elementalsearch.co.nz/2021/do-you-use-bing-webmaster-tools/
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.elementalsearch.co.nz/2021/do-you-use-bing-webmaster-tools/” /> = indexable, correct use
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.elementalsearch.co.nz/2021/some-random-article/” /> = non-indexable, incorrect use
4. Meta Robots Tags
This one is slightly easier to digest. Much like the canonical link element, if a URL includes a robots ‘noindex’ value, it simply will not be indexed. When viewing the HTML source code of a given URL, check for the following tags:
<meta name=”robots” content=”index” /> = page can be indexed
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” /> = page cannot be indexed
When doing my spot checks, I typically check meta robots on homepages including key landing pages, which are typically linked to from primary navigation elements.
5. Robots.txt
This is a small text file that lives on the root directory of your web server. If you have a robots.txt file (and you should), you’ll be able to see it by adding /robots.txt to the end of your domain name.
Example: https://www.elementalsearch.co.nz/robots.txt
Here we can choose which sections of a website to block search engines from crawling. There are a number of reasons why we’d block search engines from crawling certain areas or URLs with common parameter strings, however if there are important sections of a site that have been blocked unintentionally, and you’d be surprised at how often this happens, it can be a big find.
So, with my spot checks, I always take a quick look at a site robots.txt file and find out whether there are rules in place that prevent search engines from accessing valuable content that should be indexed.
Tip: If you see this within your robots.txt file, your entire site is blocked for search engine crawlers!
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Key Takeaway
Whether it’s a new website I’ve been commissioned to audit, prospecting for new opportunities, or producing an (SEO) health check, I can typically qualify the level of SEO attention required by taking a quick peak under the hood at these factors. If you’re relatively new to SEO, or just want to ensure there aren’t any obvious issues that may be holding your site back from performing in organic search results, consider checking out these 5 spot checks.