11 Tools to Perform Technical SEO Audit in 2024

1. Mobile-Friendliness: Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Google has been using the mobile-first index since July 1, 2019. For older websites, Google said it will continue to monitor and evaluate pages for their readiness and will notify them once they’re seen as being ready. The mobile-first index means that Google will use the mobile version of the website for indexing and ranking. Therefore, it is important to make sure your website is mobile-friendly.

You can check if your website is mobile-friendly or not through Google mobile-friendly test tool. Simply enter your URL and click on “Test URL”. This tool will also provide suggestions to make your website mobile-friendly. You can review the suggestions and implement them to make your site mobile-friendly.

2. Loading Speed: Google Page Speed Insights

Google prefers websites that open quickly and automatically rank it higher than the ones that take more time to load. Besides, Google is planning to identify and label the slow-loading websites on its Chrome browser. Therefore, optimizing your website loading speed would give you an advantage over your competitors.

You can use the Google Page Speed Insights tool to check your website’s speed. A score of 90 or above means the website is fast, 50 to 90 is considered moderate, and below 50 is deemed to be slow. It also provides suggestions to improve the page’s performance and displays an estimate of how fast the page will load after the improvement is implemented.

Follow these steps to improve your website’s speed:

• Optimize your images on the website by compressing it. Make sure you use the right format for images (PNGs are better for graphics while JPEGs are better for photographs).
• Compress CSS, JavaScript, and HTML using Gzip and eliminate unnecessary codes.
• Using a VPN also helps to improve page speed. VPN saves copies of your website on multiple locations globally and sends the copy from the nearest server which drastically reduces the server response time. Always compare the pros and cons of a VPN before choosing one. This will help you save money and have a great UX.
• Minimize the number of redirects required. Each time you redirect a user to another page, it increases the waiting time.
• Using Google AMP pages is yet another way to improve the website’s speed on mobile devices.

3. Broken Links: Screaming Frog

Broken links not only creates a bad user experience, but it also leads to lower rankings. This is why identifying and fixing broken links is important.

To check for broken links you can go to Google Search Console and then click on “Coverage” under Index.

If you use WordPress, then you can install the Broken Link Checker Plugin, it scans your website every 72 hours and sends you email alerts every time a new broken link is found.

Additionally, you can use Screaming Frog Broken Link Checker to find broken links. Enter your website’s URL in the “spider” box and click on start. Then click on “Client Error (4xx)” under the “Response Codes” folder. You can then block crawlers from indexing those pages (broken links) through “noindex”.

4. Robots.txt: Google robots.txt Tester

Robots.txt file tells crawlers which pages they can crawl and index and the ones they cannot. If you cannot find your website on the search engine, chances are robots.txt is preventing the crawlers from indexing your site.

You can test your robots.txt file with Google tester and change “Disallow: /” to “Disallow: ” to allow crawlers to access all the pages on your website.

5. XML Sitemaps: XML Validation

An XML sitemap lists all the URLs on your website, allowing crawlers to find the URLs that may be isolated from the rest of the site’s content and index your website efficiently, thus ranking them accordingly.

You can validate your XML Sitemap and can make changes accordingly. If you have not submitted XML yet, you can build and submit a sitemap directly to the Google Search Console or you can add it to your robots.txt file.

6. Internal Links: SEMRush

Internal links are as crucial as backlinks. They link one page on the same domain to another. Search engine crawlers index all the internal links and errors in any of those links could hamper your position in SERPs. Besides, it also increases the average time spent on the website. Therefore, it is important to ensure there are no errors in the internal linking structure.
You can also add internal links at the bottom (footer) of the website. However, make sure that the links are relevant and/or similar to what the user is already viewing. Fix broken internal links, internal link redirects, and deep-linked important pages.

Use tools like SEMrush for internal link audits. You can then remove those links from your content and prevent crawlers from indexing those sites.

7. Site’s Health and Performance: Internet Marketing Ninjas

Your site’s health and performance reveal important information such as your page authority, rankings on SERPs, and the total number of inbound/outbound links. This will help you figure out which areas need improvement. SEO relies on data. No matter whatever tool you use to do SEO, your dashboard comprises lots of data. It’s no wonder that by 2020, around 1.7 megabytes of data will be generated every second for everyone on the planet. You need to rely on data Science to measure your site’s health and eliminate guesswork from SEO.

Things you need to track:

• Response errors: This will help you improve the user experience, thereby reducing the bounce rate.
• The number of redirects: This will help you identify and reduce the number of redirects, thereby improving page speed.
• Least crawled URLs: This will help you identify if your most important pages are being crawled or not.
• Pages that crawlers aren’t supposed to index: This will help you identify and block those pages, thereby, improving your website’s ranking.

You can use tools like Internet Marketing Ninjas to track these metrics.

8. Canonicalization: CognitiveSEO

Sometimes, it’s possible that the same content is spread across multiple pages on a website. Unfortunately, the search engines see these links pointing to different URLs, as a result, you lose your position in search rankings.

Canonicalization is the solution for it. Canonical tags inform the search engine to ignore similar or duplicate content present on different web pages of your site. It also allows you to specify the original content. You can use tools like CognitiveSEO to find canonical pages.

9. Schema Markup: Structured Data Testing Tool

Schema markup improves the way search engines read and represent your page in SERPs. In a nutshell, schema markup helps search engines categorize and index your content. This means better results for searchers.

You can check your website’s schema tag through the Structured Data Testing Tool.

10. Backlink Analysis: Ahrefs

Backlinks help you improve your website’s visibility and ranking on SERPs. But bad backlinks can do more harm than good to your SEO.

Therefore, it is important to find and eliminate bad backlinks. You can use tools such as Ahrefs for checking backlinks.
Eliminating bad backlinks could be difficult. You can either contact the website’s owner and request them to remove the link or disavow those backlinks to your website.

11. Duplicate Meta Tags/Content: CopyScape/Grammarly

Meta tags allow you to summarize the page’s content in up to 155 words. Search engines then display the meta description in the search results. Having a duplicate meta tag will confuse search engine crawlers. So, it is important to create and optimize unique meta descriptions for each page carefully.
Similarly, duplicate content can do more harm than good. Google loves new and unique content. Therefore, you should check the content for plagiarism before uploading it.

You can use tools like Copyscape or Grammarly to identify duplicate content.