Technical SEO Audits Can Be Your Top Ticket to More Customers

Is your traffic dwindling? Do you struggle to increase revenue? Consider hiring a technical search engine optimization (SEO) agency to help. Such a team conducts a thorough optimization audit—a process often offering solutions to problems overlooked or unsolved both on-page and off-page. These include the following:

• Improved search engine visibility
• Faster page loading speed
• Enhanced user experience with structured data

Read below to learn how an audit helps achieve these benefits and drives customers to your business. Let’s go!

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1. Improved Search Engine Visibility

No matter how good your content is, if no one can find it, you won’t make a conversion. Studies show that users rarely click sites past the first page of search results, so getting on that first page should be a top priority.  One of the biggest benefits of a technical SEO audit is improved search engine visibility. In particular, it optimizes your meta tags. What are meta tags? These are types of text that are part of the source code. The meta title and description are two essential ones. Optimizing them is part of writing high-traffic SEO content. These are the elements users see in the search results, influencing their desire to click the page. In other words, meta titles and descriptions affect your clickthrough rate (CTR). Although a good CTR does not equate to conversion, you already have one foot in your customer’s door. What makes a compelling meta title and description? They have the following characteristics:

• Conciseness. Ideal meta titles are up to 60 characters long, while descriptions are up to 160. 
• Keyword-richness. They naturally include targeted keywords. 
• Accuracy and relevancy. Both the title and the description truthfully summarize the content.
• Persuasion. The description includes a call to action (CTA) to encourage users to click the page.

Besides meta titles and descriptions, a technical SEO audit also uncovers the value of the other two meta-tag types. These are viewports and meta-robots. The viewport meta tag defines the viewable area for responsive webpages, optimizing display on mobile devices. An audit validates that such a tag is present and structured properly. It helps ensure that you run a mobile-friendly site. Meta robot tags are snippets of code that tell search engine crawlers how to index and follow certain pages:

Type of Meta-Robots Tag	When to Use Them
Noindex	It tells the robot not to index the page but to follow the links. It helps potentially increase these URLs’ search engine rankings.
Nofollow	It informs the spiders not to follow the page links. Use it when running paid ads, such as banners.
Noimageindex	It prevents image-search indexing, especially for private, outdated, and potentially offensive pictures.
Robotted iframe	It stops Google from indexing chatbot conversations.
Noarchive	It does not cache the page, so users see the latest page version.

These ensure that your page shows up the way you want it to, rather than at the whims of the algorithms. 

2. Faster Page Loading Speed

A technical SEO agency also measures page speed during an audit for many reasons:

• People’s attention span is getting shorter. Other activities can steal their focus away from your website. A good example is a faster-loading competitor page. 
• Mobile devices are becoming more efficient. They have excellent central processing units and wireless connections. 
• An audit helps with mobile-first indexing optimization.
• Many optimization issues affect page speed, such as code bloat.

There are many tools available to help optimize your page speed and improve your SEO.  One is Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which tracks your mobile and desktop performance and recommends strategies to fix the errors or improve the future results. It also implements tactics to keep the speed at three seconds or below.  Edge computing is another way to improve your page speed. This revolutionary data-management framework reduces the distance between users and web content. It results in faster loading times and a better user experience (UX). Additionally, because edge functions run closer to the end user, it also lets you create high-quality content while the technology optimizes it for different devices, browsers, and screen sizes. A technical SEO audit also determines the impact of redirect chains. These refer to multiple consecutive redirects occurring before landing on a final page. Here is an example: Homepage > Page 1 > Page 2 > Final Page  Too many redirects hurt page speed and UX in several ways:

• Each redirect requires additional network requests that increase load time. 
• Long redirect chains often result in more opportunities for errors and timeouts. Any failure along the chain could result in a 404 error.
• Search engines might associate excessive redirects with shady practices or consider the target page less authoritative.
• Multiple redirects cause users to become impatient and leave the page.

Google bots can follow over ten redirects, but best practices recommend limiting the chain to three or fewer hops. 

3. Enhanced UX with Structured Data

UX usually emerges at the top of the ranking factors for one reason: unhappiness often leads to non-conversion. Search engines will lose their market, while you will experience a significant traffic loss. A technical SEO audit helps you design and improve structured data such as knowledge graphs, rich snippets, microdata, and schema markups for better UX.  In general, structured data improves CTRs as more informative and eye-catching search result listings encourage more clicks.  Suppose you are an electronics retailer using schema markup on product pages. The schema tags mark up significant pages such as events, products, reviews, and star ratings. The “4K TV” search results showcase the TV image, price range, and average user rating. This rich presentation increases CTR by 12% for those high-value product pages. Besides this advantage, structured data also contributes to the following: 

• Higher rankings as the search engines understand your content’s relevance to one another and the keywords better
• Voice search optimization is important since voice assistants rely on structured data to answer queries.
• Enhanced authority and trust because structured data often relates to your perceived expertise and credibility
• Expanded reach because your page can appear above and within the general search results 

Keep in mind that structured data rules evolve. Google, for example, has recently downgraded how-to and FAQ snippets. They will not appear in the search results, even if you optimize your pages for them. These changes happen quickly and sometimes without warning. Creating structured data is already challenging to do by yourself, but relying on an updated technical SEO agency further ensures your site can respond quickly to these changes.

Summing Up

Technical SEO audits help reveal optimization opportunities. They give you better ideas to improve site speed, discoverability, and user experience through structured data. These factors support other high-converting strategies, such as content marketing and link building.  If you struggle with stagnant traffic or conversions, this step is a smart investment. However, you cannot do this alone unless you have a lot of time, tools, and knowledge.  Contact DAP to schedule a free consultation. Our award-winning team has already generated over a million quality leads. Let us discuss how we can do the same for your business.