Ways to Conduct Technical SEO Audit in 2017

Google has launched several updates in the recent past that have changed the way technical items on the websites are dealt with. For instance, update on JavaScript crawling support, a shift to mobile-first-index, support to accelerated mobile pages and addition of rich snippets in SERPs are the major updates to consider.

With that said, the way websites had been technically audited is also changed to great extent. Now, there are certain factors to take into consideration to make sure that your website is ready to be crawled through and indexed conveniently.

Mobile web crawling

According to Google, most of the web users use smartphones to search through internet. So, Google has made a logical announcement regarding shifting to mobile-first-index. Now, the SEO auditing requirements are quite changed due to this major development because keeping the desktop indexing in focus while making the website crawlable for desktop internet is naturally destined to become a challenge.

Nevertheless, there are some technical tools available that can help in making the website ready to be crawled through by two quietly different Google bots.

• Mobile-Friendly Test and a feature in Search Console, Fetch as Google, are the simplest tools that you can use to check the visibility of your web pages among Google’s mobile crawlers.
• There are SEO crawlers that you can use to find out the behavior of Google search crawlers. These crawlers are basically the crawling simulation tools that replicate Google’s crawlers’ behavior. Screaming Frog SEO Spider, OnPage.org, Botify and Sitebulb are some most considerable SEO crawlers to take into consideration.
• Log analysis has been one of the best tactics to find out the SEO issues with a website. Now, there are the log analyzers which are specifically developed to make resolution of SEO issues easier. Some of these analyzers are Screaming Frog Log analyzer, Botify and OnCrawl.

JavaScript Crawling

Google has been able to execute JavaScript since three years ago. Nevertheless, several tests show that this ability is dependent on the way JavaScript is implemented and the framework used.

With that said, it is now recommended that certain best practices be used to make sure that content remains accessible, and JavaScript be used only when absolutely necessary. Hence, it is to be ensure that internal linking and links to primary pages of the websites are not hidden under the cloak of JavaScript.

Structured data usage & optimization

It has been a long time since Google parted ways from displaying SERPs in traditional manner. However, this evolution has gone to the next level with the implementation of showing rich snippets in dedicated display cards on the top of SERPs. This updated is widely seen as an opportunity by SEOs as the websites do not need to be on the top of search rankings in order to get its featured snippet displayed. Right optimization of structured data can do the trick here. SERP monitors like Mozcast and RankRanger can be of great help in this regard.