Bristol SEO Meetup
Technical SEO Audit for
Beginners

About Me
• Digital Marketing Executive at Edico Media
• 4 years experience in SEO & PPC
• Started Bristol SEO Meetup
Follow Me
• @FayeWatt
• @BristolSEOMeet
• https://www.meetup.com/bristol-seo/

About Edico Media
• Bristol-based Digital Agency
• Specialises in:
• Digital marketing management (SEO, PPC, CRO, Social)
• Web application development and infrastructure
• Digital/development strategy and consulting
Follow Us
• @edicomedia
• https://edicomedia.com

Technical SEO Audit
• Tools
• Robots.txt
• Index
• Sitemap
• HTTP Status Codes
• 404 Page
• HTTPS
• Redirect Errors
• Page Speed
• Structured data
• Mobile-Friendly

SEO Tools
• Screaming Frog – Web Crawler
• Ahrefs – Inbound Links
• SEMrush – Site Audit
• Redirect Path – HTTP Header & Redirect Checker
• GTMetrix – Site Speed
• TinyPNG
• CSS Minifier

Robots.txt
https://example.com/robots.txt
Robots.txt file indicates whether web robots, usually
search engine robots, can or cannot crawl specific parts
of a website.
By using the disallow directive, you can block search
engines from crawling specific pages on your website,
such as your staging site.
• Accidently blocking important URLs
• Blocking the entire website
Common mistakes:

Examples of Robots.txt
Blocking all web robots from crawling your entire website:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Blocking Google’s search engine robot from crawling a specific
URL:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /example-subfolder/

Index
Review how your website is indexed by search engines and
identify:
• How many pages are being indexed
• Any missing pages
• Important pages are correctly indexed
• Any pages that are incorrectly indexed
• Any pages incorrectly excluded by noindex meta
tag
Common mistakes:
• Forgetting to remove the noindex meta tag on
new pages

Index
Perform a site:search
Check noindex meta tags – Screaming Frog

Index Coverage Report – Google Search Console
Index

Index
If your webpage’s have been excluded from the index:
• Make sure you have removed the noindex meta tag
• Inspect the URL using Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool
• Select Request Indexing
• If no issues with the page are found, the page will be queued for
indexing

Sitemap
• Ensure it is kept up-to-date and includes any new pages
• Remove URLs that 404
• Remove URLs that redirect
• Remove non-canonical URLs
• Identify any missing URLs
https://example.com/sitemap.xml
Use Screaming Frog to crawl the URLs in your sitemap
and:

URL Status Codes
HTTP Status Code 3xx — Redirection
• HTTP 301 Moved Permanently
• HTTP 302 Temporary Redirect
HTTP Status Code 4xx — Client Error
• HTTP 404 Not Found
Identify any internal, external, or inbound URLs that do not return a 200 status code.
Common HTTP Status Codes:

Internal & External Links
Perform a site crawl to identify any internal or external links that results in 4xx or 3xx status
• Perform a site crawl – Screaming Frog
• Identify any internal or external links that result in a 4xx error
• Update these links to a relevant, valid URL
• Identify any internal links that result in a 3xx redirect
• Update these links to avoid unnecessary redirects

Inbound Links
• Export your historical backlink profile from Ahrefs or Google Search Console
• Upload the list of URLs to Screaming Frog
• Identify URLs that return a 404 status code
• Redirect these URLs to a live URL or contact site owner to update the link
Export and crawl your backlink profile to identity any inbound links to URLs that return a
4xx status code:

404 Page Not Found
• URLs redirect to a /page-not-found URL which returns a 200
Common mistakes:
Design your 404 page so users are able to easily navigate your website:
• Link back to the homepage
• Provide useful links to most commonly visited pages
• Consider adding a search bar
• Offer contact options

HTTPS
• Since 2014, Google has been using HTTPS as a ranking signal.
• Over 70% of Google’s page one search results are HTTPS
• Google Chrome now marks all non-HTTPS as non-secure when collecting sensitive data
e.g. passwords & credit card details
July 2018 September 2018 October 2018

Redirect Errors
• HTTP to HTTPS
• Non-www and www
• Trailing slash and non-trailing slash
• Upper and lowercase URLs
If the following versions of a URL are not correctly redirected, you will create duplicate
content!
Example:
https://example.com/UpperCASE
https://example.com/uppercase

Page Speed
Page speed tools:
• PageSpeed Insights
• Pingdom
• GTMetrix
Common fixes:
• Optimise images
• Minify and combine your JavaScript & CSS files
• Minimise use of unnecessary images
• JavaScript placement
• Leverage browser caching

Optimise Images
Compress your images to reduce their file size.
Tool: TinyPNG

Minify JavaScript & CSS Files
Unminified CSS Minified CSS
Tool: CSS Minifier

Minimise use of unnecessary images
Don’t use images for small icons, such as:
• Magnifying glass
• Arrows
• Mobile menu icon
• Social media logos
Use a custom font instead! Font Awesome is a
great resource for these.

Structured Data
Structured data helps search engines better understand the content on a webpage, and
can enhance how your appears in the search results.
Structured data can be added to several elements of a website, such
as:
• Logo
• Social profile
• Breadcrumbs
• Articles
• Events
• Job postings
• Reviews

Review:
Event:
Job Posting:

Job Posting Markup:

Mobile-Friendly
In April 2015, the Mobile-Friendly update was released and designed to give mobile-friendly
pages a boost in the mobile SERPs.
You can test how mobile-friendly your website is using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

Mobile-First Index
26th March - Google announced they’ve started to migrate websites.
30th April – Webmasters receive notifications in Search Console
More info: https://tinyurl.com/yc28mfyn

Mobile-First Index
What is it?
Google will crawl, index and rank your website based on the mobile-
friendly version of your site, even for search results shown to desktop
users.

Mobile-First
Best practices:
• Meta data
• Structured data
• Hreflang
• Content
• Robots.txt
• Page Speed
• Internal Links & Navigation
• Intrusive interstitials
Manually review your site!

Any questions?
@FayeWatt

Thanks for Listening!
@FayeWatt
@BristolSEOMeet
https://www.meetup.com/bristol-seo/