SEO is a complex beast. There are many skill sets that reside within this one discipline. You need to be a confident communicator, an expert data analyst, a creative thinker. Most SEO experts are actually highly skilled in one or two areas but to be totally well-rounded in all facets of SEO is rare. There’s just so much to master! Unfortunately, to ensure you have a well-ranking website all aspects of SEO have to come into play.
One side of SEO that some more outreach and campaign focused executives shy away from is technical SEO. I confess my background in generalist marketing, I certainly can’t code. In the past that has put me off even attempting to look into the technical side of SEO; how well sites could be indexed and understood by the search engines. However, my curiosity got the better of me. You see, SEO is about the whole of a company’s internet presence. I can’t ignore the very real fact that if a website operates like a bag of bolts then it is unlikely to rank and certainly going to struggle to meet the needs of its visitors. That’s why I started to investigate what I could determine a website’s technical makeup without knowing the ins and outs of JavaScript.
There are a range of free and “freemium” tools that can be used to interrogate the code, determine the indexability of pages and ascertain if there are any major changes or minor tweaks needed to make your site easier for the search engine bots to parse and understand. There are so many in fact that it can be hard to know where to start. Even armed with an extensive auditing toolkit it can be difficult to know what to look for or how to analyse the data you get back. Thankfully, senior technical SEO Chris has pulled together the Reflect Digital SEO team’s favourite tools we use to conduct a technical SEO audit, along with what you should be on the lookout for and what to do with any issues you discover. If you are new to technical SEO, or you just want a definitive guide of how to begin an SEO audit, take a look at our guide to conducting technical SEO audits.
