Technical audit process
Full Site Crawl
Configured to extract data on subdomains, schema, images, canonicals, and more.
Crawl Health
Immediate identification of “problem areas” showing the poorest performance.
Issue scoping
Deep-dive into identified issues to determine breadth of impact on site performance.
Write-up
Full write-up of identified issues, and passed areas, with data sheet and priorities.
What does a technical audit include?
Instead of just being given exports from Screaming Frog, my audits will provide you with clarity on where the issues are originating from as well as how to fix them and prevent them in future.
Too many technical audits just provide a datasheet of exports from different tools, with no context as to what they are or whether they are even important to fix.
Technical audits should be clear and actionable, with priorities set against an effort vs. impact scale so you know what you need to do, why, and in what order, but most importantly should be specific to your website.
When I complete a technical audit, I look at areas relating to:
- Crawl signals – e.g. sitemaps, robots.txt, meta robots
- Crawl behaviour – e.g. internal links, redirects, canonicals
- Site health – e.g. status codes, internal link / canonical destinations
- Site functionality – e.g. HTML vs. JS rendering where applicable
- Site enhancements – e.g. schema, images, hreflang as applicable
Interested in a technical audit project?
Technical audits aren’t one size fits all – each needs to be treated as an individual review of a website to tackle both known and unknown issues.
Common types of technical audit include:
- Full site audit – perfect for if you haven’t checked up on your site health in a while and want to make sure everything is in order, leaving no stone unturned.
- Post-migration audit – perfect for if you’ve just gone through a migration and want to make sure everything is working correctly on the current site, and redirecting correctly from the old site.
- Deep-dive audits – perfect for if you have a specific issue you’re trying to solve and need to identify the root cause of it, for example “Google can’t access these pages, why?”
Technical audits are scoped based on website size, complexity of build, and type of project required.