5 Benefits of Using Technical SEO Audit Tools
Imagine you own a building. It looks absolutely stunning from the outside, but the infrastructure is weak. It can crumble down at any moment. What is the use of this beautiful building anyway?
That's what your website is without technical SEO or, in this case, technical SEO audit tool. Technical SEO includes all the site optimization needful to help search engines easily crawl and index your website.
You can manually fix these technical errors by yourself or you can increase your productivity by using tools. The choice is yours of course. But if you are struggling to decide whether technical SEO tools are worth it or not, we have got your back.
So, without wasting any more time, let's dive in.
Technical SEO Audit Tool- What You Must Know
Nowadays there are tons of technical SEO tools to help you gear up your SEO game. More or less every tool has similar features. You can run an audit on your website using these tools to find errors. It helps you understand how Google bot will index your website and how it affects your online ranking. Your URL structure, link profile, XML sitemap, robots.txt file, schema markup, site navigation anything that seems a little off will show up.
Plus, your site will be checked for duplicate content, keyword stuffing, page speed, user-friendliness, and so on. If the SEO reporting Software says " found errors", then you know why your website is not ranking despite having awesome content. It might feel like that's way too much to fix. But don't worry, most of the time a simple upgrade can solve the issues. And if the problem is critical you might want to ask for help from the SEO Expert.
Also, the tools notify the bugs according to their importance. The most dangerous errors that need immediate attention will be separated under a "warning" headline. So you don't have to pick and choose.
Now that we have an understanding of what it does, here are the top 5 benefits of using technical SEO tools for your website.
- Fix Your site Technical Issues
By technical issues we mean, link health, duplicate content, URL structure, 301 redirect pages, schema markup, site architecture, and so on. These are also known as off-site SEO.
Unlike on-page SEO, technical issues require more intensive research. If your site suffers from any of the problems we mentioned before, search engines won't view you positively. Because it is negatively correlated with your visitor's satisfaction.
A site with poor architecture is reported to be perceived as fake or spam. If your content pages don't have a consistent URL structure, Google Bots will probably think they are not relevant to each other. That's how you can end up with lots of orphaned pages. Also, it is reported that a poor site architecture can cause visitors to perceive it as a fake website.
All of this can negatively impact your SEO unless you fix all these bugs and convince Google that you are a reliable website. Technical SEO tools like Google search console or GTmatrix easily point out these technical errors. You can go through the analysis and decide what needs to be done. It is as simple as that.
- Increase Your Site's visibility
For your website to get more visitors, first Google should be able to understand your website's XML sitemap that helps search engines to read and locate your website. A sitemap is like a roadmap for your website. Search engines can easily find what new content is added and where it is located.
So at times when any visitor searches for relevant information, Google knows where to find your content. No need to explain that, if the crawlers miss your important pages, you can't rank. It seems like no matter how many precautions we take, certain pages are always left orphaned.
It is your job to make sure your important pages are easy for crawling and index. Technical SEO tools signal you about how convenient it is for crawlers to read your website. And point out any errors that can cause bots to miss your pages. For example; maybe the pages that are not getting indexed have a robots.txt file signaling to not follow. A complicated sitemap can also be the reason why some pages are neglected.
No doubt a properly indexed website has a higher chance of earning visibility on the first SERP than a page with a sitemap error.
- Discover More Opportunities
You may not even know how many opportunities are lying on your website itself. If you have an idea about rich snippets that feature just beneath the title, you know what schema markup is. It is a code to tell search engines what your content is about in a different way. So that, your page has better chances of ranking for relevant searches. Using the right schema properties you can tell Google what you want to rank for.
Technical SEO tools can save you the trouble to find the right markup for you. It has lists of different types of microdata that can be used as schema markup. You can simply pick the one that suits your intention.
This small effort will change your position drastically. Google bots are automated software that shows your website to a visitor if the search keyword is present in your content. But with the help of SEO tools, you can specify what your article is all about. When Google understands your content, it will spontaneously suggest your page to anyone looking for something relevant. Isn't that amazing?
- Keep Up With New SEO Guidelines
Search engines like Google consider around 500 ranking factors to decide a site's position. Not just that, Google is continuously updating its algorithm. It is hard for a person to give so much of his time to track all of these updates by hand. But if you want to be relevant, there is no alternative to keeping up with new SEO guidelines and adjusting your website accordingly.
For example, the latest addition to Google's algorithm was penguin 4.0. It states that any website having spammy links in its content will be devalued. The main reasoning behind it is that the visitors should benefit from your links. If you don't link to authentic and relevant pages, your chances of ranking will lower.
That's where technical SEO tools can help you.
One of the many features of these tools is to analyze your inbound and outbound links. You will get notified about how many links are broken, have 'no-follow tags or direct towards spams. From there you can take action to fix these links. Plus, you receive a detailed analysis of your competitor's backlink profile, who they are linking to, how much this link is helping them rank, etc. Not to mention, it opens up opportunities for you to earn a profile similar to them.
- Better User Experience
User experience is everything. From the moment you enter into a website and scroll through its pages, everything you see and feel is a part of your user experience. Page loading and site navigation are the most important branches of this tree. It is reported that pages that need more than 10 seconds to load will face a bounce rate of almost 123%. Now, who wants that right?
It won't matter if your content is the best in this field unless you can make people see it. Optimizing your website for laptops, tablets, and mobile phones is another aspect of technical SEO. You might know that 52% of worldwide traffic actually comes from mobile devices. I will not be surprised if you are reading this through your smartphone too. The point is, you have to cater to every kind of user. But how will you know if your upgrades are actually working or not?
Technical SEO tools have options for you to measure it. It ranks your website and gives a percentage that is relative to other websites. So you can check your competitor's score and learn how much they have improved.
Tools also help you by analyzing your redirect links. If your page has 404 pages that must be removed, broken redirect chains, it will negatively impact your web performance. Always auditing your website is a great way to fix these bugs and ensure a better experience.
Wrapping Up
Marketers are focusing on SEO like never before. It's because the more you expose yourself to your visitors online, the better your chances are to gain their trust and convert them into customers.
But how can we get ahead in this competition? Simply by focusing on both on-page as well as technical SEO. The latter is not as popular as on-site optimization, because it is hard, and not many fully understand it. That's why we recommend using technical SEO tools as a helping hand. But just because you find it hard, doesn't make it any less important.
Thank you for going through this article. Happy writing.
