How Often Should You Conduct Technical Audits?

How Often Should You Run an Audit?

A general rule of thumb is to run a technical audit every time there is a deployment on the website.

If you add 50 new products or blog posts, you don’t need to run an audit. However, you may want to run an audit when:

• Adding new features or coding to the site
• Changing or adding servers
• Changing CDNs or something similar
• Updating layouts/themes

Major site deployments warrant running an audit to ensure that the site’s technical SEO hasn’t been impacted by the changes.

One additional time that I recommend my team run an audit is when traffic begins to spike on a site. An audit on a site that is receiving 50% – 100% more traffic will alert you to any speed issues or server errors that may be present due to the server being unable to handle the increase in traffic.

Technical Audits and SEO Automation

Automation in SEO has its limits, but it’s something that can save you and your team a lot of time on the technical side of things. For example, you can use software or SaaS solutions to automatically run audits weekly, daily, or whenever you deem appropriate.

Automated audits that display key site errors and warnings can help your team understand issues that are evolving on the site and make changes rapidly to address them. You can also create scripts to run on the site to perform an audit when certain triggers are met, such as:

• When key features are added to the site
• When certain traffic thresholds are met
• Etc.

Manual audits demand a lot of unnecessary manpower to complete. Automation can provide your team with a wealth of technical information that they can analyze and make changes based upon.

Do All Audits Need Reports?

Audits do not need reports in all cases. Traditionally, if you’re working with a client and performing technical SEO, you may provide:

• Initial audit reports
• Final audit reports

Reports may be given monthly when working on a month-to-month contract. However, there are many times when an audit is performed by a team but a report isn’t produced.

For example:

• You’re running an audit on a site that you’ve been working on all month and already have an initial report made. In this scenario, you do not need to run reports when the audit is being used by internal teams.
• You run an audit and the results are the same as in the last report.

Internal teams that are making changes to a site and its server can run audits, often on a smaller scale, to determine if their actions are improving the site. Often, my team will run speed tests and reports that we compare against past results to identify the impact certain changes have made on the site’s speed.

Clients never see these audits, and they only serve to make the final report bloated.

What Should You Include in Your Audit Report?

 

There are several things you should include in your audit report, such as:

Slow Pages

Page speed can affect a site’s rankings and user experience. Generally, a load time of three seconds or less is considered a good page speed.

Any pages with a slow loading time should be included in your report. Including these pages in your report ensures the issue is brought to the attention of the right people and addressed as soon as possible.

Future reports should also include any improvements that have been made to slow pages. Make sure that clients understand the importance of speedy load times and how these improvements will benefit their website’s performance.

When creating your report, be sure to include times for the following:

• First contentful paint (FCP)
• Largest contentful paint LCP)
• First input delay (FID)
• Cumulative layout shift (CLS)

These are the four metrics Google measures with its PageSpeed Insights tool.

Redirects

Redirects send visitors from one URL to another. Issues like broken redirects or redirect chains or loops can negatively impact a website’s server and the user experience.

Redirects should be included in your report. Be sure to report the number of:

• Total redirects
• Redirect loops and/or chains

A tool like Screaming Frog makes it easy to view and report all redirects and issues associated with them.

Make sure that the information reported here is easy for the reader to digest and appropriate for your audience. A stakeholder, for example, may need a more simplified report on redirects and issues that need to be resolved.

Reports should also include any redirect issues that were resolved from the previous reporting period.

Meta Data

Meta titles and descriptions play an important role in SEO because they let search engines know what a page is about.

Any pages with missing, outdated, or unoptimized meta data should be included in a technical audit report. These are pages that will need to be optimized and updated.

You may also want to make note of any pages that have been updated and optimized since the last reporting period to highlight improvements and progress.

Images

Images enrich a site, but they should be optimized to prevent issues with slow page speed and rankings.

A technical audit should include a list of images:

• With broken links
• With missing or unoptimized alt tags
• That are slow-loading

These are images that are negatively affecting the user experience and therefore, potentially, the site’s rankings.

Future reports should include any improvements to image performance and optimization.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content on a site has its place, especially on e-commerce sites that may have the same product listed among multiple categories. Technical audits should include reports that:

• List duplicate pages
• Mention correction or recommended fixes

If you’ve made a lot of changes, removed content, or created canonical tags, these corrections ought to be mentioned in the report and allow for an easy way to track them.

Tracking the results after the content removal will be crucial to understanding the impact of the changes made.

Internal Links

Internal links and orphaned pages are important to document and report on. If used properly, internal links can increase a site’s crawlability and even help search engines better understand what your site is about.

However, when providing a report on a massive site, it may be better to:

• Report on orphaned pages that now have links built to them
• Display graphs on how the internal link structure has changed

You can also provide a spreadsheet for this information to better help visualize how many internal links were created on the site.

Technical audits provide a wealth of information to clients and yourself if you’re running them on your own or an employer’s site. However, once you’ve cleaned up a site and have it running “technically well,” there’s no reason to run audits without internal changes to the site.