Implementing a few simple technical SEO improvements can boost your SEO and bring your website to the next level. Even if you have a wealth of content that resonates with users—with high page views, pages/session, and average time on page metrics—you’ll still want to be sure your website is set up for SEO success with technical considerations in mind.

The main focus of a SEO audit is to look for technical issues that could be affecting your website’s search rankings.

At Zelolab, we don’t believe in any SEO tricks or hacks. At the end of the day, Google is using their market presence in Google Analytics and Google Chrome to see where real people are going and where they are spending their time—this is the biggest signal of quality. 

Our philosophy when it comes to SEO is three-fold: 

1. Have great content that people want to engage with, 
2. Make sure it is easy for Google (and other bots) to find and index that content, and 
3. Ensure that users have a good experience while on the page. 

We’ll assume you have #1 covered. Here, we outline technical SEO improvements that can be made for #2 and #3, with a focus on Crawlability, Indexability, and Page Speed.

Crawlability SEO Improvements

Crawlability refers to how easily search engines can discover your website or web page. Crawlers (Google’s and other search engines’ bots) “crawl” internet to discover webpages, following links between pages.

Google will typically start on your home page, looking for links and following them until it can’t find any new links. Checkbot is a plugin that emulates this recursive crawling and sees what urls are found. 

404 Errors: Page Not Found

One of the best ways to show Google’s bots that your content is up-to-date and accurate is to make sure your website does not link to any 404 error pages (these could be pages that were deleted, or where the URL is incorrect) is . Fixing any links that are pointing at 404s should be a top priority.

404s can start showing up for many reasons. Most often, 404s are found after a site migration where urls were not properly forwarded. Simply changing the permalink of a post without providing a forwarder will also cause a 404.

Even in a perfect world where there are no 404 links within your website, every link that has ever been published has a chance of being bookmarked by a user, or linked to from a different site. Take care to always forward URLs to new equivalent pages when content is removed. 

The best way to handle 404s is to set up a plugin to automatically create forwarders when content changes permalinks, and to log all 404s. We recommend the plugin “Redirection” for this task. With “Redirection” you can log 404s, and quickly create forwarders for them. When configured correctly, changes to post and page permalinks will automatically generate forwarders.

Proper configuration of the “Redirection” plugin:

301 Errors: Redirecting Links

Fixing redirects is not nearly as high a priority as fixing 404s. Google can still follow the redirect chain to the final destination and will update their indexes accordingly. However, it is still a good idea. By linking to the last link in a redirect chain, you can save your users additional page load time.

Focusing on links that appear on all or most pages such as ones that may appear in the footer, header, or sidebars is a great start.

Set Up Your Sitemap

A sitemap file is the quickest way for you to audit which pages are public on your site. It’s also the easiest way for bots to crawl and index your entire site efficiently. You can point to your sitemap from within Google Search Console settings. This should improve how often Google will crawl your site.

For WordPress users: A sitemap is automatically created for you if you use the Yoast plugin. You can adjust which content types are visible in the sitemap.xml from the Yoast “Search Appearance” settings. Then, visit the sitemap.xml file to make sure that the only links that show up in the sitemap are ones you want Google to know about. 

Indexability SEO Improvements

Indexability means that search engines are able to add the webpage to their index (indexing it). This means Google analyzes the page and its content and adds it to their database.

Meta Tags

It is important to provide proper meta tags for the titles and descriptions of your website’s pages. This not only helps Google with a first pass at what is on the page, but along with including og image tags, will populate information on many different sites when users share the link in messenger apps like Slack and via text and on social media platforms like Facebook, (X) Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.

For WordPress users: The Yoast plugin will allow you to set a default og image and description which helps in the event that one is not set on the page. However, all pages should have unique titles, descriptions, and og images if possible.

Within a page or post editor you will see a panel for Yoast SEO, under the Social Tab you can add a “Facebook image”. This is all you need to do as the rest of the social networks will use this image as well.

Missing Facebook image on a page editor

You can use a tool like our Social Share Preview Tool to see how a given url will look on various social networks. Ensure that you have an appropriate title, description, and og image.

Image Alternative Text

Providing Alternative (Alt) text on images is very important, not only for Google’s indexability, but for improving accessibility to screen readers.

Both Google’s bots and screen readers will step through a page’s content and read (or index) the content. If an image doesn’t have descriptive text it will usually be skipped by a screen reader, which might be fine depending on the context. Here are some guidelines for when to put in alt text on an image.

For WordPress users: When you need to put in alt text, you can add it as meta data on the media file within your WordPress backend. Most themes will then use this text when putting the image within your page content.

WordPress Media Editor, with Alt Text Field

Page Speed SEO Improvements

Page speed is increasingly being used by Google to factor into search rankings. The faster your site loads, the better. Google uses a combination of real world and lab data to check how fast your page is loading. 

For a quick overview of how your site is doing with regards to speed, you can open up the Google Search Console Page Experience report within Google Search Console. This report gives an overview of what percent of URLs they mark as a “good experience” for users who click through from Google Search. 

Another way to check how Google is grading your pages for page speed is the PageSpeed Insights report. This report simulates a page load and gives details and suggestions of speed and user experience improvements. If your site gets enough traffic, it will also give you aggregate data on how real world page loads performed.

Images

Images are always going to be the largest files that a website sends to a user. This is an area where major improvements can be made. It is always important to consider if an image is even necessary. The improvements that Google is identifying are to improve the experience of the image that you are already using. 

In simple terms, they are suggesting to use new image file formats, don’t load images that can’t be seen “above the fold” right away, and to only give users the correct image sizes for their screen size. Using the correct sizes is something that usually needs to be built during theme development. It may be tricky to follow this rule depending on how your website was set up.

For WordPress users: There is a free plugin called “Jetpack” that will swap all of your images for next gen formats. This happens automatically for browsers that support them, as well as lazy-load images that are off screen. Simply installing Jetpack and configuring it to serve your images will greatly speed up your site for your users. Plus, it will improve Google’s PageSpeed Insights assessments. This ensures that your website stays “passing” for Google Search Console’s Page experience report.

Excessive Plugins (For WordPress users)

One major improvement that can be made for page speed is to ensure that you do not have any plugins installed that you are no longer using.

Most plugins are configured to load on every page, even if their functionality is not being used. Woocommerce and various Woocommerce plugins are particularly bloated. If you have a website that isn’t utilizing WooCommerce’s ecommerce functionality, deactivate those plugins.

Any new plugins must always be carefully considered against their cost to overall page speed.