The Comprehensive Guide on Technical SEO

This 20-minute technical SEO checklist will help you monitor your online presence.

For a website to keep its search presence, many technical components must work properly.

This 20-minute SEO checklist provides a high-level assessment of the state of your online presence and alerts you to any emerging issues that need to be addressed.

In terms of what needs to be done and how to do it, technical SEO is the easiest SEO task to complete which is a part of online digital marketing.

The workload can be effectively managed by using a core set of technical SEO factors to check on the site’s and search presence’s health once a week.

In a variety of industries, almost any individual or group can profit from the advice.

Naturally, there may be other factors that are particular to your situation that is added, but these concepts can act as the basis for an effective weekly checkup.

Are 20 minutes per week sufficient?

Full-time technical SEO specialists already have a counterargument prepared: “Users can’t even get started in twenty minutes a week.”

I agree.

The goal of this manual is to teach you how to monitor your most significant issues from a distance and identify the areas that require further investigation.

You might only require a 20-minute checkup for a few weeks.

Other weeks, you might stumble upon a damaging canonicalization mistake and call in the troops for a full-scale assault.

Using this weekly work process will significantly increase your productivity if you’re not staying on top of your technical SEO.

1. Overview of Search Console (Minutes 0-10)

There is no greater way to begin than by going to the Search Console and carefully going through everything.

The dashboard has already been created for you and set up for your account; Google has provided the data.

We’re looking for obvious errors.

We don’t spend hours poring over pages to monitor tiny keyword changes.

We’re trying to find the biggest problems.

Take A Look At Overview Section First:

Review these data points:

• Does the Performance summary show any unusually large declines in traffic? Massive drops may be a sign of a global SEO technical problem.
• Does the number of “Pages with errors” in the coverage summary have any peaks? If this is your first time checking in a while, you ought to investigate historical ones.
• Check the advancement summaries for features like AMP, Q&As, mobile usability, and more for ups and downs. Are they moving in an expected manner? If you notice any anomalies, investigate further.

Proceed With Coverage Section Next:

Read the Index Coverage section to learn how Google is indexing and crawling your website.

This page is used by Google to report crawling and indexing issues.

The main aspect to look for is the default Error view, and you should read the Supporting technologies.

Examine the trend column each line by line. If something doesn’t seem right, look into it more and come up with a diagnosis.

Check Out Sitemaps Section:

This provides a wealth of data regarding your sitemaps and the pages to which they link.

It’s especially helpful if your sitemaps contain different subsets of the pages on your website.

If your site hasn’t been crawled recently, you could perhaps check the Last Read column.

The Status column should then be examined in order to identify the errors that have been highlighted. Make a note to take action if this has substantially increased over the past week.

Evaluate Manual Actions:

This is a serious problem. If everything is done correctly, there should hardly ever be any manual actions listed here.

But it’s worth doing once a week to ensure your sense of peace. You need to find it before your CEO.

Each report in Search Console has a tonne of information that you could spend most of the time studying.

The summary dashboards with these high-level checks are the most important ones to look at each week.

Weekly review and note-taking of each of the following sections only take ten minutes. But to delve deeper into the issues you find, a lot more study will be required.

2. Verify Robots.txt (Minutes 11-12)

The Robots.txt file is one of the most important ways to tell search engines which pages you want them to crawl and which ones you don’t.

Note: The robots.txt file only controls page crawling; page indexing is unaffected.

Some small sites only have one or two lines in the file, while large sites often have incredibly complex setups.

Typically, the content of your website will be limited to a few lines and won’t change from week to week.

Despite the fact that the file doesn’t typically change, it’s still crucial to confirm that nothing was added inadvertently and that it still exists.

The worst-case scenario is that the robots.txt file could be modified to “Disallow: /” to prevent search engines from crawling while the pages are being developed on a staging server and then transferred to the live site with the disallow directive intact.

This might occur during a website update or relaunch by your development team.

Make sure this is the actual website by checking:

If it’s a typical week, there won’t be any changes, and it will only take a minute.

Each week, the structure of every site is different, so you should check to make sure nothing was changed by mistake.

3. In Google Analytics, check the page speed (Minutes 13-15)

We’ll go to Google Analytics to get a comprehensive view of page speed throughout your entire site.

Select Behavior > Site Speed > Overview from the drop-down menu.

I recommend comparing the previous seven days with the seven days prior to identifying any significant changes.

For more information, visit Speed Recommendations for page-by-page timelines and advice:

The goal is to determine whether anything major went wrong in the previous week.

Before taking any action, you should check individual pages to a few certain tools that dig into the details.

There are numerous additional tools available to delve deeper and identify specific page speed concerns.

A Chrome Lighthouse tool, accessible via DevTools in every Chrome-based browser, is a useful Google tool for assessing and diagnosing page speed issues.

4. Examine the search outcomes (Minutes 15-18)

There is nothing more enjoyable than thoroughly combing through the Search Engine Results (SERPs).

Even though tools are useful and minute, one should also review the SERPs on a regular basis, not just when the tools indicate a significant change.

Enter your search terms to determine whether the tools reported match what you see in the Search engine results pages.

Even though search terms are dynamic and can change based on factors such as geography, search history, device, and other customization factors, slight variations in rankings are to be expected.

5. Analyze Your Site Visually (Minutes 19-20)

In line with the previous trend of failing to check the SERPs, it’s all too common for SEO professionals to rely on analysis tools instead of manually inspecting the website.

Although manual website review is less “scalable,” it is necessary to catch some obvious problems that may go unnoticed or lost in a tool’s report.

To keep this under two minutes, test a few of your most popular pages quickly.

Remember that this is a pinpoint for major issues that hold out rather than a thorough examination of the sentences, grammar, and paragraphs.

Start just at the main website and scroll through to find anything that is broken. Click all over the website, examining various page types, and going to look for any anomalies

Also, while you’re at it, take a look at the code.

Again, performing a high-level checkup like this once a week is a good practice.

You’ll feel significantly better knowing you have your own eyes on the source of your income rather than relying on abstraction via a 3rd tool.

Conclusion

20-minute technical SEO maintenance provides high-level insight into a website’s ultimate SEO health which helps in increasing your ranking also comes in digital marketing and alerts you when something is wrong before the problem worsens and the website crashes completely.

The objective is to quickly establish that all of the website’s vital signs, including crawling and indexing, are in good working order and that the site’s performance is optimal.

I also recommend conducting a regular full technical SEO audit of your website to get a complete diagnosis and identify the more serious issues.