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It’s easy to get caught up in on-page SEO, but don’t ignore the technical foundation of your site. Technical SEO plays a key role in success. Since the Core Web Vitals algorithm update in 2021, slow websites with mediocre user experiences receive lower rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPa).
B2B SaaS websites have a vested interest in this update. If they run a chatbot or personalization features in the background, it can lead to performance issues and lost ground in organic search.
Conducting a technical SEO audit is a proactive way to identify and fix hidden issues that might limit your search engine visibility and harm user experience.
What is a technical SEO audit?
A technical SEO audit focuses on what’s under the hood of your website. It’s a full inspection of your site’s technical infrastructure that identifies issues that may impact how search engines crawl, index, and rank your site.
The audit looks at a variety of off-page factors, like site load speed, mobile usability, and crawl errors. Each of these aspects can sway a search engine’s assessment of where your site belongs in the search results. If your site is slow and suffering from technical errors, search engines are less likely to recommend it.
Top benefits of performing a technical SEO audit
Websites have many moving parts. When those parts aren’t working as they should and a prospective customer comes to your site, they probably won’t stick around to explore the solutions you offer. Technical SEO audits ensure proper functionality before your site turns visitors away.
Improved search visibility
Search engines must be able to access and understand the pages on your website. Technical SEO challenges like crawl errors, broken links, and slow page speeds can stand in the way of proper indexing. When search engines can’t index your site properly, they can’t display all your valuable content in a web search, which negatively affects your rankings.
SaaS websites are notoriously complex. Search engine crawlers often have a difficult time navigating intricate site architectures and non-linear customer journeys. If a site’s topic focus is scattered, crawlers may miss important relevance signals that boost a company’s credibility and expertise.
Better user experience
Visitors who can navigate your site quickly on any device generally have a better browsing experience and are more likely to take action. In fact, the average conversion rate for a website that loads in just one second is a whopping 300% higher than that of a site that takes five seconds to load!
Since the average B2B SaaS customer already has a long path to conversion, user experience is critical. When you eliminate the technical barriers on your site that might hold them back, you increase the likelihood they’ll request a demo, sign up for a trial, or schedule a consultation.
Opportunities to find hidden issues
Not all technical issues are obvious, but they can still drag down your rankings and decrease your organic traffic if left unaddressed. This is why regular technical SEO audits are a must for every B2B SaaS website — without an in-depth review, you’d never know these issues lurk beneath the surface.
Technical audits reveal issues like improper redirects and duplicate content. Seemingly simple missteps like having pages with identical title tags or meta descriptions can wreak havoc on your search visibility.
Better site security and trust
Website visitors see outdated SSL certificates and vulnerable plugins as major red flags. Search engines know people are more likely to provide sensitive information on trusted, secure websites, which is why they reward these sites with improved visibility in the SERPs.
If you want to earn your clients’ trust, website security is imperative. By performing a technical SEO audit, you can identify any security issues that may erode client trust or get your site flagged by the search engines.
Improved long-term growth and scalability
Technical SEO audits give your B2B SaaS website a strong foundation to build on. As you develop new products and need more web content to nurture prospective customers, your website becomes more complex. Expanding your site without untangling technical SEO issues along the way will likely result in a mess not even the search engines can unsnarl.
To support long-term growth, you should perform technical SEO audits regularly. They’re beneficial not only for search engine optimization but also for balancing your developer and content resources and making sure your organic acquisition strategy is solid.
Why are technical SEO audits so essential?
When you have a complex website, there are more opportunities for things to break. You might have an extensive knowledge base with detailed product information and case studies, alongside blog posts and landing pages. Search engines love this content, but only if they can scan and index it.
Technical SEO audits help clear the way for all that great web content to get on users’ search radar. If human error or technical glitches cause issues on your site, a website audit will pinpoint where those issues occur.
Unchecked issues damage your search engine visibility and domain authority, and it can take time to regain lost ground. Regular site audits help you keep your site optimized as you generate more content and make changes.
You also have to contend with the search engine algorithm, which constantly changes. Every year, Google makes thousands of algorithm updates. In 2020 alone, Google reported making more than 4,500 improvements to search. B2B SaaS companies keeping a technical eye on these updates will often win out over their competitors in the search engine rankings.
By now, you might be wondering how you can tell when your website needs a technical SEO audit. For most companies, the story begins when they see a big dip in their traffic, conversions, or rankings.
These companies may have once received the lion’s share of traffic and conversions. But as the market expanded and more competitors entered the field, they saw their organic visibility decline.
Sound familiar? You could likely benefit from a technical SEO audit.
7 initial steps to take when completing a technical SEO audit
Every company takes a different approach to performing a technical SEO audit. Below, we’ve included some general steps to guide your audit, but keep in mind this isn’t a comprehensive list. We’ve simply highlighted the areas where we’ve seen companies encounter the most issues with their technical SEO.
1. Invest in the right SEO tools
First things first, you need the right tools. Screaming Frog, Semrush, and Ahrefs are all reliable SEO audit tools that can give you an overall picture of your site’s health.
After crawling your site, these tools provide in-depth reports that highlight technical issues. This might include broken links and 404 errors, slow-loading pages, XML sitemap errors, SSL certificate issues, or other technical issues known to be problematic for website performance.
2. Check for crawling and indexing errors
Your site’s crawlability may be hurting your SEO efforts. To decide what pages will appear in the search results, search engine crawlers must be able to crawl and index your content. If the crawlers don’t know your content exists or they're unsure whether it’s relevant to a user’s search, it won’t be visible in the SERPs.
So a technical SEO audit should always check for crawl and indexing issues. You might have canonical tag errors preventing the right pages from indexing on your site, or a site the crawlers can’t index because it lacks mobile-friendliness.
Low-value pages are also a culprit for many B2B SaaS companies. These pages waste your crawl budget and prevent the search bot from crawling more important pages.
3. Look at site speed and performance
Google has confirmed page speed is a ranking factor for both desktop and mobile. Faster sites are more likely to achieve higher rankings in search results, as they create a more user-friendly experience and allow search engines to crawl pages in less time, leading to better content indexing.
A technical SEO audit often evaluates a site’s load times. It pinpoints slow pages that could benefit from performance optimizations like image compression or browser caching. The audit helps you understand where to focus your attention to improve your search engine visibility and user experience.
4. Assess mobile usability
After introducing mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal on mobile searches in 2016, Google made it a key ranking factor in mid-2024. More than half of today’s website traffic comes from mobile.
In a 2021 study, Semrush found that only 17% of websites maintain their positions in search across mobile and desktop SERPs. Similarly, 37% of URLs lost their place in the top 10 when a user query came from mobile. The culprit? Mobile-first indexing and mobile sites that didn’t quite stack up to their competitors.
Your technical SEO audit should include testing your site on mobile devices. You’ll want to check your site’s responsiveness and make sure it loads quickly and offers a seamless user experience. When the mobile experience is lacking, companies often report higher bounce rates on their sites as visitors seek out a more optimized experience.
5. Review security settings and SSL
Security is a critical factor in determining SEO rankings. Visitors are more likely to trust and engage with secure websites, so sites with HTTPS encryption get preference in the search engine results.
Technical SEO audits can detect whether your site is secure and has a valid SSL certificate. If your site is missing an SSL certificate, browsers like Chrome and Firefox will label your site as “Not Secure,” which can cause visitors to turn back.
6. Audit structured data and schema markup
Structured data is like a map that provides clues about the meaning of your web pages so search engines can understand the context and relationships within your content.
When users enter a question or phrase, structured data helps search engines match that query with relevant content on your website and present it in rich snippets. Schema is the language that communicates the information in structured data.
During an audit, it’s important to review existing schema implementations. You want to make sure they’re correctly applied to important content on your website, like products, reviews, and FAQs.
7. Review XML sitemap and robots.txt file
Finally, determine if your XML sitemap is up to date and submitted to search engines. This will ensure proper crawling and indexing. An XML sitemap tells search engines which pages on your site are most important.
Within your audit, you should also be able to verify if the robots.txt file is correctly configured to block or allow the right sections of your website. This can help optimize your crawl budget and prevent non-essential pages on your site from getting indexed.
How often should B2B SaaS brands audit their technical SEO?
The answer to this question depends on the complexity of your website and how often you update it. At a minimum, we recommend bi-annual audits. However, more frequent audits might make sense if you’re regularly making web updates or adding new features and dynamic content.
Let’s say you’re performing a website migration. This is a great opportunity to run a technical SEO audit. Many things can go wrong during a migration, and being proactive can prevent future website headaches.
Or maybe you decide to update the URL structure of your core pages or blog. This is another reason you’d want to do a technical audit.
Regularity is key. If you can keep up with technical SEO in between audits, you can prevent critical issues from impacting your website performance and rankings.
DIY or hiring an agency: Which is the right move for technical SEO?
Some B2B SaaS companies have a dedicated SEO team. For these teams, it often makes sense to handle technical audits internally. But other companies with complicated websites or limited in-house experience may benefit from the expertise and resources they get from an external agency like Ten Speed.
SEO agencies have the depth of experience to address the complex issues less specialized teams might overlook. Not only do they have up-to-date knowledge on SEO trends and algorithm changes, but they often have access to premium SEO tools. This means massive time savings for internal teams and greater insights.
Take back control over your site’s performance with a technical SEO audit
Companies often see a sudden drop in website traffic or conversions in Google Search Console and then race to find the culprit. But there’s a more proactive and strategic way to keep technical SEO issues at bay, and that’s regular audits.
When the technical aspects of your site complement the on-page SEO elements, you’ll naturally draw in visitors through the search engine results pages. But it might take some expert help to get there.
At Ten Speed, we specialize in helping B2B SaaS companies develop and implement effective SEO strategies. We can help you take your rankings to the next level through both technical and on-page SEO.
Ready to resolve the technical SEO issues plaguing your site? Reach out and schedule a call with our team.
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