Making sure that your website is technically sound is a key part of winning organic traffic so you see the benefits of SEO for lawyers.
Technical SEO audits help you stay on top of everything under the hood of your website. Regular technical checks ensure that your website provides the best experience possible for both visitors and search engines.
An audit process can help you uncover everything from simple issues like broken images to major problems such as blocking Google from visiting your site.
If you've never run a thorough technical SEO audit on your site, it may be time to do so. This guide's interactive walkthroughs will get you on the right track quickly.
When Should You Do a Technical SEO Audit?
Regular technical SEO audits are important to any search engine optimization campaign. It's an essential part of website maintenance that's especially useful in certain scenarios.
After Significant Website Updates or Redesigns
Whenever you make considerable changes to your site's structure, design, or content, conduct a technical site audit. Significant updates can often introduce unforeseen SEO issues that could negatively impact your site's ranking.
Before Launching a New Website
A thorough technical audit should be performed before a new website goes live. This preemptive measure ensures that your site is optimized for search engines right out of the gate, helping to avoid common pitfalls that could hinder its early performance.
Following a Drop in Traffic or Rankings
If you notice a significant drop in your website's traffic or search engine rankings, it's a clear signal that something may be amiss. A comprehensive technical SEO audit can help identify the root causes, whether they're related to recent Google algorithm changes, technical glitches, or other SEO challenges.
To Adapt to Algorithm Updates
Search engines like Google frequently update their algorithms. Staying ahead requires adapting your SEO strategies accordingly. Conducting a technical audit after major algorithm updates can help ensure your website remains in compliance with the latest SEO best practices.
When Expanding Your Offerings or Target Market
If your law firm is branching out into new practice areas or targeting a new demographic, a technical SEO audit can ensure your website is optimally structured to reach these new audiences effectively.
Competitive Analysis
Keeping an eye on your competition is always wise. If your competitors are consistently outranking you, a technical audit can highlight areas for improvement, helping you refine your SEO strategy to compete more effectively.
A general rule of thumb is to perform a technical SEO audit at least once a year outside of those scenarios. Large sites and sites that post a lot of content may need more frequent auditing.
Crawl Your Website
All technical SEO audits begin with a website crawl.
You have to account for all the pages on your website before you can start finding any potential issues with it. Using a web crawler bot, you can get a full list of exactly how many pages and files exist on your site. These tools navigate your site like a search engine's crawler, so if your tool runs into problems along the way, it's likely Google's search bot had trouble with it, too.
You could use a few different web crawlers, such as Screaming Frog and SiteBulb, but we recommend using Ahrefs for your technical audit.
Ahrefs' Site Audit tool does a little more than crawl your website. It also categorizes the issues and provides some direction on how to fix them. This makes it easy to drill down into the most pressing problems on your site.
You can also instruct Ahrefs to crawl your site on a regular basis, meaning you can track issues as you resolve them.
To get started, create an Ahrefs account, then go to the Site Audit tool. The walkthrough below will show you how to set up your first site crawl with the tool.
Next, you’ll need to configure your crawl settings.
You'll need to finalize a few more settings to configure your Site Audit settings.
Using Ahrefs as your technical SEO audit tool has a few additional benefits. The Site Audit tool is also great for general website audits and more content-focused SEO audits. Plus, you get access to the Ahrefs suite of tools for things like keyword research.
A website crawl can take a long time, depending on the size of your website. Fortunately, there are some simple technical issues you can check for while you wait for your crawl to finish.
Check for Crawlability and Indexability Issues
The first place to check is to see if search engines can even access your website.
If Google can't access pages on your website, then it won't be able to add them to the Google search index. If it can't index the pages, they won't appear in the search results.
Check Your Crawl Budget
The "crawl budget" refers to the number of pages on your website that search engines like Google decide to crawl within a specific timeframe.
The crawl budget is affected by two main factors: crawl rate limit and crawl demand. The crawl rate limit is how much the search engine crawler can consume without negatively impacting your site’s user experience. Crawl demand, meanwhile, is determined by the popularity and freshness of your content — the more popular and newer the content, the more likely search engines are to crawl those pages.
For most law firm websites, the crawl budget is not a constraint due to the relatively small size of the site compared to giant e-commerce or news websites. However, it’s still important to ensure your site is as crawlable as possible so your new and updated content gets indexed promptly.
How to Check Your Crawl Stats
Google Search Console provides valuable insights into how Google is crawling your site through the "Crawl Stats" report. This report shows the number of requests made to your site, the amount of data Googlebot downloaded, and your site's average response time over the past 90 days.
Tip: Keep an eye on server errors (5XX status codes) in the Google Search Console. Frequent server errors could slow down or halt the crawling process, negatively impacting your crawl budget.
Checking for Crawl Issues
Checking your robots.txt file is a simple way to know if your site faces this type of crawl error.
Your robots.txt file is a set of instructions for search engine crawlers telling them which pages or sections of the site they should or shouldn't visit for indexing.
All you need to do to check your robots.txt file is type in your domain and add /robots.txt to the end, like this:
For example, here's the robots.txt for the personal injury lawyer website forthepeople.com:
This file gives search engine crawlers clear instructions on what subfolders they can access and which ones they should not go to.
Previously, Google also provided access to a URL parameters tool that allowed webmasters to control the crawlability of URLs containing these. For instance, in a law firm's resource section, a URL like <span class="inline-code">www.lawfirmexample.com/resources?category=familylaw</span> might display only resources related to family law.
However, these days, Google's crawling capabilities have advanced to the point that manual URL parameter configuration isn't necessary in most cases.
However, you can still specify rules for parameters in the robots.txt file. For instance, if a law firm's website uses URL parameters to filter blog posts by topic, the robots.txt file can be configured to disallow crawling of these parameterized URLs, thereby preventing search engines from indexing multiple versions of essentially the same page.
Some developers will set the robots.txt to disallow search engines from crawling a new website while it's under construction. If they forget to update the file once the site goes live, then search engines won't be able to index it.
An error like this will show up in your robots.txt file if that's the case:
<span class:"inline-code">User-agent: *</span>
<span class:"inline-code">Disallow: /</span>
These instructions tell web crawlers that they can visit your homepage but nothing else on your site. All it takes is a simple tweak to your robots.txt file to remove these instructions, and Google can now access your site.
While you're looking at your robots.txt file, check that there aren't any other disallowed areas that you actually want search engines to access.
Checking for Indexing Issues
Once you know that Google can reach your site, you can check which pages are in its index.
Google Search Console is the easiest place to get an overview of which pages on your site are indexed. If you already have the tool set up, you can follow the walkthrough below to see how to use Search Console's indexing reports.
Identify Non-Indexed Pages
There will always be some pages on your site that you don't want to be indexed. But it can be a big problem if a page you want to rank has a “noindex” tag. Search Console can help you find some of those issues but may not provide enough context to fix them.
That's where the Ahrefs Site Audit you ran will come in handy.
Ahrefs Site Audit categorizes indexability issues and provides helpful pointers for fixing them. Here's how you can use Site Audit's Indexability report to find and export potential errors on your site:
Throughout your technical audit, we recommend exporting issues from Ahrefs so you can act on them later. It's better to note all the problems to fix in a Google Sheet or Excel. You can prioritize the issues later to fix the highest-impact items first.
Check for Blocked Pages
There's one other thing to check in Site Audit's Indexability report before moving on.
Site Audit can also help you find specific pages on your site that are blocked by your robots.txt file. Even though you checked your robots file, there could be some pages in a blocked subfolder that you want Google to access. Here's how to use the Indexability report to find those pages:
Ahrefs web crawler can only find these blocked pages through links pointing at them on pages the tool can access. For large sites, like the one in the walkthrough, this can translate to thousands of links pointing to an inaccessible page. Once you place your export in a sheet, you can weed down the list to only show the unique blocked pages.
There's just one more indexability-related group of issues to look for at this point in your technical audit.
Check for Sitemap Errors
Your XML sitemap acts as a roadmap for the pages on your website. Many web crawlers, like Google, use it as an entry point to your site because it makes it easier for them to navigate and index pages. Issues in your sitemap make it harder for search engines to index pages and decide what to rank.
You can use Ahrefs Site Audit to find these issues and resolve them later. The walkthrough below will show you how to do this.
Sitemap errors can be as varied as things like redirect issues, security issues, or “noindex” pages wasting space on the list and confusing Google. Most of the time, fixing these problems takes less time than finding them.
Now that you've identified potential issues with crawling and indexing, you're ready to move on to the next phase of your technical audit.
Check for Technical Issues in On-Page Elements
Missing on-page elements, duplicate content issues, and issues with multilingual content can have a significant impact on a site's ability to rank on Google. Your technical audit should include checks for the first two ranking factors. If your site has content in more than one language, then you'll want to do all three.
The first place to start in this part of your audit is by looking for issues with your on-page elements.
Pages without things like a title tag or H1 tag are missing the opportunity to give Google valuable context about the page. This can lead to Google ranking the page lower than competitors. Pages with too many H1 tags or titles that are too long can also suffer the same fate.
These problems are easy to fix. The challenge sometimes lies in finding them.
Here's how you can do that using your Site Audit report:
Finding and Fixing Duplicate Pages
Duplicate content on your site is another common problem that can harm your search rankings. These could look like duplicate title tags or duplicate meta descriptions, as well as the content itself being too similar to another page's.
When Google sees two pages that are nearly identical, it can have trouble deciding which one to rank for a given query. Setting up a canonical tag on one page is a solution that tells Google to prefer one page over another.
Ahrefs Site Audit can help you find duplicate content as well as potential issues with existing canonical tags. Here's how:
When you have multiple pages with similar or identical content, it's essential to indicate to search engines which version is the "main" or "canonical" page. This is where canonical tags come into play. By implementing a canonical tag, you inform search engines about the preferred URL for a set of similar pages, thereby consolidating your SEO strength towards a single, authoritative page.
This approach helps to:
- Avoid penalization for duplicate content.
- Concentrate link equity (SEO value from backlinks) on a single URL.
- Ensure that the most relevant page is indexed and displayed in search results.
Implementing Canonical Tags
To effectively use canonical tags, follow these best practices:
- Self-Referencing Canonicals: As a general rule of thumb, include a canonical tag on your original page that points to itself. This practice reinforces to search engines which page is canonical, even if only one version exists.
- Cross-Domain Canonicalization: If republishing content across different domains (for instance, syndicating a blog post to another site), a canonical tag should point back to the original content on your law firm's website. This tells search engines where the original, authoritative piece resides.
- Handling Pagination and Filtering: For blog archives, canonical tags can be used to point paginated or filtered versions back to the main page (if consolidating link equity to a single page is desired). However, consider user navigation and the specific goals of your site’s structure when applying this tactic.
- Avoid Conflicting Signals: Make sure your canonical tags do not conflict with other signals, such as redirects or the robots.txt file. For instance, do not block a page with a canonical tag through robots.txt, as it prevents search engines from seeing the tag altogether.
Make Sure Google Understands Your Structured Data
Schema markup, or structured data, uses a specific vocabulary to annotate your content, making it easier for search engines to grasp its context. This important aspect of on-page SEO can lead to enhanced search results through rich snippets, which include reviews, FAQs, or business information directly in the search engine results pages.
Checking for issues in structured data is essential to make sure your website communicates effectively with search engine bots.
Here’s how you can check for issues:
Google's Rich Results Test
This tool by Google tests your structured data to see if it's eligible for rich results in Google's search results. It identifies errors and suggestions for improvement.
Simply enter the URL of the page you want to test or copy and paste the code snippet. The tool will analyze the structured data on the page and report any issues found.
Google's Search Console
Google Search Console provides a “Structured Data” report under the “Enhancements” section. This report shows the detected structured data types on your website and any related issues.
Navigate to the "Enhancements" section after logging into your Google Search Console account. Select the structured data report you want to review. Google will list errors and warnings with specific details, allowing you to pinpoint and fix issues directly.
Check for Issues with Multilingual Content
If you have content in more than one language on your site, the next part of the technical audit will be very important.
Hreflang is an HTML attribute used to indicate the language of a webpage. These snippets of code help search engines understand which language you are using in your content. These attributes guide search engines to serve the most relevant version of the site to people based on their language preferences.
Hreflang can be complicated, and it's easy to make a mistake when setting it up. Site Audit can surface potential language issues for you so you can resolve them later.
The walkthrough below will help you find potential Hreflang errors.
If you're interested in diving deeper into resolving content issues, check out our guide to doing an SEO audit. That article looks at some less technical—but still important—SEO fixes for site content.
Now that you've identified some common issues related to site content, you're ready to move on to the next phase of your technical site audit.
Check for Issues with Images on Your Site
Having images on your site is an important part of creating an engaging user experience, but they come at a cost.
Images with large file sizes can slow your site down. If your pages are too slow, it can impact the experience for users. If it's detrimental to users, your site may not rank as well as it could.
Here's how you can find issues with images on your site using your site crawl:
Site Audit doesn't just surface issues with massive images. You can also identify places where images are insecure or broken. It'll also show you where you can add alt text to images to improve your site's accessibility to the visually impaired.
Images aren't the only broken element to look for on your site. Finding and fixing broken pages can be a huge boost to visitors' experience on your site, too. In the next phase of the technical audit, you'll look for those kinds of issues.
Check for Issues Involving Broken Links and Broken Pages
Broken pages can be a huge frustration for visitors to your site. When users encounter pages that don't work, they leave. Google could interpret a high bounce rate as a sign that your content does not match search intent.
The result: your site begins to see a decline in organic traffic.
Using Ahrefs to Find Broken Internal and External Links
Finding broken pages is one of the easiest things in a technical audit. They're also easy to fix once you've found them. The walkthrough below will show you how you can use your site crawl to find pages with these errors.
On the same token, broken links to pages on your site can be a user experience nightmare that's simple to resolve. Here's how you can use Site Audit to find issues with links on your site:
This report surfaces some interesting issues beyond issues with internal linking, too.
Ahrefs will also show you instances of orphan pages, for example. These are pages on your site that don't have any internal links to or from other website content. Adding a link to one of these pages means you've taken an invisible piece and turned it into a valuable and accessible resource.
It can also show you things like pages without outgoing links and can cover some bases on canonical page issues. Additionally, it can tell you if a page has no outgoing links, in which case Google might see it as a dead end for visitors.
Using Site Audit is just one way to find and resolve broken internal and external links. This method is useful for a technical audit, but if you want to do a deeper dive, check out our guide to finding broken links. That can help you resolve common internal linking errors and assess your external link and backlink situation.
Fixing broken links and pages can greatly improve your site experience. But there's still one more thing to check before you can complete your technical audit.
Check Your Site's Mobile-Friendliness
With the majority of online searches now performed on mobile devices, Google and other search engines have transitioned to mobile-first indexing. This means that the mobile version of your website is now considered the primary version when determining rankings.
How to Conduct a Mobile-Friendliness Check
Google offers a simple URL inspection tool called Lighthouse that allows you to input your website’s URL and analyze its mobile performance. It not only tells you whether your site is mobile-friendly but also highlights issues that need fixing, such as audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, and some SEO elements.
Lighthouse is integrated into the Chrome DevTools, which is built into the Google Chrome browser. To access it, first, open your website in Chrome. Then, right-click anywhere on the page and select “Inspect” to open the Chrome DevTools. Alternatively, you can press <span class="inline-code">Ctrl+Shift+I</span> on Windows or <span class="inline-code">Cmd+Opt+I</span> on Mac to open it directly. Once the dev tools panel is open, find the “Lighthouse” tab at the top.
In the Lighthouse tab or extension, you’ll see various configuration options for your audit. For mobile-friendliness, make sure the “Performance,” “Accessibility,” “Best Practices,” and “SEO” categories are checked. These will cover most aspects impacting mobile user experience.
Choose “Mobile” from the “Device” dropdown to simulate a mobile environment.
Select “Clear storage” to test the page as if a user is visiting it for the first time.
Interpreting the Scores
Upon completion, Lighthouse will present a report detailing the audit results. The report is divided into sections based on the selected categories, such as performance and accessibility. Each section scores from 0 to 100, with detailed insights and recommendations for improvement.
- Performance: Low scores indicate slow load times or rendering issues. Look at the recommendations to see specific areas for improvement.
- Accessibility: This measures how accessible your site is to users with disabilities—a crucial aspect of mobile-friendliness.
- Best Practices: Insights here focus on common best practices for web development, including security and modern web standards.
- SEO: Although not exclusively about mobile-friendliness, good SEO practices often align with mobile optimization, such as legible font sizes and clickable elements.
Review the “Opportunities” and “Diagnostics” sections for actionable advice to improve your site’s mobile experience. This might include optimizing images, minifying CSS/JavaScript, and improving server response times.
Testing on Multiple Devices
Lighthouse offers a responsive size feature that allows you to test your web page on various devices and screen sizes. You can also use developer aids such as Responsively App to test your website's responsive capabilities (these are sometimes more accurate.)
However, if you want to be really thorough, don't rely solely on tools. Check your website’s functionality on various devices and screen sizes manually. Pay attention to loading times, ease of navigation, and the visibility of content.
Action Steps Post-Check
- Implement Fixes: Prioritize the fixes based on their potential impact on user experience and rankings. Address loading speed and visibility issues first, as they significantly affect performance.
- Regular Monitoring: Mobile-friendliness is not a set-it-and-forget-it aspect of your website. Regular monitoring and adjustments are necessary to stay compliant with ever-evolving standards and technologies.
- Consider Mobile-First Design: In future redesigns or updates, consider adopting a mobile-first approach, designing for mobile users initially and then expanding to accommodate desktop users.
Check Site Speed and Performance
The last thing to check in your technical SEO audit is your site speed and overall technical performance.
Slow pages and pages with a large file size have a similar impact to large images. Visitors could become frustrated and leave your site if a page has a slow load speed. Over time, this could translate into a decline in search engine rankings.
Here's how you can use Ahrefs Site Audit to find technical SEO issues related to site performance:
Utilizing Google Analytics for Performance Insights
While Ahrefs helps identify technical bottlenecks, Google Analytics offers insights into how these factors impact visitor behavior and engagement — crucial components for optimizing your law firm's online presence.
Behavioral Metrics Impacted by Site Speed
- Bounce Rate: A high bounce rate could indicate that your pages are loading too slowly, causing visitors to leave before engaging with your content. GA provides bounce rate metrics at the page level, allowing you to pinpoint which specific pages might require speed optimizations.
- Pages per Session and Average Session Duration: These metrics give you a glimpse into user engagement. Slow-loading pages tend to diminish the number of pages a user visits and the time they spend on your site. Analyzing trends in GA can highlight if performance issues are affecting user experience across your site.
Loading Time Analysis
- Site Speed Reports: Google Analytics offers a dedicated section for analyzing site speed, including the Page Timings report, which breaks down the average loading time of individual pages. This is invaluable for identifying outliers or pages that significantly underperform compared to your site's average.
- Speed Suggestions Report: In addition to raw data, GA integrates with PageSpeed Insights to provide specific suggestions for improving the loading times of your web pages. Implementing these recommendations can directly impact both user experience and your site's performance in search engine results.
Link Google Search Console with Google Analytics
These reports can also be used in conjunction with data from Google Search Console (GSC). GSC can show you how pages perform according to the Core Web Vitals across the entire site.
To do this, navigate to your Google Analytics Admin section, click on ‘Property Settings,’ and scroll down to ‘Search Console.’ Here, you can add your site’s search console data for integration.
In Google Search Console, navigate to the "Experience" section and click on "Core Web Vitals." Here, you'll see reports for both mobile and desktop, highlighting pages that need improvement.
Final Thoughts
Technical SEO audits are an important process for finding and triaging everything from quick fixes to major issues on your site. And they're a huge part of any checklist for SEO.
Creating a habit of regular audits is a great way to keep track of your site's performance. The issues that this process uncovers are often easy to fix and can have a major impact on your site.
If you don't have the time to run your own technical SEO audit or don't feel that you have the skills to resolve the issues, consider working with an SEO expert.
At Rankings.io, we help lawyers create and execute winning digital marketing campaigns. Contact us today to see how you can get more out of your website and beat the competition.
