Where should you start with technical SEO?

Technical SEO work ensures that the time you’ve spent on on- and off-page SEO pays off — if a website can’t be crawled and indexed, the content on that site can’t rank no matter how high-quality or link-worthy it is. For that reason, SEO pros know that a comprehensive search marketing strategy should include periodic audits of a website’s technical health and its opportunities for improvement. But as you uncover these opportunities, how do you know which ones are most important? What information can you provide to your managers and web developers so that they know which issues deserve their time and attention?

Every website’s technical SEO situation is different, depending on platform, code base, history, and complexity. As the SEO Manager here at Moz, I use information from our Campaign tools to make recommendations about the urgency and predicted impact of our site’s technical SEO needs. Our devs use these insights to plan their sprints, making sure to prioritize the most pressing fixes and those that are most likely to move the SERP needle.

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The Site Crawl tools within Moz Pro can help you identify a wide variety of issues that may affect the crawling, indexing, and ranking of the content you’ve worked so hard to develop. In this series of Daily Fix videos, we’ll show you where to find those issues and, just as importantly, how to use the tools’ sorting, filtering, and CSV export functions to organize them by the impact they’ll have on your overall technical SEO health.

How do you prioritize your technical SEO work? Let us know which metrics mean the most to you and your website in the comments!

Prioritize Crawl Issues

Once the Moz crawler has finished its crawl of your website, the All Crawled Pages report will offer a full list of crawling, indexing, and content errors discovered during the process. With such comprehensive coverage, this list can be overwhelming!

Zac demonstrates how to filter and sort your full list of issues within your Moz Pro Campaign and using a CSV export, allowing you to focus on pages with the most issues or those with the highest Page Authority.

Analyze Crawl Depth of Important Pages

The Crawl Depth metric describes how many clicks it takes to get from your homepage to any other page within your site. Both search engines and users visit easy-to-reach pages more often, so it’s important that all pages with user value are quickly accessible.

Eli shows how to analyze your site’s architecture via crawl depth, so you can adjust your internal linking structure to ease access to your most important pages and save on valuable crawl budget.

Identify and Fix Duplicate Content

The Content Issues tool within Site Crawl provides a fast and easy way to identify potential duplicate content on your site, which can cause search engines to index and rank the wrong version of a page.

Jo uses the Duplicate Content feature to find pages that would benefit from canonicalization, redirection, or rewriting of content to avoid SERP confusion.

Prioritize Site Performance/CWV Improvements

As of June 2021, Google uses important site performance metrics called Core Web Vitals to inform its SERP rankings. Sites that load slowly or otherwise provide poor user experiences could get left behind in the wake of this newest algorithm update.

Using Moz’s robust Performance Metrics tool, Emilie shows how to audit your pages’ Core Web Vitals in bulk, saving you time and helping you understand where your site developers should concentrate their efforts.