International technical SEO audits
SEO experts agree that technical SEO competency is key to digital marketing success. For example, the Search Engine Land guide to SEO success factors lists numerous technical parameters as important ranking factors, addressing issues such as:
- Can search engines easily ‘crawl’ pages on site?
- Does the site use HTTPS to provide a secure connection for visitors?
- Does the site load quickly?
As traditional ‘offsite’ efforts – for example, ethical link building – become increasingly difficult to manage and scale, excellence in technical (and associated ‘on-site’ SEO) is now increasingly important, especially where websites require global presence and visibility across Google, Naver, Baidu, Yandex and so on.
The purpose of the technical audit – and subsequent recommendations – is to ensure that your International SEO campaign has solid foundations, i.e. to engineer a website that is easily accessible, crawlable and explicable to global search engines. This audit is a critical campaign start-up component and helps to ensure that:
- The SEO strategy is underpinned by an actionable technical plan, a deliverable that documents each of the findings from the audit (along with how to address each issue).
- The SEO campaign is guided by an SEO roadmap, a plan to achieve goals in natural search. You will then know where the site stands, what to address, what the opportunities are, and how long each step will take.
In detail, our audit considers a wide range of core technical factors including:
- Crawlability (including broken links, speed issues etc.).
- Site architecture.
- International targeting.
- Structured data.
On completion of the technical audit, our executive summary divides the issues into two distinct categories:
- High priority fixes – Issues where an actionable recommendation is included in this report. Your technical team should act immediately on these recommendations.
- Technical response plan deliverables – issues where additional input from Oban may be required to support implementation. These issues should be discussed with your team via conference call to create an implementation plan.
Once a plan is created, input from Oban will be scheduled into recurring monthly activities. This input will consist of QA and commentary on the solution proposed in collaboration with your technical team.
Oban delivers a uniquely international perspective to SEO technical solutions. Our work addresses best practice in market-specific planning (e.g. use of Hreflang tags), and a core understanding of how to optimise for market specific search engines, all based on over 12 years of SEO experience and the skills of a team of industry renowned international SEO experts. We regularly speak at marketing events about International SEO and deliver International SEO training for industry-leading publishers such as e-consultancy.
