In our most recent SEO Reality Show episodes, we took readers through the agency’s process for setting up and launching Edelweiss Bakery’s blog:
- Finding potential topics
- Preparing a content plan
- Choosing an impactful blog theme
- Creating technical instructions for third-party content writers tasked with bringing the content to life.
In the meantime, the bakery’s web developers installed a blog theme on a bakery’s test domain to ensure that there were no technical errors before officially launching the blog on the bakery’s website.
You may remember that earlier in the SEO Reality Show, the agency conducted a technical site audit of the bakery’s homepage. They’ll use a similar process here to ensure the blog performs well in Google search.
The Challenge
Preparing technical audits will almost always turn up some sort of issues that need to be resolved, and this process was no real exception. The agency received a great deal of feedback from the client on how the bakery wanted their business to be represented on the blog and site. This is a crucial part of the process where the agency can build trust with their client by compromising where appropriate, and by explaining the importance of certain technical aspects that they feel will strongly benefit the bakery. The agency concluded that moving forward, they’d need to come up with meaningful solutions to client concerns. This would involve the following steps:
- Coordinate with the client in stages to avoid lengthy delays in the site design process. This would allow the client to give feedback prior to live site changes (when it would be difficult and time-consuming to make more changes).
- If necessary, postpone uncritical edits until after the release of the live site. Businesses get busy and can’t always give in-depth feedback to the agency on their timeline. Flexibility is key on both the part of the client and the agency.
The Process
Technical audits involve checking the bakery’s site for potential issues that could negatively impact Google’s ability to index the site, which in turn prevents it from showing up in organic search results.
During the audit, SEO experts do and check many things:
- Setting up the website’s main mirror
- Checking robots.txt
- Availability of a correct site map sitemap.xml
- Mobile rendering
- Page Response Code
- Canonical pages and their alternate versions
- Page loading speed
- The presence of duplicates, broken links
Let’s take a look at how the agency conducted a technical blog audit for Edelweiss Bakery’s website.
Step 1 — Setting up the site’s main mirror
A site’s main mirror is a replica of the main site. It allows brands to test the site structure before they actually launch changes. If the site is on a test subdomain, there is no need to check the main mirror’s configuration because no SSL certificate is installed and no redirects are configured.
When you’re setting up a site’s main mirror, remember to use https://httpstatus.io for verification. You must check the following combinations: