After spending weeks on creating a potential website you are expecting a good number of visitors. But guess what? Most websites on the internet get a very small number of visitors. Yikes!
But Ahrefs, reports that 90.63 percent of websites get no organic traffic from Google. That is where a website audit comes in. It’s like giving your site a doctor’s check-up.
Imagine you search for a particular website and it takes a lot of time to load. You get annoyed right? That’s why you have to conduct a website audit to ensure that it’s working excellently.
SEO experts do website audits and aim to check your site functionality, identify issues, and make it more potential for both search engines and users.
If your website has technical or any other issues people get annoyed and leave you immediately, which negatively signals search ranking and results in missing potential visitors.
Therefore, a website audit is crucial to make sure that your site is working properly.
If you think the “website audit sounds complicated” don’t worry this comprehensive guide takes you through it step-by-step.
What is a Website Audit?
A website audit is a process of analyzing each factor that affects the visibility of your web pages on a large scale. To ensure that your site has nothing that is missing or gone wrong.
You need to make sure that after making changes or updates conduct a comprehensive audit. It is not necessarily only for finding errors, it is like a regular checkup to maintain the overall performance of the website.
Every change or update you make impacts on the visibility and performance of your website both negatively and positively. You have to make website audit the essential step if you want to get huge traffic and greater exposure.
Why Should Website Audit Matters (More than you think):
Much like your body needs regular checkups to maintain your health, a website audit is to ensure it’s performing at its best.
Sadly many website owners wait for a problem to arise before they even consider an audit. However successful marketers are more smart and know better. They regularly analyze their sites to make sure everything is on fire.
In 2011 a study showed that a site has less than two-tenth of a second to make a first impression. This means that you have much less time than you think. People on average take 54 seconds to decide on your business just by looking at your website.
This emphasizes the importance of having a potential website whether it is designed to generate sales or lead smooth user experience is crucial.
An SEO analysis is like a toolbox for improving your website in multiple ways. Here is what you can uncover with a website audit:
- Update your content quality
- Site speed
- Technical SEO problems that create problems for users and search engines
- Make your UX design more appealing and easy to navigate
- Find why your competitor outranks you
- Identify your score on the ranking
- See whether your site is mobile-friendly
- Find if are you targeting the right keywords
Having a website that works well and looks good is important. By examining those areas you can have complete data and view what changes your website and how long it will run.
What is the Right Time to Do a Website Audit?
A comprehensive website audit is beneficial all the time. Experts suggest doing an audit as soon as possible.
Website audit does not mean you need a big team to do it. It just takes a little long time for sure but you can do minor audits from time to time to maintain its performance.
However, audit your site annually or twice a year to maintain the overall health of your site.
Some signals that indicate your site needs a thorough website audit.
- When your site ranking falls
- Your site has a high bounce rate
- Decrease engagement and conversion
- Getting more negative reviews
- Drop in organic traffic
- Content is outdated
Types of Website Audit:
Every factor that is responsible for the visibility and functioning of your website comes under website audit.
While Google considers more than 200 factors for ranking, you can focus on a few key audits to boost your site visibility.
Technical Audit:
It includes a backlink profile, XML site map, site speed, mobile-friendliness, quality of content, and robot.txt file. It will help you to find if there is any technical problem that affects the visibility of your site.
SEO Website Audit :
This is the audit that aims to find the major issues or opportunities in the functioning of your site including keyword usage, metadata, internal links, site structure, generating content, etc.
It will take care of how well your website works, the keywords used in the content, and how all pages are connected.
This will take a long time but it is worth it in the end. You can also use SEO tools online to examine every SEO metric in a very short time.
SEO Content Audit
SEO content audit specifically aims to review the quality of content. It makes sure your content is fresh and valuable. To find out if the content, images, and videos are outdated or need some changes.
Google search engine always strives to provide first-hand content to their user and if the content is not new, the search engine automatically directs the traffic to other fresh content sites.
Privacy and Security Audit:
Your site privacy is very important and this audit verifies that it is a secure place for users and prevents your site from hackers.
Google always prioritizes secure and safe sites for their visitors. To establish your site you have to optimize your site and ensure that your brand identity is consistent.
Other audits include UX design, competitors audits, social media audits, markup audits, social media audits, and conversions audits.
Website Audit Checklist 2024:
Comparing Your Website to Your Competitors:
Website audit gives you the opportunity to compare your website to your competitors.
It helps you to identify areas of improvement and to analyze how your competitors outrank you.
It is a valuable way to find keywords on which your competitors are ranking and potential opportunities to gain a competitive edge.
Compare the key metrics such as website traffic, organic search visibility, domain or page authority, and social media presence.
Review the type and quality of content on your site compared to the top-ranking websites in your niche.
You can also use tools like SEMrush audit tool, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest SEO Analyzer to get more valuable insights. It also helps you to discover new tactics and mind-blowing content ideas or strategies.
Use Site Audit Tools:
As you aim to place your website in the best possible position, running your website URL through a site audit tool is a great option.
Smart marketers before going for a manual audit prefer to use a good site audit tool to save their time.
Additionally, it helps you to highlight areas where you need to optimize to improve your ranking in search engines.
It has been proved that many times experts waste hours on identifying a single problem due to which their site deteriorates over time.
That’s why it will be more efficient to use an SEO audit tool to verify your page performance.
Take a Close Look at Your Website Design:
Your website design matters a lot when it comes to attracting customers and leaving a strong impression on them.
You have to ensure that your site structure is easy to navigate for both users and search engines and they find it appealing.
Also, look at the internal link that users don’t have to click two or more times to reach the specific content.
Common problem to look at if your site is not working properly.
- You put too many things on the navigation bar in a random manner. Solution: Make a list of all main services and place them at the top menu in an organized way.
- Make sure that every page links back to the main home page or landing page.
- You do too much overlinking that makes it difficult for the crawler to index and the user to navigate.
- Clearly mention your contact details or create a separate page for contact so as not to miss out on any opportunity.
Evaluate Content Quality and Relevance:
Ranking on Google search not only needs an optimized site but also has to provide relevant and quality content to the visitors.
A comprehensive website audit provides space for reviewing your content’s type and quality.
It allows you to maintain your brand consistency and ensure that you are publishing updated content.
You also have to look at whether the information you are providing is fresh or outdated. If you find any article with outdated information, update it with more recent and accurate information.
Then look at the social media calendar and make sure that you are posting regularly.
Also don’t forget to take a round in the reviews and comment section to see which content people like the most and consider if they recommend any improvement tips.
Find where you are missing and what your audience is looking for. Enter your site URL in Google Analytics to get a more deep analysis of your content.
This is the gateway to brainstorming new ideas and establishing as a thought leader in the industry.
Measure the Page Speed and Site Performance:
Websites on average take 2.5 seconds to load on mobile and 1.2 seconds on desktop. If your site takes longer time than this it means your site is moving down on the ranking scale.
In 2011 Google officially announced it consider site speed as one of the important ranking factors.
It means if your site loads slowly it leads to leads to high bounce rate and a decrease in the ranking score.
It becomes more obvious after the 2021 Google core update; Google Page Experience Update.
That’s why a website audit is important to maintain the overall health of your site. The high-speed website becomes more visible and leads to high conversions and retention.
The more visitors you can attract the more chances that they will turn into high-potential leads and eventually sales.
Identify the Problems of Technical SEO:.
As you do a website audit to make sure that your site is functioning properly you have to look at the technical SEO also.
Technical SEO shapes the backbone and ensures that your website is run smoothly without any technical errors.
For example, look at the links profile to find if any broken link or expired link is present, if so fix or clean up to enhance the user experience.
Define the canonicalization of content to gain deeper insights into how the URL shows in the search engine and fix any indexing issues.
Another important thing to notice is the meta title and description. To boost the visibility and quickly index your site optimize the meta tags.
If your meta title and description are not good, Google will rewrite them means you are at risk of missing potential visitors.
Also don’t forget to double-check the site structure of your site, Whether all the pages are properly linked internally to make it easy for users.
Conversion Rates Audit:
Holding onto the visitors and turning them into sales is the priority of every business. But how do you make your site potential to reach this level?
Before going further think from your audience’s perspective and answer the following question.
- Does your site content solve the problem of users?
- Do visitors leave your site satisfied?
- Does your site’s landing page convert visitors into sales?
- Do your marketing offers are good enough to attract different buyer personas?
- Do users rate your website 5 stars?
If the answer is not a “BIG” yes. This means you have to work on the major factors like CTA, landing pages, marketing offers, and values.
User Experience Assessment:
After identifying and fixing all the technical errors, it’s time to complete the most important task which is to test users’ experience.
Conduct a usability test to examine how real users interact with your website and to ensure that your website meets the needs and expectations of users.
Observe the factors that affect the performance of the website including load time, finding information, and making purchases.
A bad user experience leads to a decrease in engagement and affects the overall performance of your site.
Analyze the heatmap and click tracking data where your user scrolls, clicks, and spends most of the time. It helps you to understand the user behavior and what changes might be necessary.
You can conduct this audit by using surveys to gather feedback and ask questions about the experience and issues they encountered.
This leads to improvement and ultimately, enhances user experience, higher engagement, and improves conversion rates.
Frequently Asked Questions About Website Audit:
What is a Website Audit?
A website is the evaluation of all the factors that affect the visibility of your website in search engines. It gives you deep insights into how your website works for both users and search engines.
How long does an audit take?
A complete website audit takes a long time almost a month for a large size website. However, for a small website, you can do it in a relatively shorter time. Gather all the essential information, identify issues, and make a list of actions to improve the overall performance of the website.
What to do after after a website audit?
After doing all the essential steps to identify issues note it down to ensure to not miss out on anything. First, go for the tasks that greatly impact and leads to decrease in traffic. Consider tracking your site performance immediately after making changes. Last make sure to give the best marketing offers to your audience, not to lose any potential opportunity.
How does it takes for changes to improve the performance of your site?
After making all the necessary changes it take usually three to six months to see the visible results.
Final Thoughts On Website Audit:
It does not matter how good your website looks, until it is working smoothly it doesn’t attract leads and generate sales.
If you are business owner or website owner, you know the importance of reviewing site often to thrive your business.
This comprehensive guide allows you to find and fix every problem your site might be having, and helps to boost the performance and ranking of your site.
Hope after reading this article website audit becomes an easy task for you. I try my best to add everything you need to know about the website audit.
Have you every do website audit? What improvements you made to boost the ranking of your site?
.