Most of your customers are searching for your business online, and a website is the first place they look at. Website is crucial for the online presence of any business. You need to ensure that it is also performing well. SEO or search engine optimization plays a key role in making your website more visible to your audience. Sometimes you can make mistakes when it comes to SEO and other aspects of your website. Hence, an audit is important to ensure the smooth performance of your website.
In this article, we will discuss how you can audit websites for SEO. You can learn how to audit your website analytics with our complete audit checklist.
{{cta(‘134694283566’)}}
What is a Website Audit?
A website audit is the analysis of your website’s overall performance. In an audit you can evaluate your SEO or search engine optimization efforts and other areas that contribute to your conversions. By auditing your website, you can identify issues that are preventing your website from ranking better on the search engine results page. It also enables you to determine which parts of your website need to be better optimized.
Website audit can help you improve your SEO efforts and optimize your web pages to ensure that they are more visible on search engines.
Why Do You Need a Website Audit?
Here are some of the benefits of a website audit:
Search engine optimization
The first aspect you can analyze through an audit is your SEO efforts. SEO has various elements that work together to improve your website’s performance. These elements include keyword research, content optimization, on-page optimization, link building, local SEO etc. An audit helps you assess all these areas and identify which strategies need to be improved. A poor SEO strategy won’t get you the desired results.
An audit can help you reassess your existing SEO strategy so that you can come up with a plan to optimize it. For example, you can review your keyword list and find out which keywords are not working out for you or add new keywords to your list. You can also review your backlinks to assure that they are coming from credible sources. All these measures can help you improve your SEO, ultimately boosting your search engine rankings.
Lead generation and conversions
With a website audit you can analyze the traffic coming to your website and how they convert. You can look at which channels are bringing in more traffic. Along with the traffic you also need to analyze whether you are getting qualified leads on your website. If you are not getting your targeted leads, maybe you need to use more relevant keywords and content that attract your target customer.
Another area to look at is conversions. Evaluate your content offers, forms, landing pages and CTAs, to ensure that they are getting visitors to convert into leads. If you are not getting the desired conversions maybe you need to make improvements to the landing page or create an appealing CTA. An audit can help you find these opportunities to make improvements and boost your conversions.
Analyzing competition
When conducting a website audit, it will also allow you to look at your competitor’s website. You can analyze how you rank against your competitors on the search engine results page. It can also give you insights into the keywords your competitors rank for and the type of content they have.
You can use various online tools to evaluate your competitor’s website. These insights can help you gain more ideas on how you can improve your SEO efforts, content, and keywords.
Identify any issues
In a website audit you will also be able to identify any issues that are interrupting your SEO efforts and conversions. Maybe your site speed is the issue, or any web page link is broken. This also includes the errors that might arise in mobile-first indexing your website. Identifying these issues are important as they affect the overall performance of your website. Technical errors can hurt the performance of your website and can cost you traffic. Find out these errors and fix them so that you will have a smooth functioning website.
How to Conduct a Website Audit?
Leverage site audit tools
The first step to audit your website is to use tools that can help you audit. These audit tools can enable you to assess the performance of your website so that you can identify the issues and fix them. Tools like SEMrush Site Audit Tool, Google Analytics, Google Pagespeed insights and Google Search Console are great to get started with the website audit. These tools let you analyze the performance of your web pages and give recommendations to improve it.
Look for technical errors
The technical structure of your website and its setup plays a key role in the overall performance of your website. An audit can help you identify any technical errors on your website that may be interrupting your users while they are navigating. For example, HTTP errors which are messages from the web server indicating that there is some problem. There are many types of HTTP errors. One of them is a 404 error where a user tries to access a webpage but is unable to do so. This could be due to broken links, incorrect URLs or pages that no longer exist.
Other errors can include duplicate page content, missing alt tags, poor URL structure and more. Ensure that you figure out these technical errors that have been messing with your website performance.
Identify any SEO errors
SEO is crucial for your website visibility and helping your audiences find your content. As discussed above there may be many errors in your SEO that keep you from getting positive results. For example, targeting irrelevant keywords, broken links, slow site speed, not optimizing your content and more. Find these issues and improve your SEO efforts to rank better.
Analyze your site speed
Site speed is important to reduce bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave your website immediately without taking any action. A slow website can discourage users from accessing your content. Users do not want to interact with a web page that takes forever to load. Hence, it is important to keep a check of your website’s speed so that you don’t lose your traffic.
If your website is slow, you can take various measures to improve your site’s speed. Some solutions include to compress image sizes, reduce redirects, leverage browser caching and more. Pay attention to site speed as it is important for user experience and engagement.
User Experience
Next area to analyze is your website’s user experience. User experience determines how your users interact with your website and if they enjoyed your website. Users need to be able to navigate your website and access content they need. Site speed is one element of user experience. Other elements include layout, landing pages, design, color, fonts, CTAs, forms etc.
This analysis helps you figure out if there are any issues that are making it hard for them to access your content. For example, a very busy and complex layout can make it hard for the user to read any content on that web page. Interruptive pop-ups can discourage users from engaging. Poor quality images or loud color schemes can also jeopardize the quality of your website. A good user experience focuses on an aesthetically pleasing and functional website.
Review website content
Content is crucial for your website. It is what attracts and converts leads. When auditing your website be sure to review your content. Ensure that your content is optimized for SEO. Go through your web pages and find out if you have any duplicate content and titles. Duplicate content can hurt your SEO. You can also find out what type of content is missing from your website, and you can make improvements to existing content.
Want to know more about how to conduct a website content audit? Here is a guide to help you.
Website audit can seem like a challenging task, especially if you have many pages. But if you know which areas to analyze it is easier. You can start off your SEO efforts by analyzing all the areas mentioned above. The type of tool you decide to use depends on your business needs. Choose the tool that suits you the best and start auditing.
Found this helpful? Check out more interesting articles from our blog.
{{cta(‘134694283566’)}}
