While your site may have been in great shape when it launched, things change over time, and your content will fade. Then there's SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and site performance since search engines change their algorithms, and users expect faster sites. It is thus important that you perform an audit of your website every now and see how it is performing online.
Waiting until something happens to audit a website is not only expensive, but it can also hurt traffic volume, conversion rates, and brand perception.
We often hear from business owners that they are doing everything on their website but still aren't getting the results they want. They become frustrated and seek answers and assistance from us.
Before anything else, we do a complete website audit. Due to Google's ranking factors, it's no surprise that these audits are so important.
What Is Exactly a Website Audit?
Basically, it's an evaluation of your website that helps you determine what's wrong and what needs to be done. You can imagine it as your site's report card - evaluating it based on various factors such as the user experience, search results, site's architecture, technical performance, and functionality. You may have spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on creating a clean, beautiful website. However, if search engines cannot read your site, then you are losing money.
By conducting a website audit, you can improve your site's visibility on the internet and improve the user experience, thereby generating more traffic and increasing conversions.
What’s the Point of a Website Audit?
A website audit gives you a complete picture of your site's health, performance, and speed. A website audit does more than fix errors. It helps you understand why your site isn't generating expected traffic, or why you have trouble hitting your conversion goals, and more.
With a complete and detailed web audit, you fix all the problems you have with your website while boosting the profitability of your business.
Website Audits in Different Forms.
Basically, a website audit analyzes the perception of web visibility by search engines and users. However, a full audit is not always necessary. Here are some audit types and tips to check for:
Technical Audit
Even if you have quality content and backlinks, a technical error can undermine all your hard work. The objective of a technical audit is to improve site visibility and make sure that all pages meet the requirements for crawling and indexing by search engines.
The technical SEO audits reveal broken internal links, incorrect XML sitemaps, a robots.txt file that inhibits Googlebot, keyword cannibalization, duplicate content, and few backlinks.
Won't your website rank well on Google? In that case, you should conduct a technical audit.
SEO Audit
An SEO audit determines whether your site is optimized for search engines. Analyzing keywords, links, traffic patterns, conversions, meta information, images, and videos is part of this process.
While popular belief holds that there is one magic bullet to SEO success, your site's search engine ranking is affected by many ranking factors. Fortunately, an audit can help you make improvements. Keeping up with Google's efforts is important because they strive to provide their users with the best and most relevant search results. Your audit will be more effective when produced with the tools and knowledge to find the right issues.
Content Audit
While content audits are typically performed as part of an SEO audit, standalone audits may also prove valuable as they can reveal what messaging and tone of voice are converting and which ones are not.
Whether you're rebranding, taking over a new business, or building a new website, a content audit is essential for ensuring your brand identity remains consistent.
In addition to ensuring your tone of voice accurately reflects your brand, a content audit will help you identify what content drives conversions and what could use a refresh.
Other smaller, more focused audits can involve UX (user experience), backlinks, code/markup, social media, conversion rate audits, competitor audits, or Google Analytics audits.
Why Does My Website Need an Audit?
You have a website that is difficult to navigate.
Seeing your website every day will make it easy to overlook any problems users may be having.
Frequently, users complain of difficult navigation involving the following:
- The navigation bar is too crowded – organize your services in a dropdown menu instead of listing them all in the top menu – minimize the number of tabs in the main menu.
- Overlinking – Users shouldn't have to click more than three times to reach their desired pages. Search engines are also less likely to crawl pages buried deep in the web.
- Every page on the site should provide a clear link to return to the homepage (clickable logo, etc.).
- Having a rich homepage with lots of information can be confusing.
- The site has no search function (which is essential for e-commerce websites).
- You're difficult to reach - think social icons, a mobile-friendly phone number, clear phone number and address, and an easy-to-find email address.
- Having your sign-up pop-up appear on the full screen before the user has even scrolled past the homepage.
The purpose of a website audit is to ensure that your website is user-friendly.
User testing usually involves users recording their screens, fulfilling specific tasks on your website, and reporting back on the process, such as navigating to your blog or purchasing a product.
You don't have a properly optimized website.
A site audit can uncover and correct a whole host of issues related to search engine optimization.
Basic checks include the following:
- Content optimization - outdated or irrelevant content can be redirected or removed.
- Incorrectly tagged images – search engines rely on this to know what the image is.
- HTTP / HTTPS – Identify mixed content issues on the website.
- Meta issues – Ensure that each page has unique and relevant metadata.
- Headers – Ensure the H1, H2, and H3 tags are used correctly.
- Mobile responsiveness – with mobile traffic on the rise, you must make sure your site works properly on a mobile device as well as a tablet.
- URL structures – make sure your URL structures are correct.
- Indexability – Make sure all relevant pages on your website are indexed. Also, don't index any pages that don't require it, such as a "thank you" page.
- Duplicate content – Identifying and removing duplicate content from websites.
- Broken links – external and internal 404s must be corrected.
You're at risk of getting penalized by Google.
Some established websites may have taken part in or worked with SEO companies that used black-hat methods, such as link farming, keyword stuffing, or cloaking in the past.
Several of these methods may have worked to boost rankings and traffic at the time - but as search engines' algorithms become more sophisticated, they may now penalize websites that participated.
By conducting a site audit, it is possible to identify items that may contribute to penalization and correct them before they occur or rectify any penalties incurred.
Your website takes too long to load.
The longer your website takes to load on an e-commerce site, the higher your bounce rate, fewer pages per session, and the higher your cart abandonment rate.
Google's own research shows that the bounce rate increases by 32% for pages that take more than a second to load. By the time it reaches six seconds, it increases the bounce rate by 106%.
Google knows people are lazy, so it incorporates speed into its rankings, meaning that it will penalize slow-loading websites in the SERPs.
By using Google's Page Speed Tool, you can determine the level of optimization of your site and test its speed.
As part of its new ranking factor for page experience, Google will incorporate Core Web Vitals, a new set of metrics that evaluates speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.
The most common reasons for a slow loading page
During an audit, the most common causes for a high site speed will be uncovered; these usually include:
- It's important to properly format and compress images (like those 2MB images you have on your blog).
- Using fewer redirects - this increases the load time through more HTTP requests.
- Reduce the size of JS and CSS files by deleting unnecessary characters and comments.
- Check the number of plugins on your site.
It Is Important To Analyze Your Competitors.
A good site audit should include some level of competitor analysis so that you can stay on top of your industry.
You should first identify your primary competitors (if you do not already know them) and conduct a mini audit of them, including their content, social media activities, target keywords, backlinks, and organic and paid search activity.
Knowing how you compare to your competitors allows you to alter your online strategy if it takes to become more successful than them.
How Often Should Site Audits Be Conducted?
As a benchmark for future improvements, regularly auditing your processes and addressing any major issues can be beneficial.
Smaller websites should be audited annually, while larger sites can be audited biannually.
Moreover, a site audit should be conducted shortly after the site is live to resolve any immediate issues and increase the indexing rate.
Conclusion.
It's vital to keep an eye on your website and update it when necessary if you want it to be used to its full potential.
Imagine it as a fire. When you first light it, it will burn for a while, but then it will die off if you don't add to it. Add fuel as needed to keep it burning. Your flame will be hard to re-ignite if you let it go too long.
