Much like a car needs regular maintenance, so does your website. But in this case, it’s referred to as a website audit.
It’s a rigorous process of analyzing a site’s technical aspects, content, design, and user experience, among other metrics, to improve its performance.
If you haven’t performed one in a while, you don’t want to wait till the wheels come flying off, e.g., broken links, low rank on search engine results, or lack of authority.
Schedule a website audit today! Here’s how to go about it.
What is a Website Audit?
Before diving into the topic, we need to define what a website audit really is. Simply put, it’s a comprehensive analysis of a website’s content, performance, and structure.
The premise is to identify if a website is well-optimized to achieve the desired goals, e.g., high conversions, better rank, user experience, etc.
Analyzing these metrics provides a clearer picture of the site’s current effectiveness, shows where you could optimize your website, and highlights issues affecting your site’s health.
How to Perform a Website Audit
Now we look at how to perform a website audit in much more detail:
1. Analyze Your Website’s URL Using a Site Audit Tool
The first step is to identify the issues affecting your website. To do this you need to run your site’s URL through a website audit tool. It shows your site’s performance, highlighting areas that need improvement.
2. Identify the Type of Website Audit to Perform
Once a website audit tool highlights areas that need attention, the next step is to determine the audit your website needs.
The website could have a low load speed, but the design and on-page and off-page SEO are on point.
This means your website audit efforts should be geared towards identifying reasons for the low load speed.
Familiarizing yourself with the different types of website audits is critical to identifying the kind your website needs:
Content audit
You perform this kind of audit to understand the type of messaging and tone of voice that leads to conversions.
For example, if you just rebranded or purchased a new website, a content audit ensures that your brand identity is consistent with the old website
SEO audit
This type determines how well a website is optimized for search. As such, it involves analyzing metrics such as traffic behaviour, keywords, and metadata to ensure they enhance searches. SEO audit is quite broad and can be divided into two:
- Technical SEO audit: Here, you look at metrics such as indexed pages, crawl frequency from search engine bots, and the number of pages to identify areas that need improvement
- On-page SEO audit: This SEO audit involves analyzing factors that affect your site’s performance on search engine results pages. As such, you’ll look at metrics like page speed, keyword use, user journey, and metadata for evaluation
Competitive Website Audit
You want to know your competitors’ actions to rank better and increase conversions or traffic. And the best way to do it is to perform a competitive website audit.
This audit helps you identify strategies your competitor is using so you can incorporate them into your efforts. It’s also an excellent way to identify tools or software they use to get better results.
Design Audit
Your visitors’ experience on your website goes a long way in increasing conversion rates and traffic.
A design or UX audit helps you determine how user-friendly your website is. It lets you identify elements that could make your visitor’s experience uncomfortable.
For example, the fonts might be challenging to read; a webpage might render slowly on mobile devices. Improving such elements keeps visitors engaged while enhancing the chances of returning to your website.
3. Identify Technical Issues
Technical problems related to performance, SEO, and privacy affect your visitor’s experience.
You might notice that customers leave the website seconds after clicking on the link. It could be that it has a low speed or the site has a broken link.
Tools like Google Page Speed can help you identify reasons for low page speed and find ways to improve it.
4. Identify SEO Problems
The next step is to identify SEO-related problems. You’re probably hoping your page appears on the first page of Google or other search engines, but it hasn’t.
An audit helps you review and optimize SEO aspects like the meta description, keywords, page titles, alt text, and more to improve ranking.
5. Review the Site’s Design and User Experience
With visitors using a split second (0.05 seconds) to decide what they think about a website, you want to make their experience as flawless as possible.
A design audit helps you find out how your website looks and feels and identify ways to enhance the visitor’s experience
A design audit should:
- Review the site’s visual appeal, including the layout, colour scheme, imagery, and typography
- Ensure the website’s design elements are consistent with the brand’s values, visual identity, and messaging
- Ensure the design can adapt to portable devices
- Evaluate the responsiveness of features like links, forms, and buttons
6. Review the Content
Content is one factor that helps your website rank well on SERPs. It drives traffic, improves brand awareness, increases conversions, and establishes conversions.
As such, a website audit must include reviewing content to determine:
- If it’s optimized for SEO
- Is outdated
- Relevant to users
- Promotes user engagement
Review the content on each page to ensure it’s optimized for search engines. It’s also an excellent time to analyze engagement metrics for each page, identifying the click-through rate, bounce rate, and time spent on each.
7. Develop a Website Report
Lastly, develop a report highlighting the issues found and ways of solving them.
Website audit tools make this process easy as they provide in-depth reports highlighting categories such as SEO performance, design issues, and more, as well as recommended solutions.
The Bottom Line
Performing a website audit is integral to improving your website’s performance and online presence. You stay on top of your game, addressing issues you might not know about. The guide shows the process is pretty simple, but if you find it challenging, don’t hesitate to call or send an email to our team.
