What to Look Out For When Auditing Your Website
A website audit is a comprehensive review of your website’s performance, usability, and security. It can identify any potential issues that may be preventing your website from reaching its full potential.
Website audits are essential for determining the health of your website and uncovering areas for improvement in order to maximize performance. A technical SEO agency can support businesses in completing a website audit, discover more.
Let’s take a look at some elements you should keep an eye out for when auditing your website.
Analytics & KPIs
The first step in any audit is to review your analytics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These metrics will provide insight into how users interact with your website and what they find most valuable.
This can help you identify user patterns, analyze data trends, and make informed decisions about how to improve your overall user experience.
Additionally, by comparing past analytics against current ones, you can get a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t on your website.
Performance and Security
It’s important to evaluate the security of your website as well as its overall performance on different devices or browsers.
Poorly configured security settings or old plugins can create vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit to gain access to sensitive information or cause other malicious damage to occur.
As such, it’s important to regularly review any third-party tools or plugins used on the site, as well as ensure that all necessary security measures are in place and regularly updated.
Additionally, ensuring that page loading times are fast across all devices will help improve user retention rates as well as reduce bounce rates from those who become frustrated with slow loading times or broken pages due to poor coding practices or outdated plugins/themes.
SEO and Content Quality
It’s also important to assess the quality of the content on your website. Poorly written or outdated content can negatively impact the overall user experience and make it difficult for users to find the information they need quickly and efficiently.
Similarly, if SEO best practices are not being properly implemented, search engines may have difficulty indexing your content which could result in decreased visibility online.
Ensuring that all of the content on your site is well-written, up-to-date, and optimized correctly will help ensure that users have a positive experience when navigating through it.
5 Types of Website Audit
There are many different 5 types of website audits, including:
1. Competitive
Competitive website audits track your competitors as well as their online strategies. This helps to highlight opportunities that your brand could utilize in your own strategy.
By using a SWOT analysis you will be able to see a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
A strength may be fast speed, a weakness may be navigation, an opportunity may be tools that you can use and a threat may be that their pages rank higher on search engine results pages.
2. SEO Link Audit
With this audit, you will be able to see issues with your backlink profile. Evaluating any links will help to optimize your website to rank higher for your chosen keywords. This may include anchor text, URL source, and domain.
Auditing your website in this way will enable you to see what is negatively affecting your website in SERP. To perform this audit, gather your link data and evaluate it, sites such as Ahref can assist with this.
3. Lead Conversion
A lead conversion optimization audit analyses conversion issues and opportunities. With this you will need to analyze the way traffic will come to your site and whereabouts it comes from.
Google Analytics can help with this. Understanding where your traffic comes from can make sure you understand your audience’s behavior better and optimize the site for their requirements.
4. Social Media Audit
Social media can also impact how your brand performs, if it is not pushing much traffic toward your site then a social media audit may be needed.
To begin the audit, ensure each account has consistent branding including imagery, tone of voice, and logos. After this, each page should be evaluated, which page performs the highest and which performs the lowest?
Using such information will help with optimization and engaging social media users. You will then be able to enhance your strategy and attract and delight your target audience.
5. SEO Website Audit
An SEO audit will evaluate what is impacting how your website is performing in search engine pages. Factors may include page speed, video optimization, user journey, content, metadata, and keyword usage.
Although completing an SEO audit by yourself is possible, to get the best results working with an agency may be the way forward.
How to audit your website
Analyze Your Content Strategy
An effective content strategy will help you reach your target audience and get more people interested in what your business has to offer. When auditing your website, look at how well the content resonates with users.
Analyze both organic and paid content and ask yourself if it is still relevant or if it needs to be updated. Additionally, analyze the performance of old content versus new content to see which type performs better.
Check for Broken Links
Broken links not only hurt user experience but can also affect search engine rankings as well. Make sure all the links on your website are working properly by using tools, such as Screaming Frog or Dead Link Checker.
This will help ensure that visitors don’t run into any dead ends when navigating through your site.
Optimize Page Loading Time
Page loading time is essential for delivering a positive user experience. If visitors have to wait too long for a page to load, they may give up before they even get there.
Check the page loading time for each page on your website and make sure it meets industry standards (3 seconds or less).
You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to analyze page loading times and optimize accordingly.
Identify problems with SEO
SEO issues should be considered to help with search engine optimization and rankings. So, take a look at image alt text, meta descriptions, and other elements.
Analyze UX and Design
Does your design create a positive experience for customers? There is software that you can look at that highlights where visitors are most drawn to when they visit your site and where it gains the most attention.
Analyzing your site in this way helps you understand your design and user experience better to positively impact visitors.
Auditing your website is important in order to keep up with industry best practices and provide users with the best possible experience when visiting your site.
By analyzing your content strategy, optimizing page loading times, and checking for broken links, you can ensure that everything on your site is running smoothly and that visitors are getting exactly what they expect from it.
With an effective audit process in place, you can make sure that no detail goes unnoticed and that every element of your website helps contribute to its success!
