How To Conduct A Website Audit
October 5th, 2022
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Do you want to know how your website is performing? Maybe you haven’t had a website audit in a while, or, maybe you have never had one before..
No matter the reason, a website audit is always a great thing to do for your business.
Website audits help you see where your website is performing. Specifically examining your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The results of your website audit will determine whether your website is optimized to achieve your traffic goals. Once it determines your likelihood of reaching your goals, an audit can help you discover ideas to improve your website and gain the ability to reach those goals.
Before you decide which audit is best for you and your business, let’s first learn about the different types of audits you can perform - and the results that they bring..
Types Of Audits
1. Competitive Website Audit
A competitive website audit is a type of audit that evaluates a site for its content and technical performance. It is conducted by tracking your competitors and their strategies to help you better understand how they became successful and the strategies used to get them there. A competitive audit will help show you opportunities you could be missing out on while your competition thrives on them.
The process of a competitive audit can be complex. The first step is to start by performing an analysis on your competitors website. Over a period of time, this audit will track your competitors website strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. Examples could include:
Competitors Strength - their website could have a better, easier way to contact them for potential customers
Competitors Weakness - you might have reviews on your website to showcase customer satisfaction building trust with potential customers
Competitors Opportunities - these are small but useful tools that they DO NOT have that you could add to your website. This could include a chat box for instant replies!
All of these things can help you clarify where you are lacking or ahead of your competitors resulting in your technical framework.
Once you have the results, start to follow along and use their tactics.
2. SEO Link Audit
This specific audit processes any links connected to your website. Examples of these links are:
URL sources, domains, citations, and anchor texts.
While processing the links, this audit looks for any issues or complications involved with your website. This helps you optimize by eliminating any problems that could be preventing you from gaining optimization and ranking for keywords.
Conducting a link audit requires ALL of your link data. You can do this manually or use an online tool such as Google Search Console you see your data, you will need a way to keep track of these links. You can use a link audit spreadsheet. Carefully evaluate your links manually by reviewing all aspects of the links such as the anchor text, IP address, page and page content.
However, you should also pay attention to smaller things like the spelling of your business name, business information listed (hours, address, and services), and ownership status.
3. Lead Conversion Optimization audit
A lead conversion optimization audit is the best of both worlds. This audit reviews a website's conversion information and opportunities. This audit requires you to watch how traffic is flowing to your website and the source of where this traffic is coming from. A great tool for this would be Google Analytics.
Pinpointing the locations of traffic for your website will help you identify and understand your target audience's preferences. Watching the traffic of views will also help you understand how to optimize your website to best fit your customers needs.
Along with following customer traffic trends, you need to analyze the content on your website. Your website content needs to be helpful or informative, and recent. Do you have updated business information displayed on your website? Do you have keywords to boost your website rankings?
Remember, incorrect or old business information can hurt your business rankings.
Some of the most common website information to review are
The design and layout of your website, how fast your web pages load, usage of tools, and the overall user experience.
4. Social Media Audit
Do you take advantage of social media? Well, if so great. Your business performance online can be impacted by your social media as well.
However, sometimes we don’t see traffic from social media to our website like we would like to. If this is the case, it is probably time to have a social media audit.
To conduct a social media audit, you need to create a list of all of your businesses social media accounts. Make sure to include any duplicates and do not miss any profiles! After you collect that information, you need to go through each account or profile and confirm that they are all sharing consistent brand images. This includes the same logos, images, descriptions, along with any other business information.
Lastly, you should make sure that you make any changes needed to make all of your business social media accounts correlate and complement each other.
5. Search Engine Optimization Audit
Although a SEO link audit (as listed above), has all of your business links, a SEO website audit evaluates ALL of the aspects of your business. All of these aspects are factors that can improve your sites performance such as
Keywords, content, page speed, user friendliness, media, images, tools used, and video optimization.
Although this audit can be done by yourself, it is much better to have a professional handle the matter. This audit is very complex with MANY ins and outs. It can be confusing and it is very difficult to evaluate every factor piece-by-piece.
Conducting A Website Audit
1. Find the area that needs auditing - identify the departments that are lacking
2. Run Your Website URL Through A Audit Tool
This will help your business analyze performance. Not only website performance but it will track website traffic as well.
3. SEO Issues
After you run your URL through a site audit tool, you will next want to look at how you can improve your rankings on search engines. This means reviewing images, alt texts, and meta descriptions.
4. Analyze Design
Is your website easy to navigate? How is your website design working for your customers? These are important questions to ask when rebuilding your design for your customers needs. Which parts of your website design draw the most traffic and attention? Which parts of your website make visitors leave? This analysis will give you detailed information on how your user experience is making or breaking your visitors.
5. Website Content
This audit will assess your website content which includes your business blogs, website pages, website page speed, landing pages, and more. This is important because you need to make sure that your content is ranking well in search engines.
6. All Issues and Solutions
When you are conducting your business website audit, you need to have a place to hold information. You will need a place to store your website problems and solutions so that you can resolve each issue one by one and get the correct people for the job. Having an audit summary is also a great way to track your progress over time.
Conclusion
To wrap up our thoughts, a website audit is always a great idea. Whether you are a large business that doesn't have the time to look at individual problems, or a small business that just wants to increase their website traffic, you can not go wrong. Here at Stradigi, we can help. We offer a FREE website audit. Contact us today to see how we can help assist you and your business needs!