How To Do A Website Audit
We know what it's like to have a small business and all these tasks on your list. But we also know as a small business the importance of having not only a website but one that's working at its best for you. This is why a website audit is an essential part of improving your website's performance and SEO. It involves analysing every aspect of your website to identify areas that need improvement. So let's dive into the steps you can take to do your own website audit.
Audit Your Website For Better SEO And Visibility
One of the first steps in conducting a website audit is to create a website audit checklist. This checklist includes examining factors like your website design, website content, keyword usage, search engine crawlability, and search results visibility. To run a website audit, you can use various tools such as a site audit tool, SEO tool, or a website grader. These tools provide insights into different types of website audits and help you understand how well your website works.
During the audit process, you should focus on analyzing the pages on your website, determining the quality of your content, and identifying ways to improve your SEO. By conducting a full website audit, you can identify any issues or errors that may be hindering your website's performance and optimize it accordingly. It is especially important to do a website audit if you've never audited your website before or if you're experiencing a decline in traffic to your website. You can also consider using a website audit service if you need professional assistance in making the necessary improvements.
What Is A Website Audit?
A website audit is a process of analysing and evaluating the performance, health, and overall quality of a website. It involves examining various aspects such as the website's structure, design, content, and SEO performance. This can be done manually or by using SEO audit tools, such as Google Search Console, to crawl and analyse the website.
A website audit is important for website owners because it helps identify areas that need improvement. By conducting an audit, you can understand how your website is performing in terms of its visibility on Google Search results and how users interact with your website. This information can then be used to make informed decisions on how to improve your website and SEO.
During a website audit, you can use a variety of audit templates and free tools to assess different aspects of your website, including its page load speed, mobile-friendliness, and the presence of quality content. The audit allows you to see if any issues with your website could be affecting its performance and search engine rankings. It also helps identify any broken links or technical errors that may be pointing to your website.
Why Should You Audit Your Website?
A website audit is an essential part of maintaining and improving a website's performance. By conducting a website audit, you can identify and address issues that may be hindering your marketing efforts.
One of the key benefits of conducting a website audit is that it helps you pinpoint areas that need improvement in order to enhance your website's overall health. By addressing these issues, you can ensure that your website is both user-friendly and search-engine-friendly, contributing to a positive user experience and higher search engine rankings.
Furthermore, a website audit will also help you monitor your website's traffic and determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. By analysing data such as visitor behaviour and conversion rates, you can gain valuable insights into how users interact with your website and identify areas for further optimisation. Additionally, conducting a website audit can help you discover any potential issues that may be affecting your website's visibility, such as a lack of inbound links or low-quality content.
How To Perform A Website Audit?
The key to carrying out an order is blocking out the time to do so while going in with a clear mind. It's important to look with a fresh pair of eyes like you are the customer. Then it's going through a checklist as a process of elimination to discover what's performing well and what may need improvements. So let's from this dive in and go through the key elements to include in your website audit.
Key Elements To Include In A Website Audit
Technical SEO Audit
When it comes to Google and your visibility not only is content important but also the functionality. No one likes a slow-loading website or a poor customer journey on now seeing what they want. So the key things to check is the functionality of your site and page speeds. Be sure to look at your site on a mobile, desktop and tablet (if have one) and go through comparing the two.
On top of this, you can use Google’s page speed insights to check the speed performance of your site on mobile and desktop. Do note though this test only tests the URL you out so be sure to check in with a few pages. From this, it will then give you also a list of things you can do to improve performance. Here at Greene Creatives we often find the main issue is image sizes being too large so our top tip would be to use tiny.png to compress images before uploading them to the site.
Content Audit
When it comes to SEO content is king so our top tip here would be to review your content. Take a peek and competitors' websites and see how many words they have on a page. This will help you to know what word count you may need to increase your visibility.
User Experience and Design Audit
Your site is all about the user. If you go on a website and can't find what you need you are likely going to drop off and that is why we say look at your site from a customer's point. Look at your navigation and structure and make sure users can easily find what they’re looking for. Confusing layouts can frustrate users and lead to high bounce rates, and we have more on design and our top 10 tips to help here.
Another thing to look at is Mobile responsiveness. 90% of users come from mobile so be sure to make sure you test and review your site in various formats to make sure the design and all flows how it should. You can also read our blog Eight Ways To Improve Your Website Conversions to help learn more about users and customer journeys.
Common Problems Found During a Website Audit
Poor Page Speed Performance
Poor page speed performance can have a significant impact on your website traffic and overall SEO health. When crawling your website, search engines consider website speed and performance as part of their ranking algorithm. If your website takes too long to load, it can result in higher bounce rates and lower user engagement. One way to improve page speed performance is to conduct a technical audit using website audit tools such as SEMrush Site Audit. This can help identify and fix issues on your website that are affecting its speed.
Linking
Another important factor to consider is internal linking, which can help improve SEO and user experience on your website. By linking to relevant pages within your website, you can make it easier for website visitors to navigate and find the information they need. Conducting a website audit to improve SEO can also involve checking the link structure of your website to make sure it is optimised for search engines.
Missing or Low-quality Content
When it comes to building and maintaining a website, one of the crucial factors to consider is the quality of your content. Missing or low-quality content can have a negative impact on your core web vitals and overall user experience. That's why it's important to regularly audit a website to ensure that your content is up to par. An SEO website audit can help you identify areas of improvement and optimise your content for better performance.
Monitoring and Maintaining Your Website Post-Audit
Using Google Analytics And Search Console
The key to anything is to always check in, test, learn and measure because if you dont look at the data, how do you know if it's working?
You can use tools like Google Analytics and Search Console, which are essential for any website owner who wants to improve their SEO and track the performance of their website. These tools provide valuable insights into your website's traffic, user behaviour, and keyword rankings. With Google Analytics, you can analyse your website performance and identify areas for improvement. You can also conduct an audit of your website to identify any issues that may be affecting your SEO efforts. This website audit will help you understand how to improve on-page SEO and optimise your website for better rankings on search engine results pages.
Ready To Take On Your Own Website Audit?
We hope this blog has been a great guide to you on the actions you can take to carry out your own website audit. We also know however that time can be limited as a busy business owner but that's why we recommend even setting time aside to do a few of these tasks week on week until you've built up a full audit. Remember spending 10 minutes a week is better than nothing but if instead you wanna just hand over the reins and just take on the actions then we can carry out a website audit for you.
Find out more on our website audit service here and book a chat today.
