With a detailed website audit, you can achieve a better and more in-depth understanding of your site’s performance, and why it is not generating the traffic, you believe it should. At the very beginning, we need to warn you that there are many automated website SEO audit tools, but they can never provide you with a complete website analysis that’s specific only for your site.
A website audit is a complete analysis of all the factors that affect your site’s level of visibility in search engines. If you have never audited your website since its launch or are planning to redesign it soon, then a website audit is a must. For a full website audit, you need to assess your site’s:
1. Performance
First and foremost, you should analyze to understand the user’s navigation journey – from the homepage, separate site pages, and blog posts to landing pages. Your site needs to be optimized for maximum usability because if your website doesn’t perform well, you won’t be generating leads and convert even with increased site traffic. A website audit should show you whether your website is designed with the visitors in mind.
So, to audit your site for usability, you should analyze these factors:
- Website design and page layout – is it simple, yet intuitive? Are pages cluttered with links, CTAs, and Ads?
- Conversion paths and checkout process – are they intuitive? Are there any distractions along the way?
- Value propositions – are they easily accessible from the menu items?
- Site’s overall speed – how long does it take to open the site and each new page? Are there any excessive page sizes? It’s essential to improve your website’s overall speed because it enhances the customer experience while it also positively affects your SEO.
2. SEO
If you want to hold onto your visitors, you must optimize your website’s performance. However, you also need to ensure that the content you’re putting out is resonating with your audience (and that it’s solving their problems.) A website audit will help you:
- Evaluate the quality of your site’s content (from the audience’s perspective).
- Determine if your website is search engine optimized. Every page must follow the best on-site SEO practices. Review your keyword performance, how much content are you publishing to your site to target those specific keywords, as well as all the important SEO elements like page titles, URLs, copy, and meta description.
3. Conversion Rate
Once you perform a website performance and SEO analysis, you can tweak your site and content to attract more visitors. However, if your site doesn’t convert, then there’s no use to it.
- Do your marketing offers appeal to all of your buyer personas?
- Do you have lead gen or conversion forms on your site? And are they optimized?
- Do you have a conversion opportunity for each stage of the sales funnel?
- Are your CTAs effective?
4. Technical
After you have conducted these three main assessments, it’s time to have a developer do a professional evaluation. The technical evaluation of your site should ensure that the first three maximize the UX. Ask yourself:
- Is your website free of error messages?
- Is your site’s design responsive?
- Are the URLs optimized?
- Is the website structure optimized for Google and other search engines?
- Does it have too much JavaScript or Flash?
- Have you defined your site’s pages are crawled and indexed? (This can be done with different methods that include robots files and tags as well as XML and public sitemaps.)
- A website audit framework has to be established early on, and compare it to other, successful websites.
Conducting a full website audit is not easy. Contact us if you need tech-savvy professionals with lots of experience in this field.