Website Audit: Complete guide to successfully perform your site auditing

Updated on: Sep 17th, 2024 11 min readWritten by:

Last Updated on September 17, 2024 by Admin

A website becomes a business’s virtual shop window, so it must be highly functional and user-friendly. Yet, most web admins overlook the need to carry out such audits, which can lead to potential transactions and revenue losses. Did you know loading the site with a one-second delay will decrease conversion by 7%?

A website audit is a deep and systematic analysis of your website’s performance. It helps to find flaws and areas for improvement in SEO and UX. It is similar to a health checkup for your website, which means it helps ensure everything is running smoothly and well.

Through frequent website audits, you can detect and fix technical errors, assess content deficiency, and enhance your site for better search engine rankings. Furthermore, websites optimized for search engines geared towards user experience can increase conversion rates to 200% and more.

This blog article will deliver insight into the website audit basics.

What is a Website Audit?

Conducting a website audit will help you examine your website and its individual elements. To achieve this goal, your site must be well organized. Also, it’s worth studying the competitive environment to ensure your site is better than any other website.

Maintenance is often assumed to be no longer a priority when launching a site. In reality, this is not true at all. Sometimes, you may feel compelled to replace your images and videos with new ones. Moreover, you may become aware of a ranking problem, so you may need to alter certain keywords or phrases.

Nevertheless, finding the problems with your site while doing a web audit doesn’t imply that you’ll always discover something bad. You may perform a full-scale website audit if everything works as expected. If I’m correct, that is awesome! On the one hand, it can help you fix the problems before they affect your web traffic. It can also pinpoint the issues that need to be corrected. That’s why it is necessary to be good at auditing websites.

Types of Website Audits

There are five major types of Website audits. They are as follows:

  • Technical SEO Audit: In a technical SEO audit, the technical components of your website are reviewed to identify any issues that affect the website’s search engine rankings—such as audit reviews page speed, mobile friendliness, crawlability, indexability, and site architecture. Technical issues can be found, and by improving your website’s visibility and organic search performance, these issues can be solved.
  • On-Page SEO Audit: An on-page SEO audit consists of checking each web page separately for the target keywords and bettering the relevance of the search engines. In this audit, we’ll review title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, content optimization, and internal linking. A good starting point for SEO is to audit your website’s on-page SEO. This will ensure that your website’s content provides value to your target audience and is well-optimized for search engines.
  • Backlink Audit: The Backlink Audit process consists of checking the overall performance of the external links that point to your website. Links from other websites are crucial for your position in search engine results and your website authority. One of the tasks of a backlink audit is identifying any bad links that may harm your website’s credibility and removing or disavowing them.
  • Conversion Rate Optimization Audit: A CRO audit reviews your site’s capability to convert visitors into buyers or leads. This audit analyzes user behavior, tracks conversion barriers, and improves key components, including CTA buttons, forms, and landing pages. Through a CRO audit, you can make modifications to your website that will enhance the user experience and, as a result, increase your conversion rate.
  • Competitor Audit: A competitor audit requires studying your competitors’ websites and online strategies to uncover areas for improvement with your strategies. Analyzing competitors’ SEO techniques, content strategy, backlink profiles, and social media presence can uncover important points that can help you stay ahead in your industry.

The Benefits of a Website Audit

Some of the leading benefits of conducting a website audit include:

  • Boost search engine visibility: Sometimes, you might need a website audit to increase its visibility. The website can be scanned to raise its search engine visibility. This means that search engines will find your website much simpler to find. As a result, when your site functions optimally, search engines will recognize that someone is managing it. Hence, the content is close to relevance.
  • Identify critical performance issues: An exhaustive website audit will further enable you to detect any performance-critical flaws within your website. If you have not been informed that something is wrong with your website, it might adversely affect your key performance indicator.
    If you perform a regular website audit, you can identify performance issues at the most critical moment on your website and address them on time. If you overcome the website issues, you can guarantee visitors will be satisfied with your business.
  • Improve website design: It is difficult to keep up with the regular changes in website design trends. You must revamp your website’s design to reap all the benefits of a well-designed one. Once you look at your site, you might find some components that are already outdated. Or maybe you will discover that your pictures and images must be upgraded to sync with the dominant social environment. These are some of the site’s design issues you can change when doing the audit.
  • Determine selling opportunities: You are accountable for ensuring sales are top in the business world. A website audit helps you identify chances of making sales that lead to increasing your sales volume. To name just a few, you will, for instance, need to update your product descriptions, or your blogs may need to incorporate more CTAs to lead to conversions. Also, your website could be a good place to try A/B campaigns and increase your sales. By doing that, you’ll have the opportunity to try out the options that would be best for your business.

6-Steps to Conduct a Website Audit

A website audit is crucial to boost SEO rankings and get conversions, so here is a 6-step guide to do it:

1. Analyze Your Website with an Audit Tool

The process of undertaking a site audit starts with a trusted site audit tool. Auditing tools simplify this process by detecting issues on your site, such as technology, SEO, and performance problems. Some popular options include:

  • Google Search Console: A free tool from Google that you can use to get precious information about your website, such as errors in crawling, indexing issues, and queries through search.
  • Ahrefs: A one-stop shop SEO tool that crawls your website to give you a backlink profile analysis, keyword rankings, and overall SEO health.
  • SEMrush is a digital marketing platform that enables you to audit and assess your website comprehensively and pinpoints technical errors, on-page SEO issues, and content gaps.

2. Identify Technical Glitches

Technical errors are often the most common issues and can greatly impact your site’s user experience and search engine ranking. During your website audit, keep an eye out for issues such as:

  • Broken links (3xx) and 404 errors
  • Slow page load times
  • Crawl errors and indexing issues
  • Duplicate content
  • Mobile responsiveness problems

Thus, you can install tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, Screaming Frog, or DeepCrawl to identify these technical glitches. These tools will guide you in identifying and addressing the issues holding your website back. Identify these errors, then prioritize fixing them based on their severity and impact on the UX and SEO.

3. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

On-page SEO is key in making your website more visible to visitors and giving you good organic search results. During your website audit, assess the following on-page SEO elements:

  • Title tags & meta descriptions: Make sure they are not copies, contain something interesting, and use the most appropriate keywords.
  • Header tags (H1, H2, etc. ): Use headlines to generate your resource’s structure and demonstrate the content’s importance for search engines.
  • Keyword usage: Study keyword density and distribution throughout the content, ensuring they are used naturally and serve their purpose.
  • Internal linking: Asses the quality of the internal linking structure to prevent any navigation or link equity loss.
  • Image optimization: Images should be compressed file sizes and alt text that is descriptively added.

Example: If you learn that the pages do not have meta information or the same title tags, revise them to be different and add searchable keywords for better search engine rankings.

4. Examine Design and User Experience

The website should be well organized and designed, with an easy-to-follow navigation system and a smooth user experience to entice visitors and convert them. During your website audit, evaluate the following aspects of your site’s design and UX:

  • Navigation: It is crucial to make the website navigation menu clear, organized, and easy to use.
  • Layout and visual appeal: Evaluate your site’s style, color scheme, fonts, and page layout.
  • Mobile-friendliness: Check how your site works on different devices to be sure it is user-friendly.
  • Page speed: Analyze your website’s loading times and optimize images, scripts, and other elements by speeding them up.
  • Calls to action (CTAs): Evaluate the CTAs’ locations, designs, and abilities to move users toward the actions you want them to take.

5. Review Content Quality and Relevance

Content on your website is vital in drawing and keeping users visiting your site and improving online search results. During your website audit, assess the following aspects of your content:

  • Relevance and value: Ensure your site’s content addresses your targeted audience’s pains, interests, and concerns.
  • Readability and engagement: Evaluate the readability of your content layout by using short paragraphs, subheadings, and bullet points to facilitate on-screen reading and ensure the page is being scanned.
  • Keyword optimization: Examine sprinkling keywords throughout the material so they are never overdone and always sound natural.
  • Content gaps: Knowing the question your target audience is searching for the keywords that your website does not cover properly, you need to create new content to address this.
  • Content freshness: Make sure that the content you create never loses its status of being current, accurate, and relevant by updating it regularly.

6. Create a Prioritized Action Plan for Optimization

After completing the website audit, create a comprehensive list with all the issues you have discovered and the potential areas for improvement. Consider the order of action items by the effect on the performance of your website, user experience, and conversion rate. Consider factors such as:

  • The severity of technical errors.
  • Importance of the pages that are affected or the sections of the website.
  • The potential effect of search engine rankings and organic traffic.
  • The need to step up actions in resolving user experience problems.
  • The amount of money or the other resources needed for step-by-step adjustments.

Develop a timetable for implementing the action plan, assigning members responsibility as necessary. The plan should be monitored and modified according to the needs until the target is achieved.

Why do You Need to Perform a Website Audit for SEO and Conversions?

Regular website audits are the key to a successful online presence and a means for business growth. By pinpointing and solving technical SEO issues, boosting on-page optimization, and enhancing the user experience, you will raise your website’s search engine rankings and attract more quality visitors.

Also, running conversion rate optimization audits will help you identify and remove any stumbling blocks resulting in a drop in conversion rates. This enables you to maximize your website’s earning potential. In today’s highly digital environment, website auditing is the key to seizing chances, gaining visitors, and recouping your online visibility. As a result, you must include website audits in your online marketing strategy, as they are a significant factor for long-term success.

Conclusion

The website audit is a crucial step ahead for SEO and conversion, optimizing your online appearance. You can find the weak points by analyzing technical functionality, on-site factors, backlink profiles, user experience, and content quality. Then, you can develop a detailed plan with concrete solutions to improve your website performance. The audits allow us to understand the significance of constant website audits in the quest for online success.

At AlgoSaga Internet marketing agency, our team of experienced professionals is ready to conduct detailed audits, provide actionable suggestions, and implement efficient tactics to increase your search engine rankings and conversion rates. Lead the way with AlgoSaga to fully utilize the website with AlgoSaga today!