If your search engine optimization efforts are not getting you the results you want, you should consider doing a website audit.
It is the first step of any successful SEO strategy and should be your number one priority when things are not working as well as they should.
This article will tell you what a website audit is, how it can help you improve your website, and what to expect from the process itself.
What is a Website Audit?
A website audit is a detailed assessment of your website’s strengths and weaknesses, both in terms of content and more technical aspects like site structure and URL optimization.
In essence, a website audit is a health check-up for your website.
Website Performance Assessment
The first part of a website audit is usually a website performance assessment, which focuses on user-experience aspects of your site.
It helps you optimize your site for the best user experience possible to make sure your visitors stick around long enough to become paying customers.
Technical Assessment
Is your web design responsive? Is your site structure optimized for search engines? Do you have any error messages or broken links on your website?
Answering these technical questions will help you make the most out of your SEO efforts and optimize your website for maximum impact.
SEO Assessment
A website audit will almost always include a separate SEO assessment.
An SEO assessment will help you identify missed SEO opportunities, avoid SEO pitfalls such as keyword stuffing, and help you keep up with Google’s ever-changing algorithms.
Paid Advertising Assessment
SEO is not the only way of driving traffic to your website.
A website audit will also look at traffic numbers and other data coming from paid advertising tactics.
It will help you determine if paid advertising is actually worth your time and money, or if you should be focusing your marketing efforts on organic search instead.
Why Do a Website Audit
1. Discover new revenue sources
A website audit can help you discover new revenue sources.
For example, businesses using the same keywords as you could be potential affiliate partners.
You could also discover new influencers to partner with, or find brand advocates by looking at who is already linking to your blog.
2. Improve keyword distribution
A suspiciously high frequency of keywords will get your website flagged by search engines and lower your search engine rankings.
On the other hand, a low keyword density will prevent you from taking advantage of the full benefits of SEO.
In either case, a website audit will help you spot keyword density problems and improve keyword distribution within your website.
3. Improve user experience
Slow load times, unresponsive content, and too many error messages will inhibit your capacity to rise through Google’s rankings.
Google is very user-experience focused, so take a good look at your website to make sure it is too!
4. Fix on-site and off-site SEO issues
Broken links, unfriendly URLs and HTML issues can reduce search engine visibility.
A website audit can help you uncover and fix these issues before they compound and become a much bigger problem.
5. B
A website audit will usually include a competitor analysis.
This will help you figure out which marketing strategies are working for your competitors, as well as which keywords they are using to drive traffic to their website.
You can then use this information to adjust your own marketing strategies and outmaneuver your competition.
6. Optimize content for engagement
By analyzing your website content, you can see which types of content are driving the most traffic and conversions.
You can use title tags, meta descriptions and images to capitalize on your strongest content, as well as optimize underperforming content to boost engagement.
7. Capitalize on trends
Conducting regular website audits can help you capitalize on traffic trends you would have otherwise missed.
Tracking the highs and lows of your traffic (by month, day, or time of day) can help you uncover important customer insights and capitalize on strategies that are already working for you.
What Can You Expect from a Website Audit?
If you are conducting a website audit yourself, we recommend you read up on website audit best practices.
The technical aspects of the process can get fairly complicated. Therefore, bringing in a team of experts can be really helpful.
If you hire a professional marketing firm to do an audit for you, you are going to receive a detailed report including any discrepancies or issues discovered by the audit team.
The report will also include recommendations for the most effective ways to fix these issues and improve your website’s performance going forward.
For that reason, we recommend doing a website audit every 6 months.
This will let you align your strategies with Google’s algorithm changes and stay ahead of the curve when it comes to generating traffic and conversions.
Final Thoughts
A professional website audit does not have to break the bank.
We actually offer one as a part of our free Digital Marketing Assessment.
The assessment will show you which marketing strategies are working for your business (and which ones are not!). You will also get a clear roadmap to follow to improve your SEO.
