A website audit is an all-encompassing review of any professional website that can help a business determine how well their site is working and what improvements need to be made for new business development.
Site audits are effective tools that should be utilized while planning a website redesign. They may also influence your search engine optimization (SEO) and link building efforts as well as your social media marketing strategy – as neither can function effectively if core issues persist on the site that is being promoted.
A website audit also provides a window into how your customer views and interacts with your brand online. Do they find the site easy to use and navigate? How quickly can they locate information? Many sites ‘look’ great, but poor search and navigation is enough to drive visitors away – permanently.
And in companies where security and compliance are a priority, auditing can target weak points in firewalls and other security features. Some of the granular insights that a site audit provides are so small or so technical they are likely to go unnoticed. And companies that must meet compliance standards simply cannot run that risk.
A site audit addresses the following core issues:
Visibility
Can your site be “read” and indexed by search engines, and by extension, potential customers? Your site may restrict access to some content. Redirects are another visibility issue. If you have pages, folders and domains that have moved, you need to redirect viewers to where the new content resides. There are a few simple but critical measures to fix redirects. Problems with on-page SEO, domain expiration, and more should also be identified.
Meta
Meta data helps users get quick insight about your site right from the search engine results pages, or SERPs. Users make split second decisions to either visit your site or move on to your competitors based on this info, so it’s critical. A site audit will help you determine if you are missing or have duplicate page titles, if they are appropriate in length, if you have meta description content embedded, whether or not pages are missing Google Analytics tracking, and more.
Content
Content is king. If your page doesn’t have enough content per page it will not perform well in search results. That’s because word count is also an indication of quality to search engines. To this point, duplicate content (on your site and in off-site link building) is also cause for penalization.
Links
Broken internal and external links are a glaring issue that is easily fixed. Users are likely to leave a page completely if broken links persist. Links also need text, so search engines better understand the context of the page you’re linking to. There are important other link issues that all help determine the credibility of your site.
Images
Image identification is just as important as content. Do your images have the correct attributes that put the image in context, make it easy to find in search, and relevant to the user when found? Are you using high-quality images?
Performance
Page speed factors in your site’s total page size, number and file size of images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, and much more. Reducing the number of components is the key to faster pages. Semantic Search bots are smart, but not that smart! There are best practices for design and development that help communicate content themes to search engine algorithms. Not using headings, for example, may make it more difficult to translate the meaning of page content.
Contact us for a free, comprehensive web and SEO audit.
A website audit is always a must when you want to optimize your webpage online. Having that document is very essential because it will serve as a guide on which areas on your website needs to improve in order for it to have more traffic.