Visit Our
YouTube Channel
Want To Listen
To Our Podcasts?
All About Website Auditing
February 10, 2023
A digital marketer should not start fiddling with meta-data, content, and site architecture before completing a website audit for the same reasons an electrician would not start cutting wires before examining a faulty light switch.
Digital marketers, whether SEO experts or not, may review and analyze a website's performance before taking corrective action.
A website audit specifically assists digital marketers in isolating site problems, identifying areas of potential, comprehending the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, conducting keyword research, and developing a work-back timetable that is practical and based on priority order.
Any company looking to increase the quantity and quality of online visitors should conduct a thorough website audit.
What is website auditing?
A website audit thoroughly evaluates a site's functionality (including page speed, technical problems, and user experience) and search engine visibility. You can determine how well your website performs concerning these criteria by doing a thorough site audit. Additionally, it identifies urgent technical and site maintenance problems.
A website audit should become a top priority once you have advanced from learning how to create a website to learn how to manage one. This will make it easier for you to comprehend the functioning and efficiency of your website.
What are the types of website auditing?
There are quite a lot of ways to audit your website. But, in a nutshell, your approach is the focus of your SEO or digital marketing strategy.
The different types of website auditing are as follows:
1. Competitive Website Audit
A competitive website audit keeps tabs on your rivals' online tactics to show you what business prospects your brand might be overlooking. In addition, a competitive audit enables you to learn from other companies in your industry and apply those strategies to your business.
Start by conducting a SWOT analysis on a website belonging to a rival.
As part of this assessment, you should also consider the software and solutions they are utilizing to automate their processes. This might assist you in finding fresh approaches to manage your website more successfully and improve user accessibility.
2. Lead Conversion Optimization Audit
A lead conversion optimization audit examines the potential and problems related to conversion on a website. You must read how and from where traffic to your website is coming in this audit.
For this step, Google Analytics is a great tool. Understanding your traffic sources helps you better understand your audience's behavior and tailor your site's content to meet their demands.
You will also need to evaluate the content on your website, speaking of which. Make sure the information is current, helpful, and informative.
3. Social Media Audit
Social media also affects how well your brand performs online. A social media audit should be done if your social media presence is not driving more visitors to your website.
Make a list of your business's social media accounts to begin the audit. Then, make additional inquiries to ensure you do not overlook any accounts you are unaware of, such as those other departments have created.
Next, check to see if every account adheres to the company's branding guidelines by utilizing the same pictures, logo, tone of voice, and other factors.
The performance of each page must then be assessed. For example, what material performs best, and what content does the worst? Are these pages regularly updated?
Finally, make the most of the evaluation's findings to understand your audience better and create social media engagement strategies. After that, you can revise your social media approach to better engage your audience and draw them to your website.
4. SEO Link Audit
This audit examines the backlinks leading to your website to look for any potential problems or opportunities. In addition, this audit will optimize your site to rank for your desired keywords by examining your links.
Link audits look at the domain, anchor text, and URL source to determine whether or not "link juice," or value and equity, is being delivered to your page. This will determine whether a link is improving or decreasing the visibility of your website in SERPs. Links from authoritative websites have much more weight than those from smaller, less well-known websites.
5. SEO Website Audit
The performance of each page must then be assessed. What kind of material performs best, and what content does the worst? Are these pages regularly updated?
Finally, make the most of the evaluation's findings to understand your audience better and create social media engagement strategies. After that, you can revise your social media approach to better engage your audience and draw them to your website.
Why is website auditing important?
We now know that website auditing is advantageous for your company because it assesses your website for issues and offers solutions.
Here are a few additional advantages of website auditing:
1. Provides superior user experience
The technical effectiveness and content of a website are often evaluated via website audits like the ones mentioned above.
Therefore, an audit will enable you to verify the stability of the technical underpinnings and architecture of your website. Additionally, it will evaluate how easy it is for users to get the information they require on your website and how user-friendly it is for search engines.
A website audit finds issues that hurt your SEO and conversion rates, such as broken links, buried content, and slow page loads. By identifying these issues, you can address the ones that are diverting traffic.
By analyzing both the technical and content aspects of your website, there is potential to boost the traffic and conversions it produces greatly.
Together, these variables improve user experience, which boosts conversion rates even further.
2. Optimization for search engines
Your website's content can be optimized to increase traffic and your SEO rating. In addition, your website can be improved for users and SERPs with a website audit.
An SEO audit of your website will enable you to identify any missed SEO opportunities and fix any incorrectly implemented SEO issues (such as keyword stuffing and exact match anchor text links) in the content of your website.
You may refocus your SEO efforts on users first and search engines second by doing an audit. This will protect you from continually trying to keep up with changes to search ranking algorithms, which means you will not be using bad tactics to rank well in the SERPs.
3. Enables higher conversion rates
Every marketing manager wants to enhance conversions and generate leads. Evaluating your website will help you find any holes and fill them, improving user experience and boosting conversion rates.
You can reassess your website's lead generation and conversion performance via website audits. So that you can include pertinent CTAs, you will be able to spot any previously unnoticed opportunities to convert visitors into leads. Additionally, you will be able to identify any problems with your landing pages so that you can fix them and boost conversions.
4. Increase the content's quality
Both client engagement and SEO ranking are greatly aided by content. An evaluation of your website will identify the steps that need to be taken to raise the standard of your content, which will assist in attracting and converting more visitors.
5. Adapts to Google's Algorithm
Because Google's algorithms are constantly evolving, your website must do the same. Your website will remain in good condition and updated per the newest algorithms if you conduct regular website audits. Your site will become more visible in SERPs as a result.
To Wrap It Up
You may ask how frequently you should have an audit performed for your website now that you know why your company needs one.
Depending on your website's size, you should have an audit done on it every year or two years.
Additionally, you should order an audit as soon as your website is published so that any problems may be checked and resolved straight away.
