When was the last time you decided to give your website a checkup? Website audits are a close examination of overall website and page performance. Most people perform these audits while preparing to do large-scale SEO or a website redesign. Checking your website can determine whether or not it’s properly optimized to achieve your traffic goals, and if not, what you can do to improve it. Auditing your website is actually a pretty easy task. There are several websites out there you can use at no cost, and doing so once a year is a great way to help keep things ranking where they should be. Proper optimization will lead to high rankings, which in return leads to more traffic and sales! Keep in mind, if you’re not a technical person then you may want to take your report to someone who is so they can help you make the necessary website changes. Full website audit reports may require you to do things such as remove certain lines of code and if you don’t know what you’re doing then it’s best to let someone else do it for you.
So, how do you perform a website audit? The first step is visiting an audit website such as SEOmator or SiteChecker.pro and entering the URL of the page you want looked at (for starters enter your homepage URL). Keep in mind, you should eventually plan to audit almost any page you want ranked. After the tool has performed its task you will be presented with the results and recommendations for improvement. The final step is knowing which assessments to make when auditing your website.
Website Performance Assessment – The first part of your website audit will focus on how users navigate around your website. From the homepage, to blog posts, to landing pages and anything in between. Make a list of the pages on your website and ask yourself two simple questions: Is Your Website Optimized for Maximum Usability? and How Is Your Website’s Overall Speed? Visitors should be able to easily navigate around your website and it should load quickly. Fast loading pages which are properly optimized will lead to higher visitor engagement, retention and conversions.
SEO Assessment – Tweaking the performance of your website is a crucial step for holding onto visitors, but you also need to focus on gaining those visitors in the first place and that’s where the SEO assessment comes into play. Audit the content your publishing to ensure it actually solves that problems your visitors have. Is the content on your website high quality? When reading it over yourself did it leave you satisfied? Quality content will keep users reading and engaging which can help spread the word about your website. Also consider questions like “Is My Website Search Engine Optimized?” All pages should be properly optimized for a set of keywords with incoming links going to them.
Conversion Rate Assessment – High quality content that is search engine friendly will boost your traffic, but it’s what happens when these visitors are actually on your website that really counts. That is, unless you don’t care about conversions and making money. Ask yourself whether or not your website is optimized for lead generation and conversions. Are call-to-action buttons placed on the home page and landing pages? Do you have a variety of marketing offers that appeal to all the different buyer personas out there? Is there any sort of marketing funnel setup? Your website needs to load quickly and have good content on it, but don’t forget about earning revenue either!
Technical Assessment – After addressing the three primary goals behind a website audit, it’s time to get a developer (if you need one) and start knocking out the technical improvements. Is your website design responsive and error free? Do you have a sitemap setup? Are URLs properly optimized? Does it have too much Flash or Javascript? These are questions you should be asking yourself and looking for inside your website audit report. Making these changes won’t just help with each of the three primary areas above, it can also ensure all of your pages are being properly indexed within the search engines.
Website audits aren’t always easy and issues can take some time to address if you have lots of them and aren’t tech savvy. Still, it’s recommended you do at least one per year and attempt to fix as many issues as possible when they arise. Website performance will improve which can lead to more traffic and in the end, more sales!
