What is a website audit?
A website audit is a complete analysis of likely issues and factors hindering a website's visibility in search engines. A website audit helps businesses scrutinize and improve themselves to generate new business opportunities.
The Necessity of a Website Audit
A website audit may seem tedious to many because of the extra time and money involved. A website audit is a crucial digital marketing strategy essential for good rankings during searches. Decently audited websites result in better rankings which pave a path to more customers and potential future conversions.
Now, we have a question for you all. If you would, just type on the internet for a few popular brands of your choice -- Indian or global-- and look for one thing that is common on these websites. What did you find? Wasn't their website great? The one thing common for all good websites is their flow, good interface, and functionality, not to mention they all had first rankings in searches.
The Benefits of a Website audit
- Website Performance Optimization
A website audit helps to optimize a website by shedding light on its robustness and functionality. An audit helps website owners to help detect several technical and content-related issues that help to make the website more suited for users and, hence increase the SERP rankings.
- New SEO opportunities
A website audit will help you to detect new SEO opportunities that will result in a better ranking in the SERPs. An audit helps you to apply new ranking algorithms to your website and protects against impending threats.
- Improved user experience
A website audit helps to gain new insights into the existing website and get new ideas to improve user experience. Remember, a good website that is always up-to-date is made to provide the best user experience to the customer.
- Realign lead-generation tactics
It is always good to keep the website updated with all the latest ways of lead generation. A website audit helps you to strategize your lead generation tactics and adopt new ways to create more conversions.
- Add latest features
Many new features have arrived in the market that is becoming an essential part of websites. New features like voice optimization, mobile compatibility, and integration of new languages are essential parts of website development.
- Improving content quality
Content is the essence of any website. No matter how good you are at producing content, there is always a chance of error and inconsistency. An audit is an easy way to ensure that you rectify any inconsistencies in your content and give only the best to your users.
If you are new to digital marketing and its jargon, don't worry, we were all there at some point in time and would help you in all ways possible. For new readers, we have tons of articles and blogs on our website where you can always keep yourself updated on the market.
How to perform a good audit?
The solution is readily accepted when we are convinced about the problem. Since we have already established the importance of a good website audit, it becomes our responsibility to give you solutions on how to perform a good website audit.
Here are the ways to perform a good website audit so that your website always ranks on top.
- Choose an appropriate index for your website
Search engines often create multiple indexes of a website as this makes crawling easier and more efficient. But, for a website owner, having multiple indexes of a website is not a good thing. for example,
These two websites, are domains of one website but are on with separate indexes on search engines. This can create problems for website owners as two indexes of the same site could confuse users.
To keep things simple, register all the SSL certificates with one index where all the other indexes are directed.
- Make your website mobile friendly
- More than 50% of the internet today is being used on mobile devices.
- Mobile indexing first websites are better ranked by google than computer websites.
These are some of the many facts that are prevailing on the internet, which makes it more than important to shift to mobile platforms. Mobiles are becoming the new marketplaces and attracting new opportunities.
It is therefore important to ensure that you have a mobile-friendly website which will dramatically improve your chances of getting good search ranks.
- Optimize the website speed
Website speed is an important factor that decides the ranking of a website. According to Google, a fast-loading website will have more chances to get on the top search rankings.
There are some ways by which you can easily increase a website's speed.
- Optimize images
- leverage caches
- use of content delivery network
- better hosting provider
- optimized fonts
- Amount of Backlinks
Backlinks are links used during content creation to refer to other websites. Backlinks help ensure a good SEO of websites but only when they are used optimally. Bad, unnecessary links are blocked by Google which essentially hampers the search engine rankings.
A website audit helps to check whether any unnecessary backlinks are attached to the website. Backlink tools from websites like SEM rush, Moz, Majestic, and Ahrefts can be used which are accurate and very efficient.
- Direct the focus on your best pages
A Website has pages that are better, in the sense that they contain vital information about your product. Pages that contain the most valuable information can result in more lead generations. These pointers can be used to find out the best pages on your website.
- Target pages and blogs with more relevant keywords that can help to direct attention.
- Pages with richer, more business-related content.
- Pages that are more searched than other pages comparatively.
- Internally and externally linked pages.
- Always provide relevant content
Your user is looking for quick solutions, and no one wants to sit for long to read just articles. Create content that is to the point and easy to understand. You can use these pointers to create better, more understandable content for your website.
- make your content skimmable
- Use bullets, numbers, and pointers in your content.
- use headings and subheadings properly
- add images and diagrams to your pages.
- Organize website navigation
Navigation of a website plays an important role in its user experience. A website that can be easily navigated has better chances of user retention and hence, is ranked above search engines.
Here are some points that will help you to organize your website better:
- Make your content easy to understand for users by categorizing it properly.
- Properly state all the topics and indexes which helps crawlers to increase the chances of a good ranking.
- Provide page names that are bold enough and easy to read by all users.
- Choose a website audit tool
Even though a manual audit can be done with smaller websites, a manual search on bigger websites becomes complex. A big website can have hundreds of pages which will require a lot of manual auditing. Therefore, an automatic audit is preferred because it takes less time and produces better results.
There are many website audit tools provided by reputed digital marketing companies such as SEM rush, Ahrefs, and Raven that give accurate reports and ways to optimize the website.
A website audit tool helps users to
- Find any technical issues on the website.
- Find any on-page and off-page SEO issues.
- Find broken files and internal and external links.
- Reducing the amount of redundancy in content.
- Find errors in a page like loading speed and functionality.
- Find blockers like robots.txt.
