So, you’ve been running a website for your brand on the internet. Every now and then you update whenever it’s necessary to do so.
My friend, the job is not finished. You ought to do more.
Running a business through your website on the internet requires more than just using the site. Your website needs a thorough checkup, an audit, to be precise.
If you want to reach more clients, build your brand, are planning to redesign your site, or even want to find out how strong your site will be in the near future, this post on SEO audit can guide you through the auditing process for maximum SEO and conversion results.
Definition Of Website Audit
A website audit is simply a thorough examination of the performance of a website prior to a large-scale SEO operation or a redesign. Auditing a website helps to determine how close or far the site is from being declared optimized.
An optimized website is healthy, lightweight, and engaging on the internet—the key factors for brand recognition and revenue.
Here are some of the benefits of doing a website audit from a marketing perspective:
Performance Optimization: Your website will be error-free of potential security threats. So, post-audited websites become much more efficient on the internet.
Search Engine Optimization: SEO is also part of the website audit. SEO-optimized sites are easy to rank high in the search results and thus bring more traffic.
Conversion Rate Optimization: It’s the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take the desired action.
Competitive Analysis: Gives you an edge over the market and its clients.
Identify Issues: Provides a clear picture of where you need to reorganize or change your strategy.
How To Conduct A Website Audit
These are the fundamental steps of conducting a website audit.
Checking Your Website URL
First of all, you have to find a good website auditing tool. A good website auditing tool analyzes how your website is performing on the internet.
Finding Technical Errors
If your site URLs have no issues, now you can check for technical errors such as structure, performance, SEO, mobile, security, and more.
Identifying SEO Troubles
You have to look at SEO-related issues such as meta descriptions, image alt text, and much more. Solving them will improve the ranking and traffic on search engines.
Analyzing Design and UX
A good website must provide a top-notch user experience through design and convenience. A better user experience increases the conversion rate of your service.
Checking Site Content
The content that will be on display on the pages of your website should rank well in search engines and align well with the traffic numbers.
Listed Summarization
Lastly, every time you complete an audit, create a list summary of all your findings and their solutions. It helps you to quickly compare various issues, and you’ll have a better idea of various solutions.
The Four-Pronged Approach
A thorough website audit can be divided into 4 specific parts: on-page, web content, technical audit, and backlink audit. If you compartmentalize in this four-pronged approach, chances are you’ll have the best audit for your website.
On-Page SEO Audit
On-page SEO audit is the practice of optimizing every single page of a website. By doing so, each page can come up organically when searched for keywords that are related to the topic of the page.
Advantages:
Shows a website’s SEO health.
Finds out if a site is crawlable for the search engines.
Helps to understand the hindering issues regarding online visibility.
Empowers your business acumen through real and actionable insights.
Keeps you up-to-date with the latest search engine marketing strategies.
Step-By-Step On-Page Auditing
Every page must have a title with a description. Each of them should be unique, natural, and not keyword-stuffed.
Add short (under 300 characters) but relevant keyword meta descriptions to your pages. A well-written description generates more clicks for your site.
Content has to be original, engaging, and relevant. Remove or de-index any repeated content.
Then check and provide relevant internal links (2–10 per page). It’ll improve the user experience and your Google search ranking.
Check (and change if necessary) for short and clean URLs. A good URL is brief with keywords and descriptive.
All the links on your website should be active. Broken links give a bad user experience and negatively impact Google rankings.
Organize the contents logically. Contents should look clean, intuitive, and relevantly grouped with a privacy policy, disclaimer, and about page.
Check every single image, size, and “ALT” tag. Fix it wherever necessary.
Website Content Audit
A content audit systematically analyzes and assesses all the content on your website. It reveals the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy and development workflow. It helps you adapt a better content plan for your business.
Step-By-Step Content Auditing
Defining your goals and metrics. Understanding which content to add, repair, and remove is important. Figure out the topics your visitors are most interested in to generate the most leads.
Make a content inventory only for the types of content you’ll review and audit.
Use a content audit tool to automatically collect, analyze, and interpret data according to your goals and metrics.
After the assessment, set out a plan to improve it based on your goals and draw conclusions from your data analysis.
Draw up an action plan for each URL that aligns with your business goals.
Prioritize the actions which will give the best results with the least amount of required effort.
Reuse, rewrite, expand, refresh, and restructure your targeted content and meta descriptions.
Add or change your media files like videos and images with appropriate HTML tags.
Add optimized internal linking in posts with related topics to improve the website’s organization and decrease the bounce rate.
Inform Google about your content updates with the Google Search Console.
Finally, adapt and adjust your content marketing strategy.
Technical SEO Audit
A technical SEO audit checks various technical parts of a website. The technical parts of a website directly influence the ranking factors for search engines like Google or Bing.
Many “technical” SEO elements involve HTML elements, JavaScript, meta tags, website code, and website extensions. Check for the technical issues that are damaging the user experience by causing poor functionalities in your website.
Step-By-Step Technical Auditing
A good first step is to check your site’s key pages and make sure that the contents are visible to both humans and Googlebot.
Make sure to set up Google Analytics tracking for your site.
Canonize your content so that search engines can understand the “master version”.
Check the indexing status and optimize the visibility of your site with the help of Google Search Console.
If your website has a manual action, immediately fix it.
Test whether your website is mobile-friendly.
Index all the pages properly on your website.
Scan your site for 404s such as broken links, dead pages, and status 404 URLs as they’re bad for SEO performance and user experience.
Audit the Robots.txt file to regulate permissions for robots visiting your site.
Perform a site command in Google to determine if the site is being indexed properly.
Check and repair the sitemap file so that Google’s crawler can map your site index accurately with ease.
Secure site protocols and avoid mixed content issues by using the HTTPS protocol.
Check and clear out the suspicious backlinks.
Address potential security issues such as malware, deceptive pages, harmful downloads, and uncommon downloads.
Finally, check and repair your schema (structured data) to improve the click-through rate (CTR).
Performing Backlink Audit
A backlink audit evaluates all the links pointing to your website. Let’s see how you can perform an audit on your backlinks.
Backlink Auditing Step-By-Step
You can download the list of your links from Google Webmaster Tools and review all your backlinks manually.
Find and evaluate each backlink. List the ones that are worthy of being removed or disavowed.
Reach out to the referring website owners and ask them to delete the link before doing it yourself.
Remove and disavow the links that cannot be found or the website’s owner cannot be reached.
Conclusion
Every year, Bing and Google update their search engine algorithms to deal with indexed content. Website audits can guide you to take in-depth measures that’ll ultimately improve the efficiency and visibility of your site through better search ranking, increased site traffic, and elite site performance. So, each year, at least two website audits must take place to keep businesses agile and aligned with the ever-changing nature of the internet.