As digital marketing and technology evolve, it is important for you to stay on top of your game by maintaining your website’s content, calls-to-action, landing pages, and all other elements relevant and updated.
Now is the perfect moment to comb through your website and identify areas for improvement in your marketing plan and online presence. Performing a website audit is another effective marketing measure to perform along with conducting a website analysis and defining new marketing objectives.
In order to turn your site into a top of the line marketing channel, you should perform a website audit to see what you presently have and where you can improve it. Once a year, a website audit is recommended. However, auditing your website every six months is suggested if you are continually making modifications and adding additional pages.
In this article, we will discuss what are the important elements of the website that need to be evaluated and scrutinized in order to perform an effective website audit.
Content
A website with no content is like a blank newspaper. It’s a cliché, but content truly is king. Initially, you should define the purpose of your website before you start building it, and it should be your guide on how to come up with the website’s content.
A website audit will ensure that your website is full of helpful material, content that your target market will find useful and content that supports your target keyword selections.
Website Speed
Because Google is continually looking for websites that deliver quick information, your website’s loading speed should be a priority. A website audit should include tests to see if your page loads quickly enough, and if not, where the issue originates.
Large video files on the site or photos that haven’t been optimized for the web are usually the culprits so you should make sure that all media on your website is optimized for web display. You can also check this article if you want to learn more about how to improve your website speed.
Usability
The usability of a website is an excellent place to start when evaluating a website for SEO because it is often overlooked. Usability is regarded as one of the most crucial features of a website since search engines assess a site and base its ranking depending on how usable and navigable it is. This is why, contrary to popular belief, usability and search engine rankings go hand in hand.
In order to boost conversion rates and return visits, you should ensure that your website’s design and framework are coherent, intuitive, and adhere to Google’s core web vitals. These factors have a major impact on SEO.
Craw-lability
Without search engine visibility, a website is of little relevance. It’s crucial that any website audit includes a vital evaluation of whether the website can really be crawled. Search engine crawlers will have a difficult time reading specific parts of a page if they are not accessible.
A good website audit will dig deep into your site’s code to make sure that search engines can easily navigate through it all.
Search Engine Ranking
As part of the website audit, you should also look at your website’s ranking in the search engines. There should be a search engine evaluation since it not only reveals what has to be addressed on your website, but also provides a solid foundation for SEO keyword research.
In order to see where your website ranks in the search engines, what keywords people use to reach you, and which keywords should be ranking for but are not, you may utilize a variety of search engine strategies. This can be a very informative process, showing some serious issues with a website. Ensure that Google has the most recent version of your site in their index by inspecting what they have stored for your website.
Sitemap and Robots.txt Files
Every website should have a sitemap and robots.txt file. Search engine website crawlers use both these as a guide: a sitemap points out to where the spider should go, while a robots.txt file prevents the spider from accessing content that shouldn’t be crawled.
An admin tool like Google Webmaster Tools can be used in a website audit to verify that both of these files exist and are functioning properly.
Internal and External Links
When Google follows a link on your site that contains a keyword, it should land on a page of your site that has something to do with that keyword. Internal linking systems of your website can be improved with the help of a website audit.
In addition to checking links that lead to other pages of your website, a comprehensive website audit should also look at external links. The search engines are going to be interested in seeing which websites you think your visitors will find valuable, and they may learn a lot from that. Do not forget to link to other web pages on your own website.
URLs
The URL of a page is critical for a website’s ‘on-page’ SEO strategy. A URL is a path that leads to where a certain page can be accessed. Using descriptive terms instead of a line of code in your URL is much more appropriate, and search engines will reward you for it.
Comprehensive audits should examine each and every page’s URL structure to make sure that it is accurate for the website.
Title Tags
It’s surprisingly simple to create an SEO-friendly page title, yet many website owners ignore the importance of title tags. One of the most important places for search engines to know and understand about a page is in its title tags.
Each page title should be original and descriptive, as determined by a thorough website audit. When creating a page title tag, be sure to include all of the important keywords and phrases that will drive traffic to the page.
Meta Tags
SEO on your website relies heavily on Meta tags, even if they’re not the most crucial part of your site design or content itself. Meta tags that do their job well should help your site’s visitors better understand the content.
Special attention should be given to the description tag because this is frequently where Google obtains your site’s description when ranking your website.
Conclusion
You can resolve issues that prevent you from attaining your full potential with a website audit, which maximizes conversion and traffic. Simply take into consideration all the important elements listed above.
Then, on the pages that got the worst grades in the website audit, begin making revisions and improvements. When making modifications, it is important to keep in mind what each page’s function and purpose are before making some changes.