How a Website Audit Will Help Your Business Grow
If your website is not getting results, a website audit will identify areas for improvement. An audit evaluates your website's effectiveness using variables like content, design, SEO, UX, and ranking.
It's a diagnostic approach that considers the condition of your site, its functionality, search engine positioning, and efficiency.
Before you begin, know what you're after. Are you looking to expand your website's online visibility through higher search engine rankings, fix usability issues, or rebrand your company?
Ask your developers what they think an audit should cover. If you have a marketing team, get their input too. Based on your situation, this approach helps you figure out opportunities for improvement and prioritize site issues.
7 Kinds of Website Audits
Try to complete as many kinds of audits as are relevant to your business.
UX and Design
Are you concerned about the look and feel of your website? An audit of your site's usability and design looks at how user-friendly it is. It ensures easy navigation and makes the website's call to action stand out.
Are your fonts easily readable? If not, customers will become lost and leave. A user-friendly, visually inviting site keeps users interested and increases the likelihood they'll come back.
Consider responsiveness. Are visitors saying that the desktop site and mobile versions offer different user experiences?
Usability testing is the best way to spot these issues. Watch your target audience perform tasks while noting their satisfaction and pain points. Is it, for example, taking them too long to make a purchase?
If you can, set up interviews with your customers. This will help you identify further areas for growth, better understand your audience, and learn about their online behaviors.
Also, consider evaluating your site's dark mode compatibility and overall performance across different devices and browsers.
Brand
A brand audit considers the alignment of your site's objectives with your brand and marketing plan. You don't want visitors to perceive a mismatch between your brand and website.
Check to see if your brand's identity, values, and services align with the concerns of your target market.
A brand audit includes an assessment of your site's user experience as well. Regard it as a measurement tool that informs you of the number of satisfied and disgruntled customers. If you're planning a new site, a brand audit is an excellent way to determine areas that need work.
SEO
Your website's visibility on search engines is greatly improved by having good SEO. It also increases the conversion rate. This step can attract new clients and customers to your company.
Analyzing your site's retention and conversion rates is also part of an SEO audit.
The conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who complete actionable goals on your site.
For instance, a 30% conversion rate means that out of 100 website visits, 30 purchased a specific necklace through an online jewelry store. This is compared to the number of users that return to your site over time to determine the retention rate.
Both indicators are helpful, especially for commercial and e-commerce websites. An SEO audit shows the sources of conversions and the effectiveness with which people convert into paying customers or returning visitors. Higher numbers reveal customer confidence and brand loyalty.
This audit may include a crawler, a tracking tool that keeps tabs on traffic and keyboard activity. Search engines use keywords to describe your site's content. The more effectively you use keywords, the more likely users will find you online.
Tags are also used in SEO audits to calculate your site's efficiency. A description tag offers a concise explanation of various site sections. For example, image tags instruct web servers on how to display images. Your image tags are used in an SEO audit to measure image load speeds. Title tags describe the title of a webpage. Include strong keywords in your title tags for greater visibility, as search engines use them to distinguish sites.
As part of your SEO audit, you should check if other sites are linking to yours, as this could help your brand gain more importance. Backlinks show how other websites connect to yours. Links from external sites and businesses indicate that many people find your content valuable.
Modern SEO audits should also consider Core Web Vitals, mobile-first indexing, and structured data implementation to align with current search engine algorithms.
Tech Audit
A technical audit verifies that your site's secure sockets layer (SSL) security is current. SSL is a standardized mechanism for establishing encrypted, secure communications online. This kind of site audit must be performed regularly to ensure the privacy and security of the information you and your users provide.
Do you click away from websites that take too long to load? In addition to security, a technical audit examines your site's page and picture load times. The size of the files generated by your design impacts loading speeds.
Slow and unresponsive sites lose users. A technical audit points out areas of your code that can be optimized for quicker page loads, making it simple for users to visit your site. By analyzing each link on every page, a technical audit also looks for any broken links that may be present.
Consider implementing advanced speed optimization techniques like lazy loading and content delivery networks (CDNs). Also, ensure your site is fully responsive and consider implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for certain types of content.
Content
A content audit ensures that your site is readable, interesting, and simple to use. It also checks for spelling and grammar errors.
The audit scans your pages for consistent language, grammar, and tone. It can also increase your site's appeal to a wider audience. By auditing your content, visitors are more likely to stay. Consider using this as a chance to examine how your tone fits with your brand.
Content audits also examine the organization of your content. Is there a logical page structure and a clear hierarchy?
Your site gains focus from organized material. It makes navigating simple and more straightforward for viewers to digest your material.
Consider evaluating your content strategy for topic clusters and pillar pages to boost your site's authority on key subjects.
AI-generated writing is also important to assess. While AI can be a robust tool for content creation, be sure that it aligns with your brand voice, provides accurate information, and adds value to your visitors.
Review everything generated by AI for coherence, factual accuracy, and originality. Maintain a balance between AI-assisted efficiency and the human touch that attracts your audience.
Accessibility
Through an accessibility audit, you can determine whether people with disabilities can easily use your website by checking for ADA compliance. In addition, this audit examines color contrast for visitors with vision problems and readability for color blindness. So that screen reader users understand your content, give images alt text.
Ensure your site complies with the latest WCAG 2.1 guidelines for comprehensive accessibility.
New Audit Types to Consider
Privacy and Data Protection Audit: Ensure your site complies with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
Performance Audit: Focus specifically on Core Web Vitals and other performance metrics.
Security Audit: Go beyond basic HTTPS implementation to ensure comprehensive site security.
Final Thoughts
Implementing these recommendations is the next step after a successful audit. Maintain your objectives by examining the findings with your site administrators, designers, and marketers. Ask for opinions.
Discuss current maintenance with your developers and site administrators. The auditing process is iterative. To move your website forward, don't be scared to go back and take a second look.
Use tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, or GTmetrix to assist with your audits and gain deeper insights into your website's performance.
FAQs
Q: What is a website audit?
A: A website audit is a diagnostic approach that evaluates your website's effectiveness using variables like content, design, SEO, UX, and ranking to identify areas for improvement.
Q: What are the main types of website audits?
A: The main types include UX and Design, Brand, SEO, Technical, Content, and Accessibility audits. New types to consider are Privacy and Data Protection, Performance, and Security audits.
Q: Why is an SEO audit important?
A: An SEO audit improves your website's visibility on search engines, increases conversion rates, and helps attract new clients. It analyzes retention and conversion rates, keywords, tags, and backlinks.
Q: What does a technical audit examine?
A: A technical audit verifies SSL security, examines page and image load times, looks for broken links, and identifies areas of code that can be optimized for quicker page loads.
Q: How does a content audit help a website?
A: A content audit ensures your site is readable, interesting, and easy to use. It checks for spelling and grammar errors, consistent language and tone, and examines content organization and structure.
Q: What is the purpose of an accessibility audit?
A: An accessibility audit determines whether people with disabilities can easily use your website. It checks for ADA compliance, color contrast, readability for color blindness, and proper use of alt text for images.
Q: What should be done after a website audit?
A: After an audit, the next step is to implement the recommendations. Discuss the findings with site administrators, designers, and marketers, and use tools like Google Search Console or GTmetrix to gain deeper insights into your website's performance.
