A website is never really “done.” It’s a living, breathing entity that needs regular care and attention to function properly. Just like our homes or our bodies, if we neglect them, they will start to show signs of wear and tear. This is why it’s important to perform regular website audits, especially if you want your site to continue conversion-friendly and rank high in search engines.
Not sure how to get started with your own website audit? This article will show you why you should be performing them regularly and how to go about doing so.
What is a Website Audit?
Think of it this way: A Website Audit is like a check-up for your site. It helps you catch issues early on so that you can fix them before they become big problems. It will help you determine if it’s optimized to achieve your goals and whether you are meeting those. Audits can be used to identify a wide range of issues, including technical problems, content issues, and user experience problems.
Recommended Read: 7 Mistakes to Avoid When Doing Off-page SEO & BackLink Building
Types of Website Audit for a good understanding of your needs?
1. Technical Website Audit:
In simple words, a technical website audit is maintaining the technical aspects of your website. A site cannot rank if it does not have the necessary optimizations for search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
In order to achieve your goals with sustained growth, you need to ensure that your site is properly optimized and effective in gathering ranks across all search engines. A site’s technical audit can analyze all of the elements of a website to help uncover any issues with crawling or indexation which will hinder the optimization process.
A technical audit often helps uncover problems that you may have not been aware of–such as hreflang errors or canonical issues.
How to audit your site’s crawl ability?
Simply you have to check the robots.txt file. This file tells web-crawling software what areas of your website are off-limits, or crawling. It can be found in any root domain by adding /robots.txt at the end of the URL.
How to check your site’s indexability?
- Use a search engine’s site: command. For example, if you want to check Google’s index of your site, you would type “site:example.com” into Google. This will show you how many pages from your site are currently indexed.
- Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools will do the work for you if you simply run your URL there. These tools will give you more detailed information about your site’s indexing, including which pages are being indexed and any errors that have occurred.
- Try searching for your own site in a search engine. If your site appears in the results, it means it is being properly indexed.
How to review your sitemap?
To review your sitemap you can use tools like W3C Markup Validation, it’s a free online tool that will check your sitemap and report any errors. Simply enter the URL of your sitemap and hit “check.”
Once you’ve fixed any errors, the next step is to test each link on your sitemap to make sure it goes to the correct page and returns a “200 OK” HTTP status code. The best way to do this is with a tool like Xenu’s Link Sleuth, which is also free.
Just download the program and run it with your sitemap file as the input. It will take some time to crawl through all the pages on your site, but when it’s done, you’ll have a report of any broken links.
Fix any broken links and you’re well on your way to having a well-optimized sitemap!
Tools for technical audit:
2. Website Design Audit:
A Design Audit is when you sit down to review your website and the company’s visual branding elements. A design audit allows you to see if everything is still up-to-date as well as find any inconsistencies. Most importantly, it’s also a chance to explore whether or not your designs are still looking fresh. Effective tools for designing audits are crazy egg, usability tools.
1. If you want to analyze the effectiveness of your design, the first step is to collect all of the visual branding elements. Gathering these pieces together gives you a close-up look at how everything fits together and looking at the whole picture can help you find any mistakes.
Here’s what you need to collect:
- The logo, background, and header images on your site.
- The icons you use throughout your site.
- Samples of the fonts our designers use for your content.
- A color palette of the tones you have used throughout our design.
2. Your website’s logo should remain consistent across all pages, and if it does not, replace it where necessary.
The background images should have a similar style so the transition between your pages is not jarring. If you find any images that don’t fit the mold, change them.
Your icons should have a similar style, and if they do not, try replacing them with alternatives from a single family like Font Awesome Icons.
Tools for website design audit:
- Crazy egg
- Usability tool
- Font Awesome icons
3. SEO website audit:
To perform an SEO website audit, there is a thing you need to keep in mind.
You need to make sure that you have a list of all the keywords that you want to target. This will help you determine which pages on your site are most important for SEO. Once you have your list of keywords, you can use a variety of tools to find out how well your site is optimized for those keywords.
- One great tool to use is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This tool will give you a report on how quickly your pages load and what factors are impacting that speed. If you find that your pages are loading slowly, you can make some changes to improve their speed.
- Another useful tool is Google’s Search Console. This tool will show you how often your site appears in Google search results and where it ranks for specific keywords. If you see that your site isn’t appearing as often as it should be, or if it’s not ranking as high as it could be, then you know that there are some improvements you can make.
- It’s important to make sure that your site has high-quality backlinks from relevant websites. You can use a tool like Majestic SEO to check the quality of your backlinks and to identify any links that might be harmful to your site.
Tools for SEO audit:
4. Content audit:
A content audit is a critical aspect of website optimization. After all, everyone is familiar with the feeling of having to create content that fits an unmet need. A content audit will collect and analyze assets on a site and provide insight into what topics are lacking. From there, you can create new content, update existing ones, or rewrite pieces that need attention.
1. Do a content inventory
A content inventory is the first step in any content audit. It’s a list of all the pages and pieces of content on your website. To do a content inventory, you can either do it manually or use a tool like Screaming Frog to crawl your website and generate a list for you.
2. Review your analytics data
Once you have a list of all the content on your site, it’s time to take a look at how that content is performing. Use Google Analytics or another web analytics tool like Matomo or Mixpanel to see which pieces of content are getting the most traffic and engagement. You just have to log in and run your website URL and they will do the job for you.
3. Identify gaps in your content
After you’ve reviewed your analytics data, you should have a good idea of which types of content are performing well and which ones could use some improvement. Take a look at your content inventory and identify any gaps in coverage or topics that could be expanded upon.
Tools for content audit:
Recommended Read: How to Find The SEO Company That Gets you on Page 1 & Drive Massive Traffic
5. Conversion optimization audit:
A conversion audit is a comprehensive review of your website with the goal of increasing conversion rates. The audit covers all aspects of the website that could influence conversion rates, including design, copy, calls to action, and user experience.
Follow all the above steps for successful conversion optimization, but here are some key steps to follow:
- A/B testing allows you to test different versions of your website or app against each other to see which one performs better. There are a number of tools that you can use to do A/B testing, including Google Analytics and Optimizely.
- Heat mapping tools show you where people are clicking on your website or app, so you can make changes to improve the user experience.
There are many different heat mapping tools available on the market today. Some of the more popular ones include Heatmaps.io, Hotjar, and Mouseflow.
These tools have many features and benefits, but they all work in the same basic way.
Here is a brief overview of how to use each of these popular heat mapping tools:
Heatmaps.io: This tool allows you to track mouse movements and clicks on your website. It also provides you with detailed insights into user behavior.
Hotjar: Hotjar is a powerful all-in-one analytics tool that provides you with heat maps, recordings, polls, surveys, and more.
Mouseflow: Mouseflow is another great tool for tracking mouse movements and clicks. It also allows you to create recordings of user sessions so you can see exactly what they are doing on your site.
- Analytical tools such as Google Analytics can give you insights into how people are using your site or app, what they’re looking for, and where they’re coming from. This information can be invaluable in helping you optimize your conversion rate.
By taking the time to audit your website every month, you can catch any potential problems early and prevent them from becoming major issues. A website audit will also help you improve your SEO and user experience, both of which are essential for success online. If you’re not already auditing your website regularly, now is the time to start. Your business will thank you for it!
