Checking the health of your website is never a bad thing. You never know which crucial component of your website is not functioning optimally, resulting in a loss of customers. Most of the websites have some issues that hurt their visibility or turn away the customers. When you perform a simple website audit, it helps you identify the flaws and remove them. These could be technical issues, user experience issues, or SEO issues, among others.
Whether you have an eCommerce website, a blog, or anything else, you should ensure that you check your website regularly. The more you keep an eye on your website, the better it will work, and the more customers you will get. Not to forget, your website will have higher visibility in the digital space.
What Is A Website Audit?
Most of you must have heard of the term ‘website audit,’ and many of you must have already performed it a few times. But some of you, especially if you are new to the online business community, might be asking this question right about now.
A website audit is nothing more than a thorough examination of your website and its overall performance. It will give you the answers to questions like:
- Why is my website not generating the desired traffic?
- Why are my conversion rates and sales not improving?
- Why are my visitors leaving the website?
- Are there any technical issues? What are they?
A website audit locates such issues and helps you identify them to fix them in due time. If you lack technical skills, you might want to consider going for a professional website audit firm to help you out. Regardless, continue reading to know more about the process.
What does a website audit do?
Think about it. Would you like to visit a website that takes forever to load? Remember, even a one-second delay in loading can frustrate your visitor and have them going for an alternative. It can cost your brand thousands of dollars and a decline in search rankings.
One research showed that around 80% of web users like to visit online retail stores that provide a user-friendly experience via a high-performance website. Also, more than 40% of users will leave a website if it doesn’t load in under 3 seconds. If a user leaves your website, this doesn’t just mean the loss of a single sale, and it means that the user will also tell their friends and family, and they will tell their friends. The domino effect can create a loss of multiple sales that you could have captured with a fast website.
Importance of a Website Audit
A website audit will help you with the following things:
- Improve your website’s framework and infrastructure.
- Improve your SEO strategy.
- Increase your visibility.
- Enhance user-navigability.
Search Engine Optimization
A great SEO strategy is a must when conducting an online business. Whether you run a blog or an eCommerce website, your SEO strategy will define how users find you, whether they do find you or not, and what they do once they find you. With the competition that we have these days, you cannot afford SEO-related problems in your marketing strategy. Just think of how it would affect your rankings if you have missing meta descriptions. You also have to know the quality of the backlinks you have and how you can improve them.
A website audit will help you identify SEO issues or missed SEO opportunities and improve your overall results. Some of the major SEO issues that websites face are:
- Wrong keywords
- Keyword stuffing
- Creating the wrong type of content
- Missing meta descriptions and title tags
- Missing quality backlinks
- Publishing plagiarized content
Most businesses don’t know if they are facing these issues. This is why they are always in a state of quandary and keep on wondering why their strategy isn’t working. Hence, a regular website audit is so crucial.
Visual Design
A website audit is not just about SEO and technical stuff. It also entails reviewing the aesthetics of the website. A website audit will help you analyze your website’s design and layout and remove any flaws if there are any. A clean, good-looking, and attractive website can help you land an excellent first impression on the visitors. It will also enable you to get qualified leads and make the visitors come back for more of whatever it is that your offer. Also, a website audit will tell you if your typography and color scheme are optimum or not. All of these things directly affect user experience, brand experience, and brand visibility.
Boost Your Conversion Rate
Who doesn’t want to see more visitors on their website? No one. Everybody is in a race to capture more visitors and retain the existing ones. We all want more people to subscribe to our newsletters, fill the form, or do some activity on our website. No matter what they do, interaction with the website is vital. But visitors will only do so if your website is fully optimized, easy to navigate, and provides them with personalized, high-quality content. Here is where a website audit becomes so essential. It helps you make those crucial adjustments that take your website from good to great.
What Does A Website Audit Include?
Now before we talk about what a website audit includes, here is a little tip for you. Your website may have dozens of pages, if not hundreds. An eCommerce website can have thousands of them depending on the range of products. This is something that might put you off from conducting a website audit. Who has the kind of time to audit thousands of pages, right?
But you don’t have to check them all at once. You can do it in batches. No matter how many web pages you have, remember that you cannot achieve your goals without a website audit. What you can do is to choose at least ten pages to audit in a period thoroughly. These are the pages that drive the most traffic to your website. This might be the homepage, contact us page, your most popular products, and more. Once you have selected them, audit them thoroughly. Don’t leave any stone unturned. When you are done with these pages, similarly start on the others. Make batches depending on the time you have, and work on them one by one.
Here’s everything your website audit checklist should include:
- Site health audit
- Page speed
- Internal linking
- External linking
- Meta descriptions
- Broken links
- Load times
- Page titles
- Site structure
- Site Security Audit
- Conversion rate optimization audit
- Penalty and recovery audit
- Competitor site audit
- Content and SEO audit
- Social media presence audit
Conclusion
Visitors will interact with your website more if it is user-friendly, easy to navigate, well optimized, and well-performing. Now, it might seem that it’s an arduous task, but it’s not. Also, it is something that you cannot do without. Hence, perform a website audit now and ensure that you improve your overall website health to get more visitors, increase your conversion rates, and generate more sales.
