Everything You Need to Know About Website Audit
The website audit is the most crucial aspect of on-page SEO. It’s more critical than any digital marketing practice because if your website isn’t SEO optimized, you won’t be ranked on Google. A complete website audit discovers discrepancies. These discrepancies can result in Google penalties that can affect your business. Moreover, an audit also assesses the vulnerability of your website to hackers, viruses, and other security breaches. So, you’ll have to run an audit every now and then to see if things are working properly.
The Benefits of Website Audit
Before we dive into the technical details of a website audit, let’s understand its importance to know why an audit is performed. Here are some of the top benefits of website audit for a marketing professional.
1. Website Optimization
A website audit essentially looks at your website’s technical aspects. However, as a marketer, your goal is to make things easier for your customers. Therefore, website audits also account for customer friendliness, and they help determine how easy it is for potential customers to find what they want. On the other hand, a website audit also determines whether the site is search engine-friendly because there is no point in optimizing your website for customers if it isn’t ranking on the search engines. As you discover little details about your website, you work on them to make things easier for your customer and ultimately optimize your site for searchers and search engines alike.
2. Identify SEO Opportunities
Through a website audit, you can determine any missing opportunities for SEO. These could be keyword stuffing or exact match anchor text links. Plus, it will also help you re-focus your efforts on the user more than the search engine because Google has consistently stated to design a website for the user, not for the search engine. As a result, Google will rank your website higher if it is more customer-oriented. However, you shouldn’t neglect any opportunity to optimize your website for search engines as well. Think of it as a 60-40 ratio where the former is for users, and the latter is for search engines.
3. Conversion Rate Optimization
Lastly, a website audit allows you to spot opportunities for potential lead conversion opportunities. This is slightly different from SEO optimization as your primary focus is the customer, so you aren’t looking to add keywords. Instead, you will evaluate the overall content of your website and see if you have relevant keywords in place. Neuromarketing also plays a crucial role in conversion optimization because you are aiming to convert maximum traffic on your website into paying customers.
As you can see, assessing both content and the technical aspect of your website can drastically improve your chances of ranking higher on Google. Moreover, you will also open up opportunities for increasing your web traffic, plus you will also have a chance to improve conversion on your website. Therefore, a website audit is more important than most people think.
How to Do a Website Audit
Now that you the importance of website audit and how it can affect your ranking, it’s time to dive into the process. Below I have shared a step-by-step guide for you so you can refer back if you miss something during your website audit.
Step 1: Check if There Is Only One Version of Your Website
Most businesses have redirect issue on their website which they are unable to solve. However, not all websites have this problem, but it’s best to check for it. You can do this by typing different variations of your web address and see where it leads. For example:
- http://yourdomain.com
- http://www.yourdomain.com
- https://yourdomain.com
- https://www.yourdomain.com
- yourdomain (ctrl + enter)
All of these variations should lead to your page. If one or more of the above-mentioned variations of your website leads to an error page, you should fix this immediately because you are losing potential customers. The different variations of your web address are how your customers would type in their address bar. You must make sure that every version of your web address leads to you.
Step 2: Web Crawl
Web crawlers are internet bots that scan your website for web indexing. Typically, crawlers are sent by search engines, but you can trigger a web crawler through other softwares as well and know which pages are ranking, broken or misleading. There are quite a few tools that can send a web crawler to your site, but the below-mentioned two are the best.
- Screaming Frog ($204/year)
- Beam Us Up (Free)
Once you use these tools, you can follow the instructions to run a web crawl. But I would recommend switching on “JavaScript” and “HTTPS status external links” These options ensure a thorough crawl on your website and also examine the external links in the web content.
Step 3: Check For Indexing Issue
After you have done your web crawl, you should have the results in front of you. The next step is to check for indexing issues. You can easily do this without the help of any tool but before you explain how to check for web indexing manually, let’s understand what it is.
Basically, a web index is like a library, and your website is a book. You want the librarian to put your book on the shelf so others can view it. Moreover, you’ll also want to make sure that each page of your book is compiled and nothing is missing. This is how web indexing works.
You can check your site indexing like this:
- Go to Google
- In the search bar types “site:yourdomain.com”
Google will show all the pages that are indexed, and you can do the same with other search engines as well. However, this method is not as accurate as using the Google search console.
Step 4: Check that You Rank For Your Brand Name
Another important aspect of digital marketing and SEO is that your brand name needs to be ranked on Google. For instance, if your domain is different from your brand name, chances are your customers are searching for your brand name, and they couldn’t find you. So you’d have to fix this issue; otherwise, you’ll lose a significant amount of sales to your competitors.
You can easily check this by searching your brand name on Google and seeing how many links point to your website. If not all links or the top 3-4 links are not your websites, you might want to work on SEO brand awareness.
Step 5: Check if Your Site is Mobile Friendly
The need for making a mobile-friendly website has increased a lot over the years. This information is backed by Google search results which show that majority of searches in all industries are made from mobile devices. Having a mobile-friendly website can increase your conversion because it’s convenient for the customer to view a website on their hand-held devices.
Ecommerce businesses have apps and a website to capture customers from all domains. Leaving no stones unturned is the best way to capture the maximum share in your industry, and if you lack a mobile version of your site, then your SEO practices are in the past, and you need to revamp them.
Step 6: Speed Up Your Site
A cluttered website is heavy, and even the fastest internet connection can’t load a heavy site in less than 2 seconds – which is the average time for a site to load. If your website takes more than 2 seconds, your customers will not be interested in your services because your web experience will become frustrating. You can run a diagnostics and determine what factors are causing your website to be slow through Google’s speed checker, which is free of cost.
This tool will make a detailed report of your website and highlight all the things that are making your website heavy. Some of the more common issues that make a website heavy are PNG images and JavaScript. You might want to switch to JPEG images and minify your JavaScript for easy loading.
If you have a picturesque website, you might want to add lazyloading to your site to make your site lighter and faster. Lazyloading will load images that are above the fold (currently visible to the user on the web page) first and then divert speed to the rest of the content. This ensures that your website loads on time and doesn’t ruin the user experience.
Step 7: Delete Extra Pages
Sometimes your website is cluttered with extra pages that can affect your organic SEO results. These pages are either old press releases or thin content (less than 50 words). These pages sometimes rank against your target keywords and lead users to a “zombie page.” This affects your search ranking and user experience because it doesn’t seem like you have a professional SEO team managing your website. Therefore, finding these pages and deleting them is a critical part of a website audit.
You can repeat “Step 3” and open each link to see if it matches the description of “extra pages” I am sharing below. Once you find them, remove them immediately so that your organic traffic doesn’t divert to misleading web pages.
- Tag pages
- Category pages
- Archive page
- Boilerplate content
- Thin content pages
- Old press releases
Once these pages are out of the way, your website audit will become easier because the lesser the pages, the lesser the problems. Deleting an extra page improves your SEO because Google says that more content doesn’t make your site better. So you should give Google what it wants.
Step 8: Check For Duplication
Google HATES plagiarism or duplicate content. Both terms are different when it comes to digital marketing as the former means copying someone else’s work, and the latter refers to posting the same content on multiple sites (even though you’re the author).
You need to check for this as soon as you are done with the above steps because it could result in Google penalizing your website. The best way to check for duplication or plagiarism is through CopyScape. It’s the best website for checking duplication as its crawlers search all indexed sites to see if you have even the slightest of similarity with other websites. Copyscape checks for 3-4 similar words placed consecutively, just like Google, so you are safe if you have paraphrased content but in deep trouble, if your website has duplicate content.
Moreover, avoid making duplicate websites to boost your rankings because it can fall under bad SEO practices, which might ban your website entirely. Practicing white hat SEO is the best and safest way to rank on Google. So you should stick to the rules and not try breaking them.
The Bottom Line
As you can see, website audit has overwhelming benefits and can boost your organic traffic. However, the process of a website audit is not easy, and it’s highly time-consuming. You can make most of your work easy by using tools, but you’ll need to pay attention because it’s your business on the line. Moreover, focus more on conversion optimization to get more sales because Google likes a website that is designed for the customer. Finally, a website audit reflects the performance of your site and how well it can follow the rules laid down by search engines. So make sure your tactics refrain from blackhat SEO practices; otherwise, you can say goodbye to your website.
If you enjoyed reading this blog post, I have plenty more on my website for digital marketing, Amazon marketing, and personal growth.
