Are you wondering how to do a website audit?
Do you know if your website is performing well?
Is your website at par with the latest SEO standards?
An in-depth website audit is the first step towards improving website performance and getting ahead of the competition.
With a proper audit, you can find areas that need improvement. You can optimize for search engine ranking and track down errors on your site that are hindering its success.
This BME blog post will cover the four types of audits. We will also explain the connection between these website audits and your SEO strategies.
Read on if you’re curious to know more!
What Is a Website Audit?
A website audit is a comprehensive review of a website to assess its quality, functionality and search engine friendliness.
It involves analyzing the technical infrastructure, content quality and structure, user experience (UX) design elements and more.
A website audit can identify areas of opportunity to improve the overall performance of your website. Also, to determine why visitors are leaving your site and not engaging with your content.
The goal is to understand and address what’s causing these issues to improve your site’s user experience.
A good website audit should inspect all aspects of your website. It covers everything from the design elements to the technical details behind the scenes. Audits can also review your site’s appearance, including how visitors find their way around.
An audit can fix common issues on a website, such as the following:
- slow page loading times
- poor navigation structure
- broken links
- outdated or irrelevant content
- inadequate keyword optimization
- lack of social media integration
- and more
To make it simple for users to navigate between your web pages quickly and effortlessly. A key factor here is ensuring that there are clear pathways throughout your entire website. This can include an optimized navigation structure and practical call-to-action buttons on each page.
What Are the Different Types of Website Audits?
Here, we’ve included the four types of website audits that will help your website’s user experience score rise.
1. SEO website audit
An SEO website audit is an in-depth analysis of a website’s content, structure and performance.
It can evaluate search engine algorithms that rank your website to determine areas that need improvement. An SEO audit checks how easily a search engine can crawl your website, index the pages and technical issues.
Also, it can detect elements that may be preventing your website from achieving higher SERP rankings. These important elements on your site are the following:
- page titles
- meta tags
- alt text
- link structure
- and more
Additionally, the audit will assess your website’s performance in terms of user experience. UX is another factor that influences SERP rankings and tremendously affects your website.
To create an effective SEO audit report, it’s important to understand what elements you need to analyze and evaluate.
For example, evaluating a website’s content means assessing keyword usage for optimum relevance and adding new content.
The structural assessments involve analyzing site navigation and internal links such as:
- Ensuring URLs are in the proper format for optimal crawling by search engines.
- Performance reviews for the loading time and other technical elements, such as HTML errors
- Checking server responses that could prevent the proper indexing of your pages
By conducting an SEO audit of your website, you’ll be able to keep up with search engine algorithms.
2. Competitive website audit
A competitive website audit aims to evaluate your website compared to your competitors’ websites.
This type of analysis allows your business to identify your website’s weak areas and make improvements accordingly. It also allows you to examine your competitors’ features or technologies.
The objective of the audit is to reveal gaps between the UX on your website versus your competitors.
A thorough competitive website audit will include comparisons in the following areas:
- design
- usability
- content quality
- technical performance
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) metrics
- social media engagement
- customer service and support
- and other factors
When evaluating design and usability, it is important to look for elements.
Check things such as:
“How easy is it to navigate through pages on your website?”
“How visually appealing does each page appears if you compare it to your competitors’ sites?”
You should assess your current technology when looking at technical performance metrics such as page load speed. Make sure the technology you use can handle user navigation efficiently compared with similar sites in the industry.
Analyzing competitors’ keywords for SEO can give insight into what terms are effective for your site’s organic traffic.
Additionally, analyzing backlinks can help determine which external sources are linking back to each web page. For social media engagement metrics, you should compare the engagements. You should check the likes, followers or retweets among all your competitors’ accounts. Doing this will help you understand if your strategies are effective among others in the industry.
Finally, you should analyze customer service and support. This process includes response times for emails, phone calls and live chat.
3. SEO link audit
An SEO link audit is an important step in the process of optimizing your website for search engine rankings.
A link audit helps identify weak links that can damage your website’s online visibility. It can see links that ultimately hurt your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. One of the audit’s jobs is to highlight opportunities to capitalize on existing links and create new ones.
During a link audit, you must consider the number of your website’s links and their relevance.
This means assessing the keywords in each link’s text. Also, check the domain authority of any website’s links back to yours.
High-quality links with targeted keywords help boost your website’s rankings. On the other hand, low-quality links can be detrimental to your SEO efforts. In addition, it’s important to review any broken or dead external links.
The same goes for internal outbound links that may no longer function correctly. Having too many broken external or internal outbound links can negatively impact how search engines rank your website. That’s why you must identify these issues during an SEO link audit right away.
You should update the content with valid URLs if a page contains broken external or internal outbound links.
Finally, all external and internal inbound links must point back to valid pages on your website. This process helps strengthen the overall architecture of your site. It’ll make it easier for search engines like Google and Bing to crawl, index, and rank your pages correctly. Providing pertinent information quickly and easily also enhances the user experience.
4. Audit for lead conversion and optimization
It’s critical to evaluate how well your current lead conversion strategies are working.
By taking an in-depth look at your existing strategies, you can identify areas for improvement and develop new tactics.
The audit begins with a comprehensive analysis of your customer’s journey from initial contact to conversion. This involves analyzing customer segmentation and targeting, messaging content, website design and user experience. Additionally, the audit should determine which channels are producing the most qualified leads. Then, after that, establish which ones are providing the highest rates of conversion.
Next, the audit should assess what is working well and what areas need improvement.
Consider using client feedback and key performance metrics like customer lifetime value (LTV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC). Understand why your prospective clients leave the sales funnel or not engaging with your content. Do these steps to help pinpoint your weaknesses in your current efforts.
Analyze the outcome based on the audit and strategies like A/B testing or reorganizing engagement sequences. The goal is to ensure your business is making data-driven decisions that will increase your lead conversion rate.
When Do You Need a Website Audit?
Generally, conducting regular audits is necessary to keep your website current with best practices and standards.
If your website is experiencing poor loading times or low search engine rankings, then it’s time for an audit. You also need a website audit, depending on the type of website you have.
A website audit is a good idea if you have a start-up website. A brand-new website audit can identify potential issues impacting your website’s performance and success.
For websites that have been around for years, consider doing an audit once per year. Conducting this helps identify issues that may creep up over time and will keep your web presence on track.
An audit is also beneficial if you’re launching a new product or service. You should also update your content if you are redesigning your site. During these processes, conducting an audit can help ensure everything will function smoothly.
Basic Website Auditing Checklist
With so many components of a website to analyze, this checklist provides guidance for improving your website. Follow this checklist and step up your web game.
- Review Page Speed and Run Tests
- Review Organic Traffic and Assess On-page SEO
- Look for Unindex pages
- Review Structured Data and Snippets
- Check for Mobile Compatibility
Key Takeaways
By understanding the four types of website audits, the connection to SEO is easy to see.
- Technical audits and content audits help with indexing and SEO.
- The design and usability audits help with your website’s user experience.
- These areas reveal issues that hinder your website from obtaining a higher ranking in search engine results.
- You can optimize your website by addressing page speed, security, content, optimization and UX.
Invest in the future of your website and get the best advice from BME.
Through careful website auditing and comprehensive analysis, BME can help your company maximize its potential.
Audit your website to boost your digital presence! Book a free call, and let’s discuss how we can make your website successful.
