If you are looking to increase your online presence and optimize your site for conversions, a website audit is essential. A site audit looks at the many aspects of your website to identify what’s working and where there is room for improvement. There can be many different goals behind site audits. A comprehensive site audit examines the following in detail:
- Site Health – user experience, functionality, site speed
- SEO – the on- and off-site elements that make your website visible to searchers
- Traffic – the number of people visiting your site, and how relevant they are
Auditing your website will help you inspect your site’s technical framework and infrastructure, assess search engine optimization, and analyze how easy it is for users to navigate your site.
All of these things help you check your website performance, boost conversions, and help you improve your SEO. The ultimate goal of a site audit is to uncover anything that Google might penalize you for so that we can address it and help you to conquer the online marketplace.
Here are some elements of a site audit and what they reveal about your site:
Site Health
- User Experience
A simple look at your site can help identify snags in the user experience. You want to make it as easy as possible for someone to perform the action that you want them to make on your site, while still making it seem like it is their decision. Have someone unfamiliar with your site poke around and write down everything that might be a conversion limitation as they flow from page to page. - Functionality
This search is to confirm that your site is linking to the secured version, you have no 404 error pages, and that each page on your site is operating as it should. All of the technical aspects that make up your site, such as asset minification and caching will be assessed. - Site Speed
Running a test for site speed allows us to see if there are any opportunities to improve the speed of your site. Slow site speed is something that Google will penalize you for, and it can often be a one time fix. Some ways to speed up your site include enabling compression, minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, and reducing redirects; to mention a few. - Site Security
Cybersecurity is of the utmost importance in today’s technological age, and running a site audit can help you notice any vulnerabilities on your site to potential security breaches.
SEO
- We scan your site to make sure that each page has a focus keyword, properly optimized meta titles and meta descriptions, that each page only has one H1 heading, and that each asset on the page is cached. We also make sure that each image has an image alt tag and that the URL structure of each page is clean and short. Equally as important as the scans mentioned above is making sure that there is little-to-no duplicate content on your site. Duplicate content is defined as content that appears in more than one location on the internet. Google heavily penalizes sites with over 20% duplicate content.
Traffic
- Finally, when performing a site audit, we take a look into the traffic on your site via Google Analytics. We like to understand the demographics of your site. Who is visiting? Which pages they are visiting? What is their page flow (what path users take)? Which devices are they using? What channel are they finding your site through?
Hopefully, now you understand why auditing your site is so beneficial from measuring website performance to improving your SEO, and most importantly, boosting conversions. All of these things combine to help give you the upper hand in the online marketplace in which we all operate today.