The same way your automobile baby needs some routine checkup, it’s the same way your website needs regular auditing.
What is a website audit?
This process entails analyzing, identifying, and correcting different website problems such as slow page loading speed, design/UX issues, technical issues, SEO issues, duplicate content/general content quality, broken links, and lastly, anything else hindering your websites from getting optimum traffic and conversions.
Here are steps to follow
1. Is your Website Design Appealing?
Website design can be defined as the general attractiveness of a website of visitor’s eyes. Note, through your design, a visitor will determine whether to click back (we all know the disadvantages of a high bounce rate) or stay on your website.
Here are questions to help you judge your page design:
- Are your pages structure easily distinguishable? Make sure your title and subtitle (H1-H6) help visitors to navigate the page quickly and easily.
- How is the color contrast? NB: Black text on a yellow page won’t make the cut, right?
- Is your text font appealing?
- How about the media inserted? Is it complimenting the content and attractive?
- 49% of website visitors do it on mobile devices. So, is your website design optimized for mobile devices?
- Is your navigation bar elaborate enough?
- Hope your website has no annoying ad pop-ups; if you have them, that’s a disadvantage.
- Are there enough and straightforward call-to-action (CTA) on your pages?
Such are must check tips to help keep your visitor glued to your website and convert them into customers.
2. Choose an excellent website auditing tool
A website audit is an overwhelming task. But doing it manually can prove more hectic. Take for example, a website with thousands of backlinks, pages, and hundreds of images to check. Doing that manually is close to impossible.
That is why you need an excellent website auditing tool. Today, we have both paid (premium) and free website auditing tools. For example, SEMRush and Ahrefs are premium tools, while Ubbersuggest is a free site auditing tool.
With any site audit tool, you can do the following:
- Check for off-page and on-page SEO problems
- Identify broken external or internal links, not forgetting broken files
- Analyze page loading speed, robot.txt issues, and lastly, general page errors
3. Find & Fix all Technical Errors
A technical error audit on your website is meant to help a site run smoothly and improve its user-friendliness. By fixing any technical errors, your visitors will always get to the page they wish to fast, easy, and experince no broken links.
Once a technical audit is done, the following are major issues you might come along and correct:
- Improve HTTP status: this auditing check on your website SSL certificate determines whether the site is secure and safe for the user.
- Crawl errors: any page that search engine bots are unable to crawl is identified and fixed.
- Broken image links: this ensures any media used for eye appealing or content enhancing shows up when clicked onto or when the page is opened.
4. Identify & Fix SEO Issues
Website SEO audits entail several technical operations to help your website rank well on search engines and make your content more visible.
Again, this website audit can be overwhelming if you’re planning to do it manually. But, auditing tools such as SERP keyword tracker, among other named tools, make it hustle-free. You thus remain with issue fixing the problems identified by the website audit tool.
Some of the leading SEO issues that audit tool can help with are:
- Searching for primary and secondary keywords and track how the metrics are fairing
- Identify and help fix content tags such as description tags, meta tags, title tags, and image alt tags
- Check and fix broken links to help in improving SEO ranking
- Help track how a website is doing in general from keyword ranking volumes, page traffic, exit, and entrance pages
5. Check Your Content Quality
Remember, the content posted on your website is what visitors are after, and it’s the same content that will convert them into customers.
First, the content posted on your pages should be up-to-date. Secondly, anything posted on your pages must toe in-line with the page goal. For example, if it’s the home page, it must direct visitors on various other pages, i.e., a contact page.
Lastly, for blogs, the content should be well structured in an inverted pyramid style. Meaning, the most vital point should come first. Also, the spellings, grammar, CTAs, and bulleted points (if need be) should all be well structured.
Take-Home
People confuse SEO auditing, such as keyword metrics, for a full website audit; but, there is more to website audit than just keywords. A comprehensive website audit leaves no stone unturned. It checks from SEO, design/UX, and technical errors; until your website begins to perform at an optimum level.
