A well-performed website is crucial to any successful online business. However, many people still do not know how to achieve better website performance. The quickest way to see a website’s most significant performance improvements is to conduct a website audit and make the necessary adjustments to optimize results. This article will show you how to audit a website in 14 simple steps to improve your SEO and user experience.
What Is A Website Audit?
A website audit is an in-depth website analysis to verify its functionality (including page speed, technological problems, and user experience) and search engine visibility.
Doing a website audit can help you assess all the elements influencing your website’s visibility and identify underlying problems affecting its functionality. In addition, you can discover some helpful tips to improve your website’s operation, boost traffic, and enhance client engagement.
5 Types Of Website Audits
There are many types of website audits. Still, we just mention the five main types:
SEO Audit
A page SEO audit examines all the elements affecting your website’s performance in search engine results. It considers how closely your site adheres to SEO principles, content, link profile, structured data, accelerated mobile pages (AMP), and security.
SEO audits frequently examine the following:
- Keywords
- Content
- Metadata
- Image and video optimization
- Redirections
- Outbound and inbound links
- Internal linking
- User journey
- Goal conversion
- Structured data
- Speed
- Page and domain authority
- JavaScript and CSS
- Indexation
You can utilize some SEO audit tools to conduct these audits. Besides, using Google Analytics and Search Console is also a useful way to extrapolate website performance data for analysis. In some cases, using a SEO audit service can be more beneficial. They will help you conduct a more thorough investigation and give the outcomes of the SEO tools more context by including these two platforms in the assessment.
Content Audit
A content audit is a procedure for methodically going through and evaluating every content on your website. The ultimate goal is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy.
Depending on the size, a website content audit could take a few hours to several months. But eventually, a good evaluation will improve your website in a number of ways.
Below is a typical content audit checklist:
- Content complies with the page’s goal
- Users are clear about what content delivers.
- There are no grammatical or typographical errors.
- Review the most popular and effective pages and promptly update the content.
- Read the comments and respond to them.
- Consider the content structure, including the use of blocks, bullets, space, and illustrative images when designing.
- Use heat maps to observe how readers respond to the content and Google Analytics to determine the typical number of pages visited per session.
Technical Audit
This is a type of on-site audit. It considers all the elements that affect how search engine robots index, access, and crawl a website.
Technical audits frequently concentrate on issues that are not always apparent to a user but that can significantly affect how well a website performs, such as:
- Page errors
- Broken links
- Loading speed
- Indexation issues
- Image size
- URL structure
- Web Safety
- Sitemap
- Backlink profile
- JavaScript and CSS
Most technical audits are performed by passing a website through a website audit tool. These tools range in strength, but for a comprehensive technical audit, you should use one that can examine every website page, including subdomains and PDF pages, and find any of the issues mentioned above in some depth.
Design Audit
A design audit is an ideal method for examining a website’s User Experience (UX). This audit type concentrates on how the end user utilizes the website and whether it has up-to-date standards and is distinctive enough to stand out.
Below are some criteria that design audit looks at:
- User Interface
- Page structure and scalability
- Mobile first
- Navigation
- Media usage
- Typography
- Interactive elements ( chatbot, click-to-call, QR code, etc.)
- Language
- Color schemes
Competitive website audit
Around 80% of businesses believed competitive audits necessary for their company’s growth. You need to know what your competitors are doing to ensure that your company stands out from the crowd. And one of the useful ways is analyzing your competitors’ websites to develop strategies for improving business performance.
Examining a rival’s website is essentially the same as your own. Remember that a website’s content is a baseline for a proper assessment. Before auditing the content of the competitors, you should first take a quick look at their websites to get a sense of their online strategy. It would help if you kept an eye on the following:
- Audience
- Formats
- Nature and quantity of the material
- Publishing routine
- Language, particularly the tone and intonation
- Contributors, ideally with names and numbers
- Distinctive characteristics
- General perception
Co-Founder & General Manager @ ROI Digitally
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