Website auditing: Everything that you need to know about it

When was the last time you audited your website? Whether you never did it, or it’s been some time since you tried it, or you are about to do it now, you must know that website auditing helps you optimize your SEO and conversion efforts to the highest degree. It helps you to analyze the performance of your website pages before you go full-throttle with the search engine optimization or overhaul your existing website design. It tests your website to understand its ability to meet your traffic requirements and to tweak changes that can prove beneficial in this area.

There are generally four areas that this process covers, including website performance, SEO, technical strength, and conversion rate. Here is a small brief on all these aspects.

Auditing website performance

In this part, the main focus remains on the users’ browsing behavior. You try to trace their activity on your website – where they go from home page to landing page to blog, etc. Based on what you detect, you try to understand the effectiveness of your website and its speed.

Since the quality of your website is the top priority in terms of traffic and lead generation, you have to evaluate it carefully. One of the critical ingredients in this respect is the website design. You need to know whether your site is user-friendly. Can they navigate it effortlessly to get the desired information? Assessing this factor can help you identify a straightforward website design for your users and enhance the conversion rates. While doing this, you need to consider a few things:
  1. The content quality of the menu items
  2. The simplicity and responsiveness of website design and page structure
  3. The placement of internal links, backlinks, and ads, etc.
  4. The intuitiveness of the conversion or checkout pages
  5. The number of distracting elements (if any ) on the pages as mentioned earlier

Another critical aspect of the website is its speed. At the time of auditing, you get an opportunity to have a look into the loading time of website pages and the response time of the server. If you detect slow speed, there can be an issue with the size of your pages, or HTML and CSS files. To tackle this, you may have to reduce the size of your pages and files.

Auditing SEO

The two aspects that you need to examine in this part include content quality and on-page optimization techniques. Whether or not your content contains all the information that a user may want to know can make a huge difference. It should be able to address their concerns, needs, and interests efficiently with its valuable and in-depth written material, and prompt them to take the desired action, such as buy a product or service or visit other pages. 

As far as search engine optimization goes, your focus has to be on the keyword targeting. Find out which keywords bring you more traffic and leads, and how well you target them in your content. Review of the URLs, meta tags, content body, and page titles is crucial to detect the use of relevant keywords for your business in them.

Auditing conversion rate

How many visitors come to your website, spend their time, and take action form a part of this. It’s a vital contributor to revenue generation also. To make sure the visitors translate into customers, you have to have a strong call-to-action, landing page, and marketing campaign. These factors bring you the necessary customer data so that you can get leads and enable you to keep them hooked to your content and business. At the time of evaluation, you need to look into the following things in this respect:

  • The number of marketing campaigns on landing pages
  • The effectiveness of each marketing effort for different visitors
  • The use of conversion forms and landing pages on the site
  • The optimization of the landing pages
  • The optimum use of conversion opportunities everywhere
  • The proper use of call-to-action efforts on the relevant pages

Auditing technical side

A website analysis is incomplete without taking into account its performance on the technical side. It is an essential step in boosting the user experience. There are various things that you explore at this stage. The first is the responsiveness of the website design on mobile as well as desktop devices. In recent times, you must have noticed the amount of weight Google gives to a mobile-friendly site when it comes to rankings. The second job is to inspect the website for broken links or error messages. These incidents can lead users to dead ends and spoil their experiences.

The third aspect that you consider in technical analysis is the URL. Lengthy or dynamic URLs can hurt your indexing endeavors and ultimately, affect the click-through rates. So, you have to make sure neither they overuse keywords nor session IDs nor placeholders.

Besides, there are a couple of more fields that deserve your attention here, including implementation of the canonical tag, sitemap files, and other different measures so that the website pages get crawled and indexed on Google and other search engines.

Also read: Conducted a website audit, What to expect?
Once the auditing work is done, and you made all the changes as required, you can expect to reap exponential benefits from all the efforts you put in here. You will be able to notice remarkable improvements in website optimization, search engine optimization, and conversion rates.

Since it’s both elaborate and clinical process, doing it alone or with an in-house team may not be adequate. Outsourcing this work to an external professional SEO agency, such as JJEXC, can be wise. They tend to be superior in skills and industry knowledge because of their extensive exposure to the concerned field. At the same time, they use all the latest techniques and SEO tools to complete their job with precision and within a specified time to make sure their clients don’t face any inconvenience. You can consult them regarding any concern you may have and let them know your goal so that they can align their efforts with it to serve you better.

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Eva Vergis

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