Failing to regularly check your website for SEO and higher conversions is not an option! According to econsultancy.com, only 2% of website owners are satisfied with their conversion rate and 77% of online businesses are neutral or dissatisfied. (Learn website audit and SEO with Digital Marketing Course in Delhi) Other interesting statistics from their report and the ones we show here are:
When was the last time you gave control to your website? If you’ve never checked your website, it’s been a while since you did, or if you’re planning a new website design in the near future, use it as a checklist for your website. To ensure that your website is prepared for optimal search engine marketing and conversion results. Companies that are improving their conversions typically use 35% more methods than their counterparts who are not seeing conversion rates change positively.
What Is a Website Audit?
A website audit is an examination of page performance prior to large-scale search engine optimization (SEO) or website redesign. Checking your website can determine if it is optimized to meet your traffic goals or not, and if not, how you can improve them to improve performance. The classification factor has changed dramatically.
The website is optimized for mobile devices and optimized for user intent. Every search engine has its own algorithm which is regularly tweaked with updates, but let’s face it, currently, Google will drive most of your traffic. But algorithms are one thing and it’s quite another when your competitors do a better job of ranking than you.
This is where website auditing comes into play. Regular website checks will help you check the health of your website, how it is ranking and will prevent it from harming the flow of eligible traffic to your site.
Before we get into the things to look out for when checking your website, let’s take a look at some of the benefits of doing it. Here are some of the key benefits from a marketing perspective.
Before we get into the things to consider when checking your website for excessive conversions online, let’s look at a few benefits from an advertising perspective:
1. Website Performance Optimization
Website Audit allows you to assess the effectiveness of your online website in terms of conversion and lead generation. You may discover some opportunities to skip to show traffic to leads or sales.
Examples include including a few powerful call-to-actions [CTAs] or one of the best we understand: send a cart abandonment email.
As a result, an audit gives you the opportunity to inspect the robustness of your website’s technical framework and infrastructure, assess how search engine friendly your website is, and determine how well your website is search engine friendly. and find content on your website.
2. Search Engine Optimization
By conducting a website audit, you can identify any missed SEO opportunities and fix any mismatched or poorly executed SEO pitfalls (e.g. keyword stuffing, exact match anchor text links, etc.) in your website content.
This also allows you to focus your SEO efforts on users first and then on search engines. This protects you from the constant changes in search ranking algorithms, which means you don’t use bad practices just to appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). With website audits, you can spot any SEO and content errors throughout your website and get actionable recommendations to improve your SEO efforts.
3. Conversion Rate Optimization
A website audit also allows you to re-evaluate the effectiveness of your website in terms of lead generation and conversions. As a result, you’ll be able to discover previously overlooked opportunities to convert visitors to leads so you can add relevant CTAs, as well as identify gaps in your landing pages so you can optimize them to increase conversions.
4. Competitive Analysis
Performing a website audit will allow you to compare your website to competitor sites. You can analyze your ranking against competitors for keywords and determine potential new revenue sources. You can use a tool, such as the HubSpot website picker, to audit your competitors websites to gather more insights. You can find out how your competitors are attracting visitors and see how they are getting conversions. Ultimately, this will help you find new tactics and strategies for your site.
5. Identify Issues
When you do a website audit, you will be able to find issues that are plaguing your SEO and conversions. Maybe it’s broken links, hidden content, long page load times, or something else. Identifying these problems will help you solve the problems that are diverting traffic.
As you can see, evaluating the content and technical aspects of your website will open up opportunities to drastically increase the traffic and conversions that your website generates. Now that you know what a website audit is and why you should do it, let’s take a look at how to do it.
How to Conduct a Website Audit?
1. Run Your Website URL via a Site Audit Tool
Before you get started, you will need to discover an internet site auditing device that let you examine how your internet site is performing. When you operate a web website online audit software program to run your web website online via, you may get particular tips and check how your web page is performing.
2. Find Technical Errors
Once you have positioned your web page through an auditing tool, you may need to search for technical errors. These may be associated with performance, SEO, mobile, security, and more. The technical web page shape and setup of your web page play a massive position in how nicely your internet site plays for customers.
3. Identify SEO Problems
Now you may need to look at SEO related issues to improve your search engine rating. Maybe that’s searching for meta descriptions, looking for alt text in photos, etc.
4. Analyze the Design and UX
One of the things I like to look for in a website audit is the user experience. How does this design work for your customers? Some software has heatmaps of the parts of your design that get the most attention and what users are reading. This type of analysis lets you know how the overall design and user experience impact your visitors.
5. Evaluate Website Content
A website audit helps you evaluate website content, including blogs, web pages, etc. You want to know how your current pages stack up. Ask yourself, How well does my content rank in search engines? and Are my SEO and on-page performance in line with my traffic?
6. Generate a checklist of all site problems and recommended solutions
Finally, when conducting a website audit, it is important to have a place where you put a summary of all your findings. List site issues and recommended solutions so you can send this information to the appropriate teams. Now let’s dive into more specific details so you know what to look for in this website audit. Assessments to Make When Auditing Your Website.
But first, enter your website into the HubSpot website directory, this will give you a general overview of your website’s strengths so you can gauge your focus on each of the reviews that follow in this article.
1. Website Performance Assessment
The first part of your website audit should focus on how users navigate your website, from your homepage to blog posts, landing pages, and any intermediate related content. List your web pages and ask yourself the following questions to evaluate them in terms of optimization potential:
Is your website optimized for maximum usability?
The more visitors you get to your website, the more opportunities you have to generate leads and ultimately customers. But only if your website performs well. As you can imagine, just having a website does not guarantee results.
As part of determining the overall effectiveness of your website, your audit should verify that your site was designed with your visitors in mind. The design and general navigability of your website should match what a person is looking for on the site, such as more information on a business topic, resources, product/price information, testimonials, etc. A lot will depend on your person.
The main focus here is to make it easier for people to get the information they are looking for. As a result, the conversion rate tends to increase by itself.
To check the usability of your website, consider the following:
● Are all of our key business value propositions easily accessible via our main menu/navigation items?
● Do we have a simple but intuitive website and page layout? Make sure the page isn’t too cluttered; full of ads, CTAs, or links; or no internal connection at all.
● Is your conversion path and/or shopping cart or checkout process intuitive? Are there a lot of distractions along the way that can create friction for your site visitors?
How Is Your Website’s Overall Speed?
Is the page size too big and/or the page load time and server response are slow? Is your site down frequently? Site speed can be affected if image files are too large or HTML and CSS need to be cleaned, which can dramatically increase your site speed.
Ultimately, fast loading and optimized pages will increase visitor engagement, retention and conversions. To quickly check webpage loading times, download MozBar, a Moz toolbar that you can link to your browser for simple page analysis every time you visit a website.
2. SEO Assessment
Optimizing your website’s performance is key to retaining visitors, but the previous questions aren’t the only ones you should ask. You should also check the content you post to make sure it actually solves your visitor’s problem.
Is the content on your website of high quality?
When evaluating the quality of your content, think about it from the perspective of your target audience. Has this information satisfied me? Did he answer all my questions? Does that give me any relevant resources on this topic? Do I know what to do now? Keep in mind that high-quality content should meet the interests, needs, and concerns of your buyers; be interesting, well written and provide valuable, in-depth and detailed
information on a particular topic; and leave the next steps to the reader (such as calls-to-action, links to resources, etc.) If you’re still not sure if your content is high quality, rate it with this checklist: How do you know if your marketing content is really useful?
Is Your Website Search Engine Optimized?
Make sure all your web pages follow best practices for on-page SEO. To check your content for on-page SEO, perform a keyword analysis in which you do the following:
Review your analytics to examine keyword performance. Which keywords give you the biggest gains in traffic and leads? Evaluate how well you measure keyword performance in your content strategy. How much relevant content do you add to your website to target these keywords? Review on-page SEO basics, such as URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, and copy. Make sure keywords are included if applicable.
3. Conversion Rate Assessment
While high-quality search engine optimized content is a great way to increase your traffic, what happens once those visitors are on your website really matters. Unless of course, you don’t care about the conversion. Is Your Website Optimized for Lead Generation and Conversions?
This is where optimized calls-to-action (CTAs), marketing offers, and landing pages play an important role in your website’s performance. Not only do they give you opportunities to capture visitor information so you can follow up on leads, but they also keep your visitors engaged with your content and brand.
Ask yourself the following questions to check your website for maximum conversion potential:
How many marketing offers do I have in my content repository to place behind a landing
page?
- Do I have a variety of marketing offers that all my different buyers like? For starters, is there a landing page/conversion form on my website?
- How optimized is the landing page?
- Do I have opportunities for visitor conversions at different stages of the funnel
- Am I using the call to action effectively?
- Am I missing the opportunity to include a call to action on various pages of my website?
4. Technical Assessment
Once you’ve covered the three main goals of a website audit, it’s time to call in a developer or someone from your IT department for a technical assessment. You can also hire an outside agency, but be sure to do your homework first. Please note that there may be some carryover from the above three ratings of website performance, SEO and conversion rate. However, the technical review focuses on all three
to maximize user experience (UX).
Here’s what to keep in mind in the technical evaluation phase of your website audit…
Is Your Website Design Responsive?
Does your website have a responsive design? That is, is it a mobile-friendly website? The use of smartphones to access the internet continues to increase. In 2017, mobile devices accounted for half of all web page views worldwide. As a result, websites need to be compatible with this ever-increasing demand. For more information on mobile compatibility, see our Main Information Sheet for Mastering Mobile Marketing
Is your website error-free?
Are response code errors appearing all over your website when they shouldn’t? Recalling the 302, 404, and 500 level response codes can be helpful in telling users that something is wrong. However, the fact that this is happening also indicates that someone is not cleaning up broken links and thereby driving users into a dead end. Find these error messages and clean up your broken links. Tools like Google Webmaster Tools or Xenu`s Link Sleuth can be very helpful for this.
Is your website URL optimized?
Does your website have too long URLs due to keyword stuffing? Do they contain session IDs and/or do they include a lot of dynamic parameters? In some cases, these URLs are difficult for search engines to index and result in lower click-through rates from search results.
Does Your Website Have Too Much Flash or JavaScript?
Identify your navigation area that is fully Flash or JavaScript. Search engines have a hard time reading and accessing this, which can prevent your site from being indexed. Furthermore, these elements present a problem from a usability point of view. Visitors often look for very specific information when they visit your site; if they have to go through 10 seconds of visual recognition before they can find your hours of operation, you’ll be dealing with a rather frustrated visitor.
Is your site structure optimized for search engines?
We’ve talked about site structure in terms of access to content and usability for users, but it’s also important to ensure that the site structure is optimal for search engines. If pages on your site are not internally linked to other pages on your site, they are less likely to be indexed.
Are you determining how your web pages are crawled and indexed by search engines? This can be done using a variety of methods, including everything from robots and signalling files to sitemaps. These metrics allow you to guide search engines to the most useful content on your site.
Robots file or tag
The robots meta tag allows you to use a granular, page-specific approach to control how an individual page will be indexed and served to users in the results. Search results. These tags must be at the head of a given page. The robots.txt file, on the other hand, is a text file that allows you to specify how you want your site to be crawled.
Before crawling a web page, search engine crawlers usually request a robots.txt file from the server. In your robots.txt file, you can include sections for specific (or all) crawlers with instructions telling them what should and shouldn’t be crawled.
Public Sitemaps and XML
Your website must also contain public sitemaps and XML files. A public sitemap is a map that users can access to view pages on your website, such as the index of a book. XML Sitemaps for search engines to inspect pages added to your site, all in one place. The usual location for the sitemap.xml file is
www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml. An XML sitemap is something every website should have; it provides the ability to tell Google and other search engines which pages on your site you want to be crawled and indexed. Your website must also contain public sitemaps and XML files. A public sitemap is
a map that users can access to view pages on your website, such as the index of a book.
XML Sitemaps for search engines to inspect pages added to your site, all in one place. The usual location for the sitemap.xml file is www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml. An XML sitemap is something every website should have; it provides the ability to tell Google and other search engines which pages on your site you want to be crawled and indexed.
Are You Defining Canonicalization of Content?
The canonicalization of your website content is the last important technical consideration to make. To gain more control over how your URLs appear in search results and to minimize duplicate content issues, we recommend that you select the canonical (preferred) URL as your preferred version of the page. There are several ways in which you can indicate your preference to Google.
One of these methods is to define the canonical tag in an HTTP header of a page. Make sure someone checks that the canonical tag is properly implemented on the site by making sure it points to the correct page and that not every page points to the home landing page.
Website Auditing Checklist
Before you get started, consider using this basic website auditing checklist to make sure you’re researching all the necessary elements for your site’s performance, SEO, mobile, and security issues. Sample Website Audit
To sum it all up, I decided to do a website audit with one of my favourite bloggers, Christina Galbato. This website is functioning properly. SEO and mobile are doing very well. The main areas for improvement for this site are performance and security.
Conducting a Website Audit
It is important to establish an audit framework early on. Ideally, ask yourself questions that focus on the “How am I doing?” assessment. These questions can also include things like How does this compare to others, especially my competition?
Conclusion
Everyone knows that checking your website is essential if you want to maintain your SEO to get qualified traffic and convert those qualified visitors into paying customers. Market trends, competitors, search engine algorithms and best strategies are constantly changing.
Final Thought:
“That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.”
– Pearson’s Law
Read More: How To Improve SEO Ranking With Website Audit? 7 Factors To Consider!
