If you have a website, you have definitely heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But, how do you measure the health of your website and its SEO? This is where a website audit comes into play. A website audit checks the health of your website and has the power to point out any SEO or User Experience (UX) issues your website may be facing.
You see, your website is the source of traffic, lead generation and conversion and with this in mind, you need a site audit to ensure you are constantly bettering your website visibility and user experience. So, you may have SEO tactics in place but it is vital you perform site audits across your website to amend any possible issues and increase your website ranking.
It is also important to note that there is a difference between a SEO audit and a website audit. You see, a SEO audit will help you discover the problems that are affecting your search engine rankings while a full website audit will discover the entire performance and health of your site (including your SEO performance). This is why a website audit is vital - it covers all elements of your website to ensure search engine performance and greater user experience.
In this article, we take a look at what a website audit is, what you should be monitoring in your website audit and the benefits of auditing your site.
Let’s dive right in!
What is a Website Audit?
As stated previously, a website audit crawls your website and checks the performance of your site in its entirety. The results help you identify any possible issues that need to be addressed which in turn, help you better your SEO objectives.
There are a variety of online tools, some free while some come at a cost, which marketers can use when auditing a website. What is important is that you find an auditing tool or auditing experts that can create reports and consistently keep track of your website's progress. The auditing tool you choose to use should also be able to provide information regarding:
- Page speed
- Internal and external links
- Backlinks
- Duplicate content
When beginning your website audit journey, it is important you place emphasis on the above data. This is because if any of the above insights are slightly off, your website will begin to lose its strong search engine ranking and users will drop off your website.
With this in mind, we will take you through some of the most important elements of website and website SEO auditing in 2023.
5 Actionable Tips for Website and SEO Auditing in 2023
Finding out what is working and what isn't working about your website and SEO can be time-consuming. Therefore, it is important you invest in auditing tools to help you get the results you require in a timely manner and identify opportunities to increase your conversions as soon as possible. However, if you are willing to perform these tasks without a program, the below steps will help you do this on your own for optimal results.
Below, we take a look at what you should be looking out for when performing a website audit:
- Increase Page Speed: If a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, most users will click off the website and view your competitor's website instead. Your website audit should always measure your page speed and report on the performance of your page speed when using desktop and mobile devices. Once you have an understanding of what isn't working, your website team can take the initiative to better load time and page speed. There are a variety of tools available that will complete this for you including Google’s PageSpeed insight. A slow website will impact customer retention, lower your page rankings, increase bounce rate and lower your online conversion significantly. This is why you need to measure your website loading time and page speed - and amend accordingly.
- Website Indexing: When performing your website audit you need to make sure that search engine powerhouse, Google, is indexing your website. Indexing refers to the collecting and storing of information to facilitate accurate website information retrieval, helping your website rise up the Google search engine results. So, how do you know if your website is being indexed by Google? This is where coding comes into play. Open a tab in your web browser and write this simple line of code: site:yourwebsiteurl.com. The results you should see will be: site:https//yourwebsitename.com or alternatively, site:yourwebsitename.com. If the search engine is not able to crawl your webpage then you will see no results. In order to amend this issue, you can enable “crawling” to your site. One of the reasons you want Google to crawl your site is to feature-rich snippets in a search result page. Google uses structured data to understand the content of your site. As a result, your content may be eligible for rich snippets.
- Content Analysis and Better User Experience (UX): User Experience, referred to as UX, is vital for the ranking of a website in the search engine results. The UX refers to how a user engages with and experiences your website. By having a good UX, you keep the user on your website for longer, which not only helps with rankings but also leads to greater conversions. So, how do you test your website UX? This comes down to on-page SEO. Your on page SEO starts with your website theme, aesthetic, colors as well as your site's readability (this includes content, keywords, Call-To-Actions, headers and font size.) By investing in a website audit tool you will be able to test your UX and on-page optimization to make sure all elements are up to scratch and if they are not, you are able to make the relevant changes.
- Page Performance: Google analytics is a free web tool that can report on the overall performance of your site. The tool also tracks the activities on all your web pages within your website. Your page performance analytics will highlight your website bounce rate, statistics, page visitors and more. This will help you figure out which pages are gaining the most traction and which are not performing well. Once you have this information you are able to make the relevant changes to improve your user experience and website rankings.
- Search Engine Optimization: As stated previously, a website audit should also analyze your SEO efforts. A full website audit should highlight any missing SEO requirements you need to help you rank in the search engines. For example, you should check on keyword distribution, title tags, URLs, meta description and a variety of other factors that make up SEO. We have previously covered your on-page optimization but you also need to take an in-depth look at your off-page SEO efforts, one of the most important being backlinks. A website backlink refers to another website that links its users to your website. Your SEO audit needs to highlight whether the sites referring back to your website are "spammy" because irrelevant backlinks will hurt your search engine rankings. By performing a website audience that investigates your backlinks, you can remove the links that can harm your rankings.
These are just 5 of the most important elements you should focus on when you begin your website audit journey.
The Wrap Up
By reviewing all of the above on a consistent basis your website will soar in the search engine results and your website visitors will have a positive brand experience - converting them along the way.
How We Can Help
As a leader in SEO, web development and digital marketing, Nexa offers a free and instant website audit. In order to obtain your website audit, simply visit our website audit page, here.
Our free website audit will provide you with the following data:
- Any technical issues that need to be addressed such as page load times.
- Missing header information that will negatively impact your website.
- Any content requirements based on the search terms are important for your business.
- Website code analysis.
- The current performance and user activity related to your website.
Please feel free to download the report upon completion. If you have any questions relating to this, please complete the form on this page and one of our experts will come back to you.