Websites have become an essential aspect of the current digital era. It helps businesses build a strong online presence, creating opportunities for success and growth. The company is also able to reach a large audience around the world regardless of the business size. While creating a website is easy, maintaining it can be challenging. Many technical and maintenance issues may affect your web page, impacting its search engine rankings.
Luckily, you can conduct a website audit to identify mistakes that can negatively affect your website status. It also ensures you keep up to date with the ever-changing technology of search engine optimization strategies. You must hire an SEO expert to create a website audit checklist to ensure they scrutinize every aspect of a website and its effectiveness.
So, if you are having trouble with your website or it’s not bringing the correct conversion rate. This article highlights all the information you need about website audits to help you make an informed decision.
What is a Website Audit?
A website audit is a comprehensive examination of your website’s effectiveness which involves checking for bugs, SEO issues, or technical errors that can affect its performance. The process results in an analysis report that helps a business address problems that can hinder the growth and success of a business. With that said, here are different audits that scrutinize specific web pages.
Technical Website Audit
A technical audit is the fundamental aspect of a website since it analyzes all the factors that enable a site to run smoothly. It checks if all the webpages are easily crawlable by checking issues related to XML sitemaps, robots.txt files, hreflang errors, and canonical problems. This ensures your site is well-optimized and ranks high on various search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
SEO Website Audit
A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) website audit is an evaluation of your site search ranking performance. It examines keyword density, goal conversions, metadata, site traffic pattern, and incoming and outgoing links. It also analyzes video and image optimization, which may help develop better SEO strategies.
Content Website Audit
Writing content for your website is one thing, but having quality pieces that spike the attention of your prospects is another. For this reason, doing a regular content audit for your website is vital to ensure it’s unique and brings qualified leads to your business.
So, if you are still confused about this matter, here is why a website audit is essential.
To Assess Technical errors
Suppose you wonder why your website ranking and organic traffic suddenly drop. In that case, your website might have technical errors affecting its conversion rate. The only way to know which issue you are dealing with is to do a comprehensive website audit. You might not know about using audit tools, but plenty of companies can help you check if your website has technical errors.
Search engines such as Google offer free SEO audit tools such as Google search console to examine technical issues affecting your page performance. Some of the technical errors a site audit tool can find include;
Crawlability issues
Search engines use bots to crawl your web pages to gather information. But, if all the pages of your site have issues, the website crawler will not index hence failing to rank it. Thankfully, an SEO audit tool can assist in noticing crawlability issues on various pages of your website, which might lead to the success of your business.
Indexing Problems
Do you know what website indexing is? If not, it is a process done by various search engines after uploading website content, enabling the site to appear after a search. In simple terms, it tries to understand the topics on your site and match them with searches, thus directing people to your website.
A site with indexing problems doesn’t appear on search engine results pages hence the need for an SEO audit to solve such a problem. Some SEO errors related to indexing include; failing to create and submit a sitemap to the Google search console, blocking indexation, and the wrong configuration of the robot.txt file.
Website Speed
Website speed is an essential metric for search engines like google because they currently focus on the user experience. This means if your site speed is faster, you will rank high, while when the speed is slow, it will negatively affect your search engine results page.
As a matter of fact, research shows that website speed is a critical factor in about 85 percent of Americans and 88% of Britons. Furthermore, the same report reveals users find slow websites irritating, and they might have a negative attitude toward a brand with a bad site.
For this reason, it is best to conduct a website audit using a free version of tools readily available online. You will be able to assess your website speed and fix it to improve the search engine rankings of your site. Most importantly, SEO experts will use three core web vitals, Cumulative Layout Shift, First Input Delay, and Largest Contentful Paint, to examine the site’s performance.
Site Architecture problems
Site architecture in a website is the hierarchical arrangement of web pages. It assists users in efficiently navigating the site and helps search engines to crawl for search engine results. Therefore, if your website has such a technical issue, it makes it challenging for a crawler to navigate the site and hence will not show on various search engine searches.
So, a website audit tool will analyze site architecture problems which will help you devise a strategy to fix them. To maintain a better website structure, use subfolders and short URLs to make it simple and easy to maneuver.
Coding Issues
Sometimes, website owners work with very tight budgets and end up working with unqualified developers. This might lead to coding issues that confuse search engine crawlers, slowing your site’s performance. For example, having duplicated meta tags might affect the SEO score lowering your conversion rate.
Consequently, getting an SEO expert to undertake a website audit through the various SEO tools to identify code issues is crucial. Most of them are free such as ahrefs webmaster tools and the google search console platform.
Redirects and Errors
When a website has redirects and error issues, it affects its speed performance which may ruin the site visitor’s experience. The 301, 302, and 404 errors might put them off, but you can hire an expert to conduct a website audit and write a comprehensive SEO report highlighting specific redirects and error issues.
To Identify a site’s on-page Issues
A website audit is helpful in terms of identifying on-page issues on a site. Several points can be resolved by conducting the audit, thus enabling you to have a better ranking site. For example, it is possible to fix the meta description and page titles, therefore, have on-page optimization. A Seo expert ensures that the meta titles have between 35 to 70 characters while meta descriptions should have 160 characters.
They also check if you have included the right keywords to ensure your content and site rank well on various search engines. You can also optimize your header and content by conducting an on-page audit. Optimizing the title allows you to set the headline through keyword research. Additionally, the content should contain the keyword. By doing these checks, you will note whether your website content is relevant and of high quality. It helps improve keyword rankings and ensures that the readers enjoy your content.
Furthermore, an SEO expert will have a chance to evaluate whether the current content aligns with your content strategy and thus make adjustments. This is equally important when crawlers visit the page. Fixing the on-page issues on your website will ultimately give search engines and readers a better experience.
An SEO website audit report May Help you to Come up with a Better SEO Strategy
A website owner going through their content and web pages every day might create the perception that it is perfect. However, the site might fail to rank well on search engines, thus affecting the performance of your business.
For this reason, it is best to have an independent SEO expert conduct a website audit using a free online tool such as google lighthouse. It might help you to know and understand the strength and weaknesses of your site. And by doing so, you will be able to develop a better website content strategy, creating more significant opportunities for your brand.
Moreover, quality and unique website content may boost website visitors who may be qualified leads, increasing your sales, so if you are still worried about how you can analyze your website’s SEO to know which strategy is working and what you should drop. It is advisable to get a team of SEO experts who will provide a detailed SEO report that can assist your business in creating better strategies.
An SEO audit tool Might Assist in assessing the link Profile
Many links play an essential role in a site’s performance that a website SEO checker can scrutinize. It helps assess if there are broken links or low-quality links that can jeopardize the credibility of your website. Also, an SEO site checkup ensures no internal links lead to empty or error 404 web pages.
In addition, hiring SEO experts for a website audit can assist you in realizing common problems related to internal linking, such as site taxonomy. This is the arrangement of links that determines the direction of web crawlers in various search engines. Improper internal linking will negatively affect your site authority, leading to poor ranking performance.
Besides, if you have web pages, you’ve hyperlinked and do not wish search engines to crawl. An SEO analysis will show them which you can tag with nofollow links, preventing such pages from affecting your ranking performance.
Furthermore, when it comes to backlinks pointing to other people’s sites, an SEO audit will determine the high-quality links from the low quality that can make google penalize your site.
A Website SEO audit assists you in identifying your Competitors
For each business, there are a thousand sellers in the digital market. They share the same buyers, but some stand out while others fail to attract prospects to their websites. This is because every website owner uses different SEO strategies that attract customers to their brand. Therefore, hiring SEO experts from a reputable company with results to show to improve your tactics is crucial. It might help boost search traffic that might convert to sales.
You might be asking yourself why it is crucial to do competitor research through an SEO audit. Well, it is because you need to be unique and have the chance of attracting a broader online audience for your small or huge website. Furthermore, research shows that competitor analysis helps businesses make better decisions and stay ahead. The process can be done by auditing another person’s website through the available SEO audit tools.
Moreover, the report also explains that it is easy to conduct competitor research due to the current web technology, which has pushed business operations to online platforms.
Conclusion
Conducting a website audit is essential for businesses looking to build a solid online presence. And besides helping site owners to identify errors that affect their ranking performance, an SEO audit allows them to explore other opportunities, thus increasing their reve
So, regardless of the size of your website, it is best to do a regular website audit to ensure your site is well-optimized. However, site audits can be challenging without the proper knowledge and guidance, even when using a free SEO audit tool. Therefore, hiring qualified personnel who will scrutinize your website’s elements is essential, thus increasing its performance. You can enjoy organic traffic, which might lead to sales.
References
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/07/link-tagging-and-link-spam-update
