Posted on 26th April, 2023

Website Audit: A Comprehensive Guide

If you own a website, you must ensure it works seamlessly. Otherwise, people may become frustrated and abandon your website. Furthermore, search engines can detect when your website isn’t functioning properly and will steer users elsewhere. Therefore, understanding how to audit a website is crucial.

Regular website audits can help you guarantee that your website is functioning properly. Your visitors will have an easier time obtaining the information they require this way. To conduct a proper website audit, you need to hire SEO services. However, it would be best to learn thoroughly about website audits. So, keep reading this blog and get comprehensive knowledge. 

What is a Website Audit?

A website audit involves checking your website’s components. You need to ensure that your website operates perfectly. It’s also good to look at your competitors to ensure your website exceeds the competition.

Once a website is operating, people tend to pay little attention to it. In reality, that’s not the case. You need to update your content regularly. If your search results rankings are lower, you may need to adjust some keywords and phrases.

Advantages of a Website Content Audit

Depending on the extent of your website, a content audit can take significant time. Yet, an effective audit will improve your website in a variety of ways, including:

Identifying Issues in Your Website Content

 When you analyze your content assets, you may start to solve performance concerns, replace broken links, and improve the accessibility of your site. These improvements will enhance your site’s search value and make it more desirable to new and returning users.

Finding Content Repurposing Possibilities

Beneficial, current information improves site usability, search ranking, and visitor loyalty. Nevertheless, creating content from scratch is only sometimes necessary when you have blog entries, contributed articles, and other marketing collateral that may be reused to achieve specific goals.

Identifying and Correcting Content Gaps

An audit provides an inventory of your website’s material and exposes places where the site needs more information from what your audience is looking for. By identifying the site’s content gaps, you become better prepared to develop fresh content that provides value to your site and your business.

Content Quality Assessment

The quality of your existing content should be evaluated during your website content audit. Google’s website crawlers are aware of repeated, brief, and valuable material and can penalize your site in search rankings for it.

Enhancing Your Data Structure 

You may have excellent material on your website, but it is only useful if available. Utilize relevant analytics data, such as search phrases, to figure out how to make your most compelling content easily accessible to both your audience and search engines.

How to Do a Website Audit?

Manual site auditing is a lot of labour that even experienced SEO professionals struggle with. The work is significantly more difficult to complete for older and larger websites. You should hire SEO Services for the job. However, you should learn the process in this case

A website will take longer to load if there are more pages and resources to audit. This is where audit tools come in handy, while a manual edition is still required for an effective audit.

Choose an Audit Tool

There are numerous website auditing tools available nowadays, like SEMRush and Ahrefs. Other than that Screaming Frog and Sitebulb provide exclusive audit services as well. These products are expensive but have the finest reputation for being detailed, accurate, simple to use, and all-encompassing. Although free audit tools are available, choosing a premium solution is recommended for more capabilities and dependability.

Each of these enables you to do the following:

  • Examine your website for any technical issues.
  • Determine on-page and off-page SEO problems.
  • Examine for broken files and broken internal or external linkages.
  • Examine page errors, page load speed concerns, and pages blacklisted by robots.txt to identify poor or duplicate content.
  • The best way to uncover any website faults and generate a report of problems that need to be solved is to use an SEO tool (or several).

Check the URL 

Now that you’ve chosen a site audit tool enter your website’s URL into the site auditor. The site auditor will next crawl your website, looking for and reporting faults in detail. Bear in mind that each tool displays the results somewhat differently.

You will be able to more readily determine what needs to be addressed and tick items off as you go if you have a report on hand. Most reports allow you to search by category, making it simple to go from one issue to the next.

Detect Technical Errors

Your final audit tool report will include a list of technical errors. Your technical faults have the most significant impact on SEO. However, even if SEO is a low priority for your website, resolving these issues will help it function more efficiently and be more user-friendly.

Some technical errors include Errors in Crawling, HTTPS Security Status, Page and Site Load Times, and Mobile Compatibility. Also, Broken Images, File Robots.txt, and Broken Hyperlinks are some of the technical errors you might find.

Determine SEO Problems

As previously said, a technical issue can frequently overlap with an SEO issue. These concerns greatly influenced SEO in many ways. We will put anything that should have been covered in the technical component of the site audit in this area.

Typical concerns discovered during an SEO audit include the following:

  • Duplicate title tags, lengthy or short titles and in some cases when titles are missing.
  • Meta descriptions that are duplicated, short, prolonged, or absent
  • Duplicated, prolonged, short or missing title text or Image alt text.
  • The Google Analytics code needs to be included.
  • If Headings including H2, H3 are presence or absence.
  • Schema.org needs to be included or updated. microdata
  • Lack of optimized internal links and anchor text.

The site auditor will specify the issues and how they should be solved. This could include rewriting page names, writing longer meta descriptions, adding H2s, and other changes.

Although some of these errors may look minor, they will have an impact on the SEO of your site. Furthermore, it would be best to accurately target your focus keywords by adding them to your title tags, meta descriptions, etc.

Examine Design and User Experience

To continue driving traffic, examining your website design and user-friendliness is critical. These factors influence how a user interacts with your website, connects with you, and stays on your website. These results will decide whether or not your clients convert when they visit your website.

When determining how well your design and user-friendliness are doing, there are various signs to consider. Site navigation and page depth, for example, will indicate whether or not your site is straightforward to use and how easy it is for people to find what they are looking for. We strongly advise that most of your material be located within three clicks of the homepage.

Customers are more likely to convert when you make it simple for them to find what they’re looking for on your website. If your site navigation employs unclear jargon, your content is buried in your website, or your design is in shambles, your users may become frustrated and quit your website before completing a call-to-action.

Examine the Website’s Content

As you may have heard, content is king. A good SEO strategy is not the place to cut corners. Throughout your entire website audit, it will determine which pages rank for your target keywords and which pages may not. Furthermore, it will identify any pages with shallow or duplicate material.

Finally, each page on your website should have a purpose. The material on each page should be prepared with that specific objective in mind.

Here are some practices that can be beneficial for your SEO content:

  • The content adheres to the general goal and purpose of the page.
  • The content is concise and valuable to users.
  • Content includes well-researched keywords that correspond to search intent. Content is well-organized and structured per SEO best practices.
  • There are no spelling or grammar errors.
  • There is no “filler” content (i.e., all content serves a purpose)
  • As needed, content includes bullet points, numbered lists, and images.
  • The content has been mobile-optimized (short paragraphs with white space)
  • Add internal links to relevant pages and external links to trustworthy websites.
  • The content is unique and has not been replicated or plagiarized.

Create a List of All Site Problems

Last, you should compile a complete list of all the site issues that must be addressed. This will keep you organized and allow you to cross items off your list. As previously said, most tools will provide a digital report to check off as you go and basic advice on resolving the difficulties. You may also share the checklist with other team members, making it simple to demonstrate the need for a new website.

A checklist of all technical, SEO, design, and content issues makes it simple to track what work is required. It keeps you focused on the topic, urging you to direct your attention where it should be and ensuring you don’t overlook any vital aspects.

Summing Up

Hopefully, by now you are familiar with webpage audits and how to conduct them. The process is indeed complicated and you must hire SEO services from companies like Futuristic Bug to help you out and save your time and money.

 

Get started now

Let your expectations meet our expertise

In order to establish your brand/business, you first need to acquire a strong online presence. And, we being quite proficient with our web design and development process, can help you amplify your brand successfully.