Are you finished implementing all the SEO strategies and still not seeing any improvement in your rankings? It’s time to get down to work and conduct a website audit to check for technical errors. Without further ado, let’s begin with a comprehensive guide to website audits. However, please note that the steps mentioned here will provide you with an introductory understanding of the whole process. Once you complete your first website audit, you can dive deeper into the minute details.
Heads up – this may seem overwhelming, so remember to take it one step at a time.
What is a Website Audit?
A website audit is a process of assessing how well your webpage is performing before making significant changes to improve search engine results or revamp the site. By conducting an audit, you can determine if your website is optimized to attract the desired traffic and gather insights on how to enhance it to achieve your goals.
Types of Website Audits:
There are six types of website audits:
1. Competitive Website Audit: This type of audit involves monitoring your competitors’ online activities. It helps identify opportunities that your brand might be overlooking.
2. Links Audit: A links audit examines the web address source, domain, and anchor text to determine if your page is receiving value and equity (“link juice”). It analyzes the links pointing to your website to identify any issues or opportunities for improvement in your backlink profile. By evaluating your links, this audit helps optimize your site for ranking with your desired keywords.
3. Conversion Audit: A conversion optimization audit focuses on identifying and improving a website’s conversion problems. It involves examining how visitors reach your website and where they come from.
4. Social Media (SM) Audit: This audit involves checking each social media account to ensure they align with your company’s branding, using consistent images, logos, and tone of voice. It also assesses the performance of each page and provides insights to better understand your audience and improve social media engagement.
5. SEO Website Audit: An SEO website audit covers aspects like keyword usage, content, metadata, page speed, user experience, and video optimization. While you can perform an SEO audit independently, hiring an agency might provide more comprehensive answers in less time. To conduct an SEO website audit, assess all the pages on your website using website audit tools to evaluate various SEO metrics like crawling, indexing, security, usability, and other technical issues that may impact your site’s ranking in search results.
6. Data Privacy (Audit): A data privacy audit ensures that your website adheres to privacy laws and provides a secure environment for visitors. Search engines look for privacy-related pages to determine if a website is trustworthy.
Website Audit Checklist:
Before conducting a website audit, make sure you have the following tools:
– Content Management System (CMS): This will allow you to access the backend of your website, such as WordPress.
– A mobile device: This is necessary for conducting manual testing as part of the audit.
– Google Analytics: Use it to identify pages to audit based on traffic and goal performance. Keep in mind that Google takes about a month to collect data.
– Google Search Console (GSC): This tool is essential for content and technical SEO audits. You can use it to request reindexing, submit sitemaps, and more.
– Page speed calculators: Tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix are helpful for assessing page speed.
– Image compressor: Use tools like Tinypng.com or themeisle.com to compress images.
– SEO software: If you want more in-depth SEO metrics, consider using tools like Ahrefs, Moz Pro, Screaming Frog, SEMrush, etc. Some of these tools offer free trials or services for a limited number of links.
– Accessibility audit tools: Tools like WAVE or webaccessibility.com can help with accessibility audits.
– Website graders: Grader tools provide guidance and simplify results, making it easier for non-SEOs to understand the findings.
How to Conduct a Website Audit?
1. The First Step: Keep it Light
Start by conducting a surface-level audit of your website’s core pages, including the home page, services/products page, about us page, contact us page, blog posts, 404 error page, and navigation. This audit focuses on identifying apparent errors, ensuring accurate business information, and maintaining a consistent brand feel. It also helps address minor issues and errors quickly.
2. Content Inspection (SEO Content Audit)
Assess the condition, quality, and relevance of your content. Ensure that it is correct, reliable, and SEO-ready. The aim is to create content that appeals to both online audiences and search engines. Consider factors such as website traffic, keyword targeting, meta descriptions, titles, images, quality, and links.
3. Technical SEO Website Audit
Conduct a technical SEO audit to ensure that search engines can locate and crawl your website effectively. This audit focuses on providing information that assures Google of your website’s security, speed, and trustworthiness. Factors to consider include indexing, sitemaps, robot.txt files, website structure, and backlink profile.
By following these steps and using the appropriate tools, you can conduct a comprehensive website audit to identify technical errors and improve your website’s performance in search engine rankings.
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