A Guide on How To Perform a Comprehensive But Simple Website Audit
In this digital age, almost all businesses have their own websites. But how do you know if your website is performing the way you want it to and delivering value to your business? One thing that you can do is to conduct a comprehensive but simple website audit.
A website audit is an analysis of the factors that affect the website’s performance. It can be done by comparing your website against industry standards and best practice guidelines to identify the areas that need improvements. A good website audit is one of the most important parts of your digital marketing strategy. This will tell you the factors that contribute to the success or failure of your website and possibly your business.
Simple Website Audit Checklist
1. Website Traffic
Website traffic is the number of visitors your website gets in a certain period of time. It is measured in visits or sometimes called users or sessions, depending on the analysis tool you’re using. Website visits tell you how effective you are at attracting people to your website. Some factors to consider when analysing website traffic are:
- Bounce rate. This is when a visitor leaves a page without interacting or visiting another page within a few seconds. It is usually (but not always) considered a bad thing because it often means the person didn’t find what they were looking for.
- Time on page. How long did a visit last? A website is usually more effective if a user stays longer on a page because it shows that they are interested in what your website is about
- Conversion rate. What percent of visitors completed a goal on your site? It could be downloading an offer, registering for a webinar, purchasing a product or completing a contact form.
2. User Behaviour
User behaviour is all the actions that a visitor takes on your website. It shows how users interact with different pages of your site. Where they click, tap and how they scroll. Most importantly, it shows where they stumble and drop off the page.
This data will give you an inside look at your audience perspective and what attracts them or makes them leave a page. More specifically, analysing user behaviour will help you:
- recognise what your audience wants
- know the struggles they encounter in your webpage and reason they leave
- know what your audience gravitates towards or ignores in your website
- analyse each page’s performance
- understand what actions visitors take on your website
3. SEO – On Page/Off Page
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is probably the most common factor analysed in a website audit. It can be divided into on page and off page, both impact your website ranking in the search engines.
On Page SEO. Basically, this is how you structure your website content. Some of the things you need to optimise when it comes to on-page SEO are:
- Title tags
- Meta Descriptions
- Headings
- URL structure
- Alt text for images
- Page load speed
- Page content
- Scheme Markup
- Internal linking
- Social tags
Off Page SEO. This happens when other websites or users link your content in their website or share them on social media. It is known as backlinking. Suffice to say, this is how Wikipedia dominates the ranking in almost all search engines. But how can you get backlinks to your website? Here are a few methods:
- The quality of your content is the most important. You have to make sure that people would want to link to your website by giving valuable and trusted information
- Making sure your content is shareable on social media
- Guest blogging on some related websites.
- Listing your website in relevant directories
4. Mobile Responsive
Most of your audience will likely view your website on their phone. Therefore, it is very important for your website to have a mobile responsive design. In order for your website to be considered mobile responsive it should:
- have text that is readable without zooming
- have enough space to tap the buttons or links
- not have horizontal scrolling
Optimising your website’s mobile responsiveness can greatly affect your audience’s browsing experience. Keep in mind that your site should look great on desktop, tablet and a mobile phone’s browser.
DID YOU KNOW?
Since July 2019, Google moved to mobile-first indexing which means that they predominantly use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking”.
5. Social Media
Social media plays a big part in promoting your website. Using the top social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter can greatly increase the traffic to your website.
Each SM platform works differently for each business. This is the reason why analysing your social media is very important. By doing this, you will know what works best for your business website. Here are some simple ways to review your website’s social media performance:
- Examine your social media profiles to make sure they appeal to your audience
- Make sure all of the details and information about your website is the same and up to date
- Follow up on your social media performance to see how you’ve grown. This can be done by
- Measuring the number of your followers and fans, your posting frequency and engagement.
- Reviewing what your competitors are doing
- Determine your goals for your social media platforms.
6. Content
To successfully do a website audit, a content audit is necessary. It is the process of analysing assets on your website such as landing pages and blog posts.
Content audits help in taking note of the areas in your website that need improvement. For example, optimising your blog posts to add keywords in your meta descriptions to improve your search engine rankings. Adding keywords to your content gives search engines clues about what your web page is about.
Paid Tools vs Free Tools for Simple Website Audit
A good website audit takes every element that affects a website’s ranking in search engines into consideration. It also offers insight and analysis to a website’s overall traffic and individual pages.
There are a lot of tools that you can consider when doing a website audit some are free and some charge a fee. There are a lot of great free tools which give you a lot of great information but if you have a large site or your website is key to your business, then you can consider investing in a paid tool, or have us to do the audit for you because we already use many of these paid tools.
1. SEMrush
Cost: Free – $99.95/mo for Pro
SEMrush is one of the most common free tools to use for keyword research. It has an elaborate dashboard that shows reports on the domain performance as a whole and their specific pages. It also offers an SEO toolkit. SEMrush also offers Analytics Reports that get insights into your competitors’ strategies through:
- Organic Research. See your competitors, best keywords, discover organic competitors, etc.
- Advertising Research. Analyze сompetitor ad budgets and keywords
- Display Advertising Tool. Target the right audience with Audience Insights
- Backlinks. Conduct a deep link analysis
- Keyword Research. Find the right keywords for SEO and PPC campaigns
- Traffic Analytics. Qualify leads, prospects, and potential partners.
2. Ahrefs
Cost: $99/mo for Lite Plan
AHrefts is a tool for keyword research and website audit. It has an advanced SEO resource that can analyse your website property. It can help you decide on the best content by producing keywords, links and ranking profiles for your website. AHrefs’ four major tools are:
- Site explorer – shows the performance of a specific page
- Content explorer– allows you to search the top-ranking web pages for specific keywords or topics.
- Keyword explorer – generates search volumes and click-through rates for a keyword.
- Site audit – reveals the technical issues for each of your website’s page level.
- Backlink analysis
3. Google’s Webmaster Tools
Cost: Free
- Fetch as Google. A tool that shows how Google sees a particular URL. The information given by this tool can help you optimise a page’s performance.
- PageSpeed Insight. An SEO tool that measures your page speed in both desktop and mobile devices.
- Google Analytics. An excellent tool for tracking what visitors do on your site, where they come from and who they are.
- Google Search Console. Great for looking for errors and finding search terms people use to find your website.
4. Woorank
Cost: 14 days Free Trial, $59.99/mo for Pro
Woorank is a tool for website audit. It offers an in-depth site analysis on how to improve and optimise your website. It gives detailed reports on:
- SEO
- Marketing Checklist
- Local
- Visitors
- Mobile
- Technologies
- Social
- Usability
5. BuzzStream
Cost: Free 14-day trial + $24/mo
BuzzStream specialises in link building. It’s a tool that manages your outreach to the leads that can provide inbound links to your website. BuzzStream helps you find the right leads based on their industry and their engagement across social networks.
6. Moz’s Pro Tools
Cost: Free 30-day trial + $99/mo
Moz’s Pro Tools’ main purpose is website analysis. It’s an all-in-one tool for optimising and increasing your business’ search rankings. Apart from providing its subscribers detailed reports and information on SEO opportunities, track growth and build reports, one of its great features, Crawl Test tool, engages Moz’s own RogerBot that analyses up to 3000 links on a given URL.
External Link Analysis. Evaluates the quantity and quality of your website’s external links.
7. GrowthBar
Cost: Free 5-Day trial + $49/mo
GrowthBar is a Chrome extension tool that helps in keyword research, competitive analysis and SEO rank tracking against your competitor sites. Its key features are:
- Top Keywords and Backlinks. Shows which paid and organic keywords have the most traffic for a specific website as well as its most authoritative backlinks.
- Keyword Difficulty Score. Analyses how hard it is for a keyword to rank.
- Word Count. Word count of any page from the SERP.
- Facebook Ads. Shows if a website runs Facebook ads and sees what they look like.
- Keyword Suggestions. Provides a list of related keywords you might want to rank for as well as Search Volume and CPC.
What To Do Next?
Once you finish your website audit, what is the next step? What are you going to do with the data? The data you gathered should be analysed in order for you to know what needs improvement on your website.
For example, if your webpage’s load speed is too slow, you might need to resize some images or change your hosting. Are your images properly formatted with Alt Tags? Do you have a lot of redirects on your page?
After a successful website audit, you will be able to diagnose the problems that your website has. You might have some ideas to fix these but it is highly recommended that you seek advice from experts on how to properly analyse and fix the issues. This will not only save you time in optimising your site but it will also give you in-depth information about the proper management of your website.