Website Audit is the process of evaluating parameters that determine the visibility and discoverability of a website in various search engines. A complete website audit can tell you about the traffic volumes & landing pages on your website and provide actionable insights about users’ experience and their journey through the website.
If you want your website to act like a marketing and business development person for your business, you need those insights to improve your visibility on search engines and to fix the loopholes on the website that hamper your business.
- website performance
- search engine optimization
- conversion rate
- technical aspects
You might Google and find numerous websites or online tools that offer a free website audit report. However, all you’re trading for so proclaimed free treat is actually the list of emails in your organization. This is quite alarming that this free website audit report, in actual, nowhere matches the quality and content of that made manually after researching and analyzing the website closely on various critical points. Some reports, in fact, would be nothing but just one of the formats including your website details and predictable graphs, charts and comparisons.
A good website audit report should be
Assessing Website Performance
- list all the important things properly over the home page and a good header or footer which allows navigating to various internal pages
- not be having too many distractions like Call to actions, links, banner ads or internal links
- Load quickly or you can put some brain to engaging your visitor in some interesting article by the time page loads
Assessing Search Engine Optimization
The SEO of your website is largely dependent on the content and keywords. You need to verify how genuine and appealing and relevant your content is. The content should be audience-oriented and hence, easily readable. The topics must be innovative and insightful so your audience relates to it! You must check for too many unnecessary keywords or the crawler in a dubious state will lead people looking for something else to your website. For eg someone looking for antiseptic chemical Dettol might be redirected to the website of Dettol which will result in a wrong visitor landing to your website and fleeing immediately in few seconds realizing the mistake.
- Keywords giving you hits, positions and visitors
- Relationship of the keywords with your content
- The main elements of the page such as URLs, page titles, meta title, meta descriptions and copies
Assessing Conversion Rates
The purpose of any website nowadays is primarily to get leads, unlike a few years back when a website was simply a digital portfolio for the business. Nowadays a website is expected to be as self-sufficient as possible so that any relevant visitor coming in can be turned into a lead. To know how many visitors are getting converted into leads, you need some specific elements like either a landing page or some other type of call-to-action. You can assess your call-to-actions and marketing offers in terms of quality, quantity and placing as part of A/B testing to see what works best for you.
Assessing Technical Aspects
- checking if the website is responsive on different platforms or not
- looking for any Website Error Messages
- reviewing the website URL optimization to ensure that website is search engine compliant
- if your website has too much JavaScript or flash, it might affect the load speed of the website
- Ensuring that website pages are crawled and indexed properly by the search engines
- Making sure that canonicalization of data is defined
