How to Conduct a Website Audit To Increase Your Website Traffic And Business?
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How recently have you checked your website? You might not have checked your website in the past, or it may have been a while. Your website has been set up, and although it appears excellent, it isn’t attracting any new users, or traffic is reducing.
What is the solution to problems? Well it might be the case where you were often juggling with the solution. So if you are one of those then I am here to help you in delivering you the best possible solution.
However on the top of it, By doing a website audit, the solution could be found. If you’re not sure where to start, this guide takes you through it step-by-step.
Conducting a site audit is crucial if you are looking to boost your performance on search engine results pages, showing you where you stand to boost your conversions and provide an excellent user experience. SEO auditing is an evaluation that rates a site’s ability to appear in search engines. In addition to improving the pages on the site to rank better for keywords the company wants to focus on, SEO Audits also help determine how users engage with the site. A site SEO audit helps identify your website’s visibility for keywords and issues that may affect its page rank.
A website audit helps you to identify broken pages, issues with crawlability, and other general issues related to a website’s web visibility. Website audits enable you to uncover any SEO-related and content-related mistakes across the entire website and receive actionable recommendations for improving SEO efforts. The actions you take following your website audit to increase your website traffic coming to your website, increase conversion rates, and help you enhance your website’s overall function.
Conducting a website audit will help you understand your site’s content and technical aspects and eventually reveal the list of issues that are harming your conversion and traffic goals.
While SEO website audit is the most common viewpoint, there are other lenses through which website audits can be conducted, like conversion rate audits, design and UX audits, security audits, etc. An SEO audit usually involves reviewing technical SEO factors, content optimization, and the link profile, with the ultimate goal being to identify issues that are unique to a site, so you can build a plan to fix these issues while also getting the site and the link profile into compliance with established SEO best practices.
Auditing your site can identify if it is optimized for achieving your traffic goals and, if it is not, how it can be improved for better performance. Website audits enable you to assess your site’s technical performance and infrastructure, how friendly it is for search engines, and how easily users navigate your website and find related information. A conversion Rate Optimization site audit is about evaluating the site to see whether or not it is performing well from a conversion standpoint and to determine areas where improvements are needed.
- Why is a website audit needed for your website?
Website audits are very important for improving website performance and visibility. Conducting a website audit helps you determine the existing site’s strengths and weaknesses. This is different from better SEO because website audits help you discover many SEO features and aspects.
A proper website audit tells you what is working on your current site, what is not working, and how you can improve your site to have the chance of ranking. Determining how your website ranks organically on the search engines can be done through site audits.
When using a site auditing tool to run your site, you can receive specific recommendations and check the performance of your pages. The advantage of site auditing is that you get an in-depth view of your site’s current performance.
An audit helps to improve a website’s visibility and rankings in Google and other search engines. The most important benefit of a website audit is that it will allow you to rank better on Google.
- Website Audit Checklist.
A website audit checklist will help you analyze your website easily and improve your visibility on search engines.
Here are simple checklist you can use for your website-
a. What are the objectives of my brand and website?
b. What is working well, and what might be made better?
c. Is it simple to use my website?
d. Are people drawn to the information on my website?
e. Does our website adhere to our branding guidelines?
f. Is it simple for search engines to locate my website?
g. How does it stack up against the opposition?
- 8 Steps to Website Audit
3.1 Review and enhance the meta titles and descriptions
A meta description is an HTML element that contains a summary of your page, and it produces a brief segment you see below your site’s title in Google’s organic search results. Title tags and meta descriptions describe the content on each page on your website and explain how it is relevant to the user’s search query. Title and meta description tags should contain keywords related to the content on the web pages they describe. Some tags, such as the title and meta description, also help users understand your page’s content better and may increase click-through rates through search engines.
Within three easy steps, you may evaluate and improve meta titles and meta descriptions:
a. Launch a brand-new project and conduct a site audit.
b. Do a content audit to get a list of all pages, titles, and descriptions. Afterwards, review the spreadsheet, delete any extra columns, and improve SEO.
c. To get suggestions on how to optimize the pages of your website, choose the on-page SEO analyzer.
3.2. Improve and update User Experience (UX)
Improving your website’s UX can help your website to rank on search engines as well as helps to boost conversion of your website. The user experience should be optimized and improved as good experience impacts purchasing decisions.
Therefore, your website will likely suffer from ranking and SEO if your UX is not good.
Many factors affect user experience, your website’s design, the website’s complexity, page loading time, Usability etc. So, to overcome all these obstacles, you should improve and optimize your UX.
Here are the simple steps to concentrate on and improve user experience (UX)-
a. The color theme of the website represents your brand
b. Headings and titles
c. Images and videos on the website
d. Forms
e. Key pages and links to other pages.
f. Easy Usability and complexity of the website.
Consider using a reliable tool to evaluate UX and improve and optimize it for better experience and Usability.
3.3. Checking your Keywords and content
Google search engine ranking depends upon how relevant your website content and keywords are. Optimizing content and using relevant keywords in your website help you to rank on search engines and improve your visibility on google.
The process of content optimization need not be difficult. Just follow these easy steps:
a. Use a tool for competition research.
b. Examine keyword possibilities and gaps to find the subjects your rivals are covering, but you aren’t.
c. Develop content with those keywords in mind (or update older content to include the new keyword targets).
d. Use keywords to improve your content, including meta descriptions.
e. Make your material more readable and snippet-ready.
f. Implement a more effective internal connecting plan. Use optimized anchor text in all of your links, please.
Another factor that affects your ranking is duplicate content on your website.
Duplicate content doesn’t affect rankings and can still hurt SEO since it can prevent Google from indexing and ranking site material and reduce link value.
This issue may arise if you publish information in several formats or have many domains. Utilize tools like Copyscape or the Duplicate Content Checker Chrome plugin to search for duplicate content.
3.4. Find and Fix Page Indexing
Indexing enables your target audience to reach your website. It increases website traffic and your identity on search engines.
Some of the common indexing errors you might notice-
a. 404 and server errors
b. missing pages
c. Crawl issues and duplicate content
Google may overlook your website for several reasons, including long load times, poor content, or incompatibility with mobile devices. However, keep in mind that Google indexes not all pages.
These issues can be fixed through tools that provide site-specific issues and find ways to solve them. Google search console could help you solve indexing problems and identify related issues.
3.5. Check the website loading time.
A typical website loads on a desktop and a mobile device in 1.286 seconds on a desktop and 2.594 seconds. You could be lagging if your site takes longer.
Sites that take too long to load may have higher bounce rates, poorer conversion rates, and less visibility.
Most importantly, Google has been using your site’s loading speed as a ranking factor for some time. Visitors may prefer to visit a rival website rather than wait for yours to load if it takes too long.
How can slow loading times be fixed?
Use Google PageSpeed Insights to run a performance study to determine your page speed score, identify any mistakes, and provide ideas for improvement.
If your website is still loading, you can also try:
a. optimizing images
b. using a Content Delivery Network
c. reducing the number of plugins and scripts
d. minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
e. enabling GZIP compression on your server
3.6. Analyze the mobile-friendliness of a website
The majority of people prefer to surf a website via their mobile devices. It’s not only easy to see a website on mobile but also has access to use it anytime, anywhere. Therefore, you should check the mobile-friendliness of your website. Whether your website is displaying efficiently on mobile devices, how much time it takes to open pages, what is the view of your website and its pages on mobile devices, checking if any content or link is overlapping, and the overall website performance.
The higher your ranking in Google search results, your website appears, and the more mobile-friendly it is. You must accommodate mobile visitors since more than half of website traffic comes from mobile devices.
You may evaluate mobile-friendliness by putting your URL into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to receive your score.
Utilize Google’s mobile usability report to evaluate the corrections that are required. Consider doing a mobile makeover to enhance UX, or engage with an agency, depending on the score.
3.7. Fix broken links and zombie pages
One of the most prevalent problems with websites is broken links; almost all websites have a few. Website upgrades, content modifications, and page deletions might result in broken links.
Although it might not seem like a big deal, most of us know how annoying it is when links don’t work and how it detracts from the entire user experience.
Broken links can impact your results since Google uses them to determine anchor text and PageRank. Google cannot discover these links if they are broken.
However, the issue is simple to resolve. Finding any issues by using a broken link checker tool. Any broken links can then be fixed, removed, or redirected.
First, find broken pages on your site that Google can’t index.
You can find this info in the Google Search Console’s “Index Report”.
You can also use tools like Broken Link Checker to run this test.
To find and fix the zombie page, run a simple test on your website:
Type site:yourwebsite.com into Google. It will list all your zombie pages and show how many pages have been indexed for your website.
If the number is too high on results showing that your website contains zombie/duplicate pages, you need to remove them for better ranking and search on google. It also increases traffic to the website.
3.8. Conduct Social Media Audit
A social media audit may assist in growing your brand internationally and attracting new viewers. Your company has a better chance of growing sales and income as your worldwide network and reach expand. Additionally, you never know if a new market for your product or service will be a success!
You may use this Audit to check the appropriateness of the social media connections on your website. An audit can assist you in choosing the social media channels that are most appropriate for your brand if your company uses several of them. The Audit measures audience, interaction, and social media content metrics.
An approach to enhance interaction with your material, such as articles, blogs, and videos, is through social networking. Auditing your social profiles can help optimize your social media posts for greater reach, engagement, and higher quality content.
Conclusion
Website audit identifies whether or not your site is performing optimally; if it is not, it can help you identify where you need to add improvements to meet SEO and traffic goals. SEO audits are a great way for website owners to learn how Google ranks their website, what is failing, and what you can do about it. Checklist for site audits to make sure that you are checking all of the essential factors affecting the performance of your website.
An SEO audit helps you evaluate your on-site optimization, spot potential improvement areas, and get suggestions for raising your site’s search engine ranking. A comprehensive SEO audit gives you the tools to improve performance, raise ranks, and increase exposure while enabling you to identify and address any possible problems.