Before we get into the details of a website audit, we’d like to ask a simple question – what is the purpose of your website? Simply speaking, the objective of any site is to increase sales and generate leads. However, most websites do not gather the expected traffic or create the necessary leads.
Is your website performing optimally? Are you receiving the footfall you’d like to see? Is your brand making a generous profit? The only way to find out which parts of your website are pulling their weight, and which parts aren’t is by performing a website audit.
While a site audit can be of many types, here we are focusing on marketing and user experience (UX). An audit helps the website owners fine-tune their existing marketing tools and site features for better performance.
A website audit is for enhancing the onsite authority and there are loads of benefits attached to auditing your web properties. You may want to know how website content audit will help you in curating improved content. How do you know the right SEO guidelines to follow without a proper website SEO audit? It is absolutely not possible.
It is after you’ve done a proper SEO auditing for your business website using some of the best audit tools available online that you will now be worrying yourself about measuring ROI.
5 Website Audit Benefits Every Website Owners Should Know About
Outlined here below are five website audit benefits every website owner should know about this year.
1. Better SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is what makes the digital world run right now. Since it has changed drastically in the last couple of years, every website owner needs to revisit their SEO strategy frequently to ensure that they are in tandem with the Google algorithm updates. An SEO audit will help you understand how to improve your site’s performance and increase its visibility.
2. Better UX
Google is gunning for optimized user experiences on all fronts. According to the latest reports from the house of the search engine giant, websites with a better user interface (UI) have higher visibility and organic traffic. The design and functionality of your site can limit the user’s experience. It is time to revisit the page layout, responsiveness, information hierarchy and internal links of your site to improve its UX.
3. Improving conversion rates
An internal audit can not only point towards design flaws and SEO lapses, but it can also figure out what is holding your conversion rate (aka sales) back. Aligning leads, click through rates (CTR), dwell time and conversion rates is not easy. An uncountable number of factors influence a site’s conversion rate. However, through strategic planning following a site audit, your website should be able to enjoy increased conversions for a higher ROI.
4. Targeted content
Do you know your target audience? A technical audit takes into account dwell time, bounce rate and page views. Page heat maps are instrumental in highlighting portions that attract maximum views. A complete website audit can help you reorganize and revamp your site content for the target readers. It will help attract paying customers, and it will help your site with search engine crawling. I will discuss the other types of website audits that you can do further in this article.
5. Boosting organic visibility
Auditing your site will give you an idea about what should remain and what parts of your website require changes. It will give your team a clear perspective of what to rank for. Depending upon the result of your audit you can develop a new on-page SEO strategy and modify your existing marketing strategy to improve your visibility.
A site audit is mandatory for any website that wants to improve visibility and increase organic traffic. It is a small investment that can transform the future of your team.
Types of Website Audits – Which type do you need?
There are several types of website audits that you can embark on, but we are going to mention the most popular types of SEO website audits that you need below:
- Site Health Audits: Health in this regards points to general site health concerns in terms of downtime, loss or reduction in traffic, and many other issues like breaks in plugin codes or malfunctions of some PHP files.
- Red Flag Audits: This could easily be categorized under site health audit but it could stand on its own because it forms a larger part of how far your website can perform. Occasionally, accessing your website for potential penalty issues is the right practice. There could be Google sandbox, page rank penalty, or link spam concerns. You have to do a Red flag audit to identify these things.
- Competitive Site Audits: How do you measure up if what you are doing is according to industry standard? It is by analyzing your website gaps, spotting those tiny little details that your competitors are using to get ahead to see what opportunities are there for your business. This is not for you to copy and paste the same strategy, but it is for you to improvise, and further develop on those new data. Your website has to be competitive by all means, and you can’t achieve that without a competitive site audit.
- Conversion Optimization Audits: If getting returns over your investment is what you care for, then the conversion optimization audit is highly required. With this type of website auditing, your goal is to analyze conversion issues ranging from onsite, offsite or technical concerns that may be turning your prospects off from getting converted to paying customers.
- Negative SEO or Attacked Site Audits: Food is essential to our day to day living; feedback is essential to business growth. One customer negative feedback about your business is enough to keep you up in the night. It is not a pleasing experience. Something has to be done very quickly, the collapsed bridge needs fixing. Payment refund or free product replacement could mend such kind of relationship (unless it has gone worse beyond repair). But the challenge now is, how do you spot those bad energy from your customers? This is where negative SEO audit comes in handy. Your competitors could also try to plant dirty weeds in your backyard if you are not very careful by using negative SEO methods. It is attacked website audit that will save you in this kind of situation.
- Penalty and Recovery Audits: This is meant for analyzing downturns in website metrics especially when a site is known to have been algorithmically or manually penalized by search engine service providers for negative SEO methods.
- Security Audits: Malware, spyware are spreading like wildfire across the world, and your website could be affected too. These days, we have the HTTP vs. HTTPS protocol argument (unsecured vs secured) which is causing lots of security concerns for website audience, and the earlier you switch the better. Every once in a while, you should engage professionals in conducting security audits for your website vulnerability. It is very crucial to your website growth, especially in high-risk verticals and high-value sites.
- Complete Website Audit: When everything seems unclear, a complete website audit is urgently required to get your business website back on track. A complete audit consists of penalty and recovery audit, security issues (including site health), negative SEO method tracking, conversion tracking, competitive analysis, and red flag auditing.
(PS: All these types of website audits could be merged into our session of audit as stated above in the complete audit section, it all depends on your needs as a business owner, or clients needs as web specialist and professionals.)
According to Siteimprove, when you hire experts to perform a website audit, you should expect to see at least these five outlined website audit benefits. These are facts about website audit that no one else will tell you.
More About Me
Impressive post specially the points you mentioned about the strategies could help me in my business. Some of the points were familiar to me and some of them are very fresh tips for me.
Thank you so much for sharing this post with us. I’ll follow your blog posts from today onward.
Great Job!
The benefits to run a site audit is through checking your technical SEO, performing a site crawl, improving user experience, checking your site speed and mobile-friendliness, and improving your on-page SEO.