The Importance of a Website Audit

Have you taken a good look at your website lately? Once a website is up, we often ignore it unless a problem comes up.

Taking Care of Your Main Online Sales Tool

This is a big mistake. Your website is your main online sales tool and works for you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. You want to make sure it is working at peak efficiency for you. Regular site audits should be completed using audit services or an auditing tool to perform an SEO audit.

There are many items to look at in a complete SEO website audit, but where should you start? What do you need to look at? An SEO Audit includes a security audit, technical audits, and content audits.

Just like taking care of a physical office, you have to do basic housekeeping and sometimes some maintenance to keep everything in good shape. Think of your website in the same way.

You have to make sure your website runs properly and your visitors get what they need for the site to work for you.

The auditing process can be overwhelming to figure out what you should be concentrating on, so we’ll look at some of the elements in smaller bites.

Here are the top 5 common issues to review monthly for your In-depth audit:

1 – Website Speed

You have on average 3 to 5 seconds to capture and keep someone’s attention when they land on your site. If your website takes too long to load, your prospective visitor has already moved on. As well, the search engine crawlers (Google, Bing, and others) rate the speed of your site when they determine your search engine ranking.
There are many options to perform online technical audits to measure your speed. Here are two of our favorite SEO Site Audit Tools that you just put your website URL (address) in and wait for the analysis:

Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix give you the basic reports for free. These reports give you great insight, an easy-to-understand score and advice on what needs to be fixed or improved.

Some items are simple and you can do them yourself and some you will need a developer or agency to help get it done (we never recommend playing in the code, if you don’t know how to code).

2 – Mobile-friendly Websites

“For 2022, the number of smartphone users in just the United States has reached 298 million. This is roughly 80% of the total US population in 2022. Even better, the figure is expected to reach 290 million by 2024.” source: webtribunal.net

Impact breaks down some helpful statistics on what users are doing with their phones and how that experience is affecting their choices.

Two ways I recommend you test this for your website:

The first is a free SEO tool from Google ( Google Mobile-Friendly Test ). Google makes it very easy to understand what they see when they rank your site and how it will appear at first glance on a mobile device.

The Yorkie Times example was pulled right from the tool.

As well, it will let you know if there are issues you should be taking a look at to improve or fix.

And the second, feedback from your team, your friends, family and, most importantly, your visitors. A tool can never replace people’s real experience on your website. Ask them to check on their phones and let you know if they can easily read the site and move around on it. It is much better to find out something needs improving from people you already have a trusted relationship with than lose business because you didn’t know.

Google Mobile Friendly Test Example

3 – Marketing Call to Action

We all want visitors to get to our website, but we don’t just want them to visit, we want them to take an action to become a customer or a new lead. User engagement may seem like an obvious thing, but as we already believe in our businesses, sometimes the obvious gets missed. Look at your site and ask yourself these two questions.

  • Have you told your visitors what you want them to do?
  • Have you made it easy for them to contact you?

These questions are good ones to add to your mobile-friendly feedback as well. Don’t make your visitors work too hard to figure out what should come next. Tell them about the special, the service, the great thing they need to know and make contacting you a click of an ‘easy’ button. If they have to work too hard to figure it out, you may well lose them to another business that has made it easier for them.

If you make these part of your monthly schedule, it will become a natural part of taking care of your online marketing and lead generation and keep your site up-to-date.

If you need help with any of these items, feel free to book a free consultation with me or download our full website audit checklist below.

4 – Check the Links

Every website is a chain of pages. Just like a real chain, a bad link can cause issues for the entire chain. Bad links can lower your search engine rankings and hinder the user experience. The presence of a broken link can affect your search rankings reducing your organic traffic. During the audit process, all internal links and external links should be reviewed.

Internal Links are the roadmap for your website. They help the user find a specific piece of content that matches their search intent. Ensuring these links are functioning will show engines you are creating proper roads for your visitors to travel increasing your search engine traffic.

External Links are the online form of networking thus improving your online presence. These links are designed to show engines your willingness to direct users to their answer, even if the answer is not with you. External pages you are linking are not controlled by you. These pages should be checked for any changes on top of link functionality during the audit process. Broken links or links to unhealthy pages will reflect poorly on your page.

5 – Review Site Content

Site content should also be included in your regular site audits. Content issues should be evaluated as engine requirements become increasingly demanding. Having content available is no longer good enough. All content provided on your site should be of the highest content quality in order to remain competitive.

Avoid duplicate content on the same subject or target keyword. Why compete with yourself? Diversity increases the information you can offer providing a larger user outreach. All content you have or plan to have should be regularly checked and compared to your content strategy to avoid duplicate content issues.

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Book Now with Founder & CEO of ThinkFlame, Shelly Patrick, who trains individuals and companies to understand how their marketing affects their sales conversation and how to integrate marketing into their yearly plans for consistent growth.

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