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What is a website audit?
A website audit is an examination of your website’s performance from both a technical and content perspective. It can be used to highlight any missed opportunities across a company’s website or where changes can be made to improve overall performance.
If you’re planning a website redesign for your business, or you’re looking to get more out of your website as a marketing tool, this should be your starting point.
The benefits of a website audit
Carrying out a website audit is no easy feat. With many elements to be covered, it is important that you understand the best practices of search engine optimisation (SEO) to be able to analyse the content and structure of a website effectively.
However, the benefits of a well-carried out website audit will be worth the trouble of conducting it! By analysing your website in terms of its architecture as well as the content that your company is sharing, you will be able to determine any opportunities for optimisation, highlight any errors that may be affecting rankings, as well as make sure your content is well optimised for both your visitors and search engines.
By having a well structured website that provides the relevant information your visitors are searching for and shows them what they need to do next (such as getting in contact with you) you can look forward to lots of traffic comprising of happy and well-informed visitors, as well as more leads coming in.
So, let’s get started!
Website performance assessment
Starting with the navigation of your website, here are some questions you should look to answer during the website performance assessment:
- How easy is it for a user to navigate through your website?
- Are all your main value propositions accessible through your menu?
- Is your website design and layout intuitive to use?
- Are the calls-to-action simple and clear throughout the website?
- From your target audience's perspective, are they able to easily find the information they would be looking for, and are you solving their problems or pain points?
Next, you will want to look at the speed of your website:
- Are pages loading in a timely manner?
- Are any of your website pages excessive in size?
- What are your server response times?
By analysing the speed of your website, you’ll be able to get a feel for how long a user would be waiting for a page to load and find ways to speed your loading times up. The average time for a mobile landing page to load is 22 seconds, however 53% of visitors will abandon a website if it takes any longer than 3 seconds. If you’re website sees an extra one second delay in page response, studies have found it can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
By improving the overall speed of your website, visitors will not become impatient, making them more likely to engage with more content on your website and have a much more positive experience - and more conversions!
Not only this, but Google has also confirmed that site speed is a ranking factor, meaning if you don’t do anything to improve any load time issues you can end up dropping below competitors who do.
Both GTmetrix and Google’s PageSpeed Insights provides analysis of how well a webpage is optimised for fast loading.
SEO assessment
When looking at the SEO of your website you’ll want to start with your content.
- Are you solving your target audience’s problems with the content you are providing?
- Is the content of high quality? From your target audience’s perspective, are you answering the questions they would have, and is it clear for them to see what they should do next?
- Is the content well written, easy to read and provide enough detail on the topic you are talking about?
All the content on your website should be written for your target audience or buyer personas in mind. If you are producing content talking about how great your business or products are, but not relating it back to the problems or needs that they are experiencing - its not going to engage them enough to want to leave their details with you.
On-page SEO Optimisation
Next you can look at the set up on your webpages. Starting with the keywords you want to rank for, review the rankings of your website. You will soon start to see how well you are targeting these keywords and you think of how you can look to improve your keyword performance through your content marketing strategy.
Keyword research should be carried out before any new content is created and form the basis of your content marketing strategy, by understanding what your buyer personas are search for - and providing that contact for them.
Take a look at your urls, page titles and meta descriptions - are keywords you are targeting with each page coming through in these areas in a natural way? Avoid “keyword stuffing”, Google is smart enough to know when a website has keywords stuffed into your content to try and make it rank and so will penalise you with your ranking position if you go down this route.
If you are writing your content for your buyer persona in mind, your keywords should naturally flow into the content and so should not need to be rammed in. Remember write for your audience first and search engines second.
Conversion Rate Assessment
This part of the website audit will highlight the areas in which a visitor is able to convert into a lead or customer through your website. By looking at where you place your call to actions, where your forms are on the website and what contact information you have on your website, you can start to get a good picture of easy it is for visitor to reach out to your business through your website.
Here’s some questions to bear in mind when discovering how well optimised your website is for conversions.
- Where do you have forms on your website?
- What kind of contact forms do you have? Are they just contact us forms or do you have other lead capture areas such as gated content or newsletter sign up forms?
- What call to actions do you have throughout your website?
- Do visitors have a clear conversion path available to follow easily?
- Are you forms optimised to ask for relevant information that your business needs?
- Are they conversion points for every stage of the buyer’s journey or only decision stage?
- What marketing offers do you have available?
- Are you using the right call to actions at the appropriate places throughout your website?
Technical SEO Assessment
The final step to your website audit will be to look into the technical side of your website:
- Is your website mobile responsive?
- Do you have any broken links or other error messages across your website?
- Are you using the right syntax for indexing in your urls?
- Do you have a sitemap?
- Has your website got relevant internal links?
As you can see if you go through the above steps you’ll have a pretty good understanding of how well your website is currently performing and where opportunities may lie for improvements. This results from your initial audit can then set the benchmark for your website performance reporting going forward and allow you to set SMART goals based off real data when optimising your website’s content or design going forward.
