How to Conduct an Effective Website Audit

Your website plays an important role in expanding your online presence and promoting your business’ overall performance. Conducting a routine website audit is one of the surest ways to maintain your site’s efficiency. It addresses your site’s problems and guides your company in developing strategies to reach more customers and increase profitability.

A website audit typically focuses on several site functions. One of the most significant areas it looks at is a site’s visibility in online search engines. That is why part of most website audits is a search engine optimization (SEO) audit checklist.

In today’s digital world, an effective SEO strategy can make all the difference in improving your business’ brand image and attracting more customers online. More countries and regions are now seeing a ballooning number of internet users. For example, most Singaporeans now do more transactions online. According to data from oom.com.sg, Singapore registered the highest internet penetration rate in Southeast Asia, with 84.5% of its total population accessing the internet. This makes SEO an essential part of any business’ success.

Why do you need a website audit?

A website audit adds more value to your business. Here are some of the reasons why you need to conduct a site audit:

• An up-to-date and well-maintained website gives your customers a pleasant experience. Remember that no one would want to stay long in a slow, inefficient site.
• A website audit can help fix broken tags and avoid the accumulation of corrupted data. These things are important especially as most (if not all) businesses now rely on data analytics and digital marketing.
• A website audit also helps protect your users’ data privacy. Ensuring that you protect any sensitive data you collect will say a lot about your company’s integrity.

Steps in conducting a website audit

An effective website audit takes more than a single day. It is an intricate process that depends on many factors, including the size and contents of your business’ website. Here are some tips that can guide you in doing a site audit:

• Identify areas you want to focus on.
  What is your primary goal in conducting a website audit – is it to improve your site’s effectiveness to boost data analytics? Is it to achieve specific marketing targets? Do you want to increase site traffic by coming up with a comprehensive SEO audit checklist? Whatever goals and criteria it may be, setting them early on in the process will help you conduct a faster and more effective website audit.
• Create a spreadsheet for your findings and notes.
  A spreadsheet is useful in taking down significant notes throughout a website audit. List your findings of all your site’s pages and sections, and assign priority levels to help you organize which problems need to be addressed first and which strategies should you focus on.
• Consider and review your budget.
  After the whole audit process, you will then be able to determine if your website needs a major redesign or maintenance. Cost is one of the important things you should consider when investing in a customized website. Marketers note that a customized implementation of a digital marketing strategy can cost about USD80,000 on average. Most companies now opt for long-term website engagements, hiring a website design company to routinely maintain their site.

Areas of a comprehensive website audit

Below are some of the most significant areas of a website audit:

• Overall website assessment
  An overall website assessment analyzes your site’s architecture and usability. It focuses on addressing technical issues, such as site construction, content structure, and site speed.
• SEO audit
  Most companies engage in SEO content audits to optimize their sites for better search results and increased site traffic. An SEO audit includes link profiles, analyzing keywords, metadata, and goal conversions. Meanwhile, a content audit can be a standalone area in a website audit, but sometimes it can also be reviewed as part of an SEO audit. An SEO audit checklist is critical in your SEO audit and can include the following details: keyword research, on-page optimization, and SEO strategy realignment.
• Social media audit
  More businesses are now aiming to boost their presence on various social media platforms. By doing this, your company can increase site traffic and cater to more online consumers. A social media audit involves analyzing your business’ different social media pages so that you can develop an effective social media strategy.
• Security assessment
  Reviewing a site’s security performance is important in addressing potential vulnerabilities. Immediately dealing with security-related problems avoids potential security breaches and protects your users’ data.
• Competitor analysis
  Identifying key competitors – including their sites’ contents, target keywords, and social media activities – can provide your company fresh and new insights on how to improve not only your website but also your marketing activities.

Tools you can use for your website audit

Utilizing available online tools for your website audit is a good way to be organized. Below are some of the tools you can use:

Woorank

Marketers can take advantage of Woorank’s in-depth analysis that takes into consideration SEO rankings, usability, and social media. This tool, which is typically used for website audits, can provide a comprehensive analysis of web pages, on- and off-page SEO, backlinks, and broken links that need to be fixed. Woorank is easy to use and can make recommendations for site optimization, improvement, visibility, and ranking.

SEO Site Checkup

This free auditing tool analyzes a website by focusing on various categories including mobile usability, social media, and the semantic web. It also has an SEO audit tool that can generate data from search engines, site health scores, and a website’s overall performance.

Found’s SEO Audit Tool

Found’s SEO Audit Tool is free and can significantly help marketers identify and solve SEO errors on a website, including those related to metadata and link building.

Found’s SEO Audit Tool is divided into three main categories: technical issues, content issues, and external link analysis.

Screaming Frog

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a good tool to use for website analysis. It provides invaluable insights that can help solve issues by crawling the entire site and examining URLs to identify SEO problems. Screaming Frog is ideal for larger websites as it simplifies time-consuming processes.

Hubspot's Website Grader

This tool is founded by Hubspot and focuses on analyzing website performance and SEO audits. Even if its features are complex, Hubspot’s website grader gives a detailed summary of a website, reporting all significant points that can be crucial in improving your site. Some of the areas it looks at are social medial, SEO, mobile use, and lead conversion.

SEOptimer

SEOptimer conducts a comprehensive SEO analysis of a website across over 100 data points. This free SEO audit tool also provides insightful recommendations to improve a site’s online reach and rank higher in search engine results.

Conducting a proper website audit is beneficial to your business.

A website audit is a great method to measure and analyze the performance of your site and improve its visibility and effectiveness. Investing in an efficient website is both a strategic and cost-effective way to present your business to a wider audience and maximize growth opportunities online.