Looking to increase your online traffic?
Getting an audit on your website could be the answer.
Perhaps, you have established your business model and niche. Your well-written and creative content have reflected this. However, how is your website functioning for your users?
One way to understand and work on this is through a website audit. The audit will provide you with a framework to get started on. To be specific, the following areas are the issues we need to be looking at:
For some of these, you would be able to check them without an audit, but website auditing points you in the direction. Factors such as site speed, you can check using Google. But, we don’t always know how well our site is functioning because it requires a little more time, and maybe working on content has been the main area of focus.
The good news, most website audits are free!
But, we still need to choose the right website audit. You can choose between several different audits. These could be; content, technical, SEO, and several more. What you want is a website audit. A website audit is a good place to start because it provides you with the bigger picture of areas to work on rather than one select area.
The purpose of a website audit is to enhance the user experience by making our website work at its optimal rate. Let’s go through each area of the audit.
Once you have selected the right website audit service, here is what to do in three steps.
Select your most important pages. This will include your home page and contact pages. The other pages can be the ones that are either driving the most traffic or the least. It’s up to the owner to decide what pages go into the audit.
You then want to run your chosen URL through the site URL checker. It looks like this:
Most website audit results will give the owner a percentage or a grade. They measure the effectiveness of your website in around 5 categories. These include:
You then simply click on the department that needs the most amount of work. Let’s say, you clicked on performance. Here is what you would expect to see. It will provide you with errors, warnings, and notices if there are any to work on.
Once we have the results, that’s when we can get to work. On the results, we will know how effective our meta titles and descriptions are. Luckily, we can change these on our website. For example, you can change your meta titles and descriptions through the WordPress plugin called AIO SEO if you own a WordPress site.
The audit will measure your social media engagement and your link structure. Like other areas of the audit, we can add more social media links to our site and look into the quality of our internal links. For example, you may have blog posts on your website. Some of these blogs may have a link that directs the user to another website. Checking the quality of that website is a part of the audit. A way of measuring this is by thinking about the website’s domain authority, and most importantly, we need to check it to make sure the link is not broken.
This also includes 404 pages. Any 404 pages need to be customized to be directed back to the owner’s website instead of hitting a blank wall. It’s quick to check and fast to mend.
But, are there any other ways we could improve our audit score before we input our URL link?
The answer is yes. Relevant keyword research is always useful, as well as optimizing our content. This is particularly important if you run a blog, where the content needs to be SEO friendly. A blog post should be written like this:
Web content commonly addresses a problem with a solution. Once you have the content, structuring it in an internet-friendly way should be the goal and it will help your audit score.
This may seem like a lot of information. That’s because a lot goes into the audit, but once we break down each section one at a time. We can find out what parts need the most amount of work.
Working on your next marketing strategy comes easier once the audit is done. Making sure your website looks good and functions well for your visitors will help increase the user’s experience and should be the priority before other work is done.
A healthy-looking website provides the best foundation to build your content on.
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Sam Edwards
Sam Edwards is a content writer at Serpwizz. He recently wrote an article on the advantages of an SEO audit. He graduated with a degree in Film Studies in 2019 and loves writing film reviews. For more on Sam, please visit his LinkedIn profile. , where you will be able to read some more awesome articles!
