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  • Writer's pictureWarren Arthur

What is a Website Audit?




Search engines decide website ranking factors based on the user experience. A website audit is a detailed analysis of your website’s performance against these factors.


Search engines have automated search agents known as search engine bots. These bots crawl the websites, analyse the content and store it in their databases.


When a user enters a search query, these bots then search their database and retrieve the results that are most relevant to the user’s query and serve them on their search engine results page (SERPs).


So by doing a site audit, you will see the areas your website is falling behind against these factors which are essential for the search engines to rank it first in its SERPs.



Key Factors To Consider While Performing site Audit


1. Page speed: Page speed is one of the key factors most search engines consider while ranking web pages in their SERPs.


Hence it is necessary to find out whether your website has all it takes to load quickly than your competitors. Through site audit, you can find critical points that are affecting your page load time.

2. On page SEO: On the page, SEO helps in easy identification of the page by the search engine bots while performing a site audit the following must be checked.

Each page must have a unique topic.


Each page must have a primary keyword included in its page title and related meta descriptions.


Check the images, anchor texts.Check the H1 and H2 headings, redirects and duplicate pages.


Also, check for page crawl errors and indexation errors. Check for page not found and server errors. Have SEO friendly URL’s for all the pages.

3. Mobile friendliness: Mobile compatibility will increase your page rankings and will give you an edge over the competitors. While performing site audit make sure you cover the following aspects

The site must have a responsive design. YouTube video links must be embedded. All the images must be compressed to minimise size for loading speeds.

4. Check the robots.txt file: If you think that all the pages on your website are not being indexed then the first place to look at is the robots.txt file.


Sometimes, a few pages are blocked which prevent Google from indexing those pages. So while performing a site audit search if there any page has been ‘disallowed’.

5. Check for broken links: Broken links lead to bad user experiences and therefore low site rankings, so always check for broken links on your website and fix them.

6. Check your website’s XML sitemap: The XML page of your website serves as a guide for the search engines bots to crawl and index the pages of your website.


Hence it is essential to make sure the XML file is in the correct format and follows the XML sitemap protocol. All your website pages must be updated in the site map, and the sitemap must be submitted to all the search engines.

7. Social media: Another channel for lead generation channel is social media, so it is necessary to make sure your website is connected to your social media channels.


Check if you have included the social media icons on every page, ensure you have social media share buttons where users can share your content on social media, place your social media icons on the header for easy access for the users.

8. Image SEO: Images also play a major role in improving your page ranking, check for the following: 

Make sure the image file names match the image, you can also use keywords in the filenames.


Check if the Alt tags are defined for all the images. If you are using many images consider using a content delivery network.

9. Check for user-friendliness: The ultimate goal is to attract traffic to your website, but what if you are able to get traffic onto your website, and are leaving abruptly?


To ensure the users stay on your web-page, check for the user-friendliness of your website. Here is how you can do it:

Check if the users are able to find what they are looking for within 3 clicks.Track the user journey through the search engine console and see where the dropouts are occurring.


Check if you have clear navigation in place and have a 404 error page.


Ensure your site has the contact us, about us and privacy policy in place.


Maintain consistent interface throughout the website.

These are some of the aspects you need to look for while performing a site audit, however, a site audit is not a simple task, there are many aspects to take care, and manually checking each and every detail might require lots of time as well as technical knowledge.


To make a site audit easy, there are many tools available which can perform your site audit and give you a detailed report with a few clicks. One such tool can be found here on our website and its Free.


 

Warren Arthur has 25 year+ experience in leveraging digital marketing strategies and implementation to help local businesses survive & thrive online. He works with businesses of all different shapes and sizes across the UK, US & Europe - and is passionate about empowering his clients to find their success in this digital age we all live and work in.

Find out how he and his talented team can help your business thrive online, contact Warren Arthur Consulting


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