A website audit is a complete analysis of your site to identify its capacity to perform well on search engines and to ensure its user accessibility. A comprehensive web audit will give a more in-depth understanding as to why your website is not generating enough traffic and also why your overall sales or conversions are not going up. Moreover, an ideal website audit also will give you feedback about the technical issues about your website and flaws in the content.
In fact, there are a lot of automated website tools also out there with which you can do the audit by yourself, but these may not be a complete website analysis. Unfortunately, there are not such free audit tools yet, which may give you a comprehensive look into how can you enhance website performance.
Why you need an audit?
It is not enough to have a website now, but you need to ensure that it is performing well at the highly-competitive digital marketplace. To ensure this, at the first point, the need is to determine whether your website is search engine ready and it can be returned against relevant searches.
Considering SEO, some of the latest additions to the ranking factors include:
- Site speed
- Responsiveness
- Link authority
- Technical code etc.
As a website administrator, you need to understand what is a website audit, for which you need first to find answers for the below questions.
- How many backlinks you have to your site?
- How many backlinks are of good and low quality?
- Are there any broken links on your website?
- Is there a schema implemented on your site?
- Is your website loading fast?
- Is your URL structure perfectly tuned for SEO?
- Are there any meta tag issues on your site?
- Does your website pass a mobile compatibility validation?
If you find an unconvincing answer to most of these questions, then there are quite a few things which needed to be covered through a proper web audit and require optimization. An audit may offer many add-on benefits too even when you find answers for the above questions as it will help you find the minor flaws on your website and help to keep it healthy and ensure the growth of your business.
What is included in a proper audit?
Some of the services skilled web audit services offer, but not limited to:
- Technical audit to ensure that the site code is perfect and it loads fast.
- On-site audit to analyze the proper use of keywords and tags.
- Off-site audit to check the quality of backlinks, anchor text, and authority of the links.
- Social audit to review the visibility and mentions of your web pages.
- Local SEO audit to ensure that you are being presented in the relevant local searches.
An end-to-end audit is not an instant process. It may take several days to complete it if you have a reasonably big website accurately, but on an average, it requires two to three full days to complete a standard business website. Even while you use some tools, it is necessary to do an in-depth manual review of every aspect of a site and run various test cases to prepare a detailed report and analyze the data by putting it on a well-structured spreadsheet.
