People visit your website but don’t convert into leads. Why’s that?
Prospects judge whether they would work with you based on their experience with your website.
If the website looks good, loads quickly, has good content and is structured well, visitors will have a good experience.
And that experience will translate to eventual business. On the contrary, a bad experience will force them to go to your competition.
So, instead of guessing, conduct a website audit. It is a complete analysis of your website’s performance, from on-page SEO to technical performance – everything that would impact the user’s opinions.
What is a Website Audit?
Website audits are a way to determine if your website is performing at its peak. In short, you’re identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your website.
You look at your website from all possible angles and pinpoint issues affecting its performance – in terms of SEO, conversions, or user experience.
Once you’ve performed a thorough website audit, you have a priority list of what requires your urgent attention and what you can relegate to another day.
Ideally, you should have a website audit checklist so you don’t miss crucial parameters while assessing your website. In a typical website checklist, you have a review of:
- On-Page SEO
- Keywords Being Used
- Backlinking Strategy
- Website’s Usability
- Social Links for Wide Reach
- Local Presence with actual details
Before we get into the details, let’s understand why there’s a need for a website audit in the first place.
6 Reasons You Need a Website Audit
Here’s why getting a website audit will be beneficial:
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Gauge User Experience
Your website is supposed to be an integral part of your funnel. If it starts leaking, meaning it stops converting people and sending them down the funnel toward the actual sale, it has lost its use.
One of the main reasons for this is a bad user experience. You might have broken links, slow loading speed, or a design that’s not mobile-friendly. All of these add to a bad user experience and have been known to affect conversion rates.
When you do a website audit, you identify all the things that cause your prospects to leave your website without completing their journey.
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Find On-Page SEO Gaps
Just as a brick-and-mortar store needs foot traffic to stay alive, a website needs virtual traffic to stay relevant. Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial to bringing that traffic to your website.
You may have had an SEO-optimized website six months ago, but is yours considered optimized now? Google has been updating how it reviews websites and rates them. And if you don’t update your website accordingly, it’ll likely lose traffic.
A website audit can tell you about all the major on-page SEO changes that will help optimize your website for better rankings.
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Check Your Website’s Structure
Don’t you like it when you enter a well-organized store? You find what you came in looking for. And see yourself coming to that store again.
Now replace that store with your website. And yourself with your ideal client. No matter how good your copy is or how compelling your offers are, if they cannot find it, they will not take the required action – meaning you’ve lost revenue.
A complete website audit will check your website’s structure and internal linking and highlight where it gets complicated for the user.
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Know Why Your Conversion Rate Fell
You’re driving traffic to your website and qualified traffic interested in your services (or product). But they don’t convert. Or they do, but the conversion rate has taken a plunge.
We’ve mentioned how user experience affects the conversion rate. But are there other factors adding to this fall?
With a complete website audit, you’ll know just that. You’ll get an overall list of things that are adversely affecting your conversion rate.
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Spot The Keywords You Have
It’s not just on-page SEO affecting your rank on search results. According to Google, content is the most important factor for ranking. And when you use the right keywords in your content, Google recognizes them and puts your content in front of people.
How do you know if you’re using the right keywords? One way is to analyze your website manually, go through each page, and then highlight where you found the right keywords.
You can also conduct a website audit that will check each page for keywords and create a list of phrases on your website.
Yes, this list isn’t exhaustive, and you cannot be sure if it found the right keywords. For that, you need expert analysis. Still, it is a start and better than nothing.
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Avoiding Technical Issues
Your users may not see technical issues in your website’s back end. But that doesn’t mean these issues do not affect how they interact with your website.
Issues such as slow server response time and page load speed are perceivable by the end user. If your competition has a snappy website that doesn’t lag, they will prefer it to yours.
A website audit will examine your website’s major technical parameters and tell you how you perform compared to the competition.
How to Do a Website Audit?
There are two ways to do a website audit. The first is manual. The second is by using a Website Audit Tool.
Since we’re all about simplifying marketing for you, we suggest using that tool.
What Do You Get in the Website Audit Report?
- On-Page SEO Analysis: An overview of your meta tags (title and description), heading structure, content length, alt text, and keyword consistency. This overview compares your score with the industry’s and identifies areas for improvement.
- Backlinks Strength: You get a comprehensive analysis of your backlink strategy – where you’re getting these backlinks from, how useful they are, and which pages have the most backlinks.
- Website’s Usability: Is your website looking good on all possible devices? Usability analysis covers this. You also get data on how your website loads on different devices and if the load speed will affect the user’s experience.
- Technical Performance: Content load speed, server response time, and script time. All these impact your website’s technical SEO and are checked in the website audit.
- Social Links: Active social media presence is crucial to your brand’s reputation, and the website analysis will check your website for these links. If you have broken links, you’ll see that in the report and can update them at your convenience.
- Your Contact Info: The website audit will also check if you have provided contact info on the website. Reachable contact info instills confidence in your brand because users know a human is on the other side of the website.
What to Do After the Website Audit?
Once you have the report, read it carefully. Cross-check what you can and note down all the suggestions. The report has a list of suggestions, with priority clearly mentioned against each. It’s up to you which you want to prioritize, based on the resources available and your goals with the website.
With the updated list, you can create a realistic timeline for the required changes and lay down an action plan for said changes.
Check your website after each milestone in your improvement journey.
How much does a website audit cost?
It depends. A manual website audit can cost you anything between $700 to $15,000. But you don’t need that kind of analysis, at least not now.
We recommend you use a Free Website Audit Tool. The analysis is detailed, and the report is fairly easy to understand. With that report, you can start improving your website’s overall performance.
How often should you have your website audited?
We suggest conducting a comprehensive website analysis at least twice a year. This will help you find and address all the accumulated issues without getting overwhelmed.
However, this biannual thing isn’t a rule. If you feel like your website needs more frequent audits, go for it.
Wrapping Up
Website audits are crucial if you want your website to perform at its best. These help identify issues –present and potential– and the required fixes.
Digilatics wants you to take steps towards a better, ROI-friendly website. For that, we’ve created a free website audit tool. Simply enter your website’s URL and get a full report on your website’s performance.
But you have to keep one thing in mind: audits are nothing without implementation. Because planning is good but action is better.
If you are ready to audit your website and apply the recommended fixes, enter your website’s URL and other details.
