You need to get health check-ups, your car needs to go in for a check-up, and so does your website.
Check-ups are important so that you catch any issues or malfunctions early-on before they become an expensive problem. Checking on the “health” of your website will save expenses down the road, and it will also allow you to optimize the experience your customers have when going to your page.
Website audits are able to give you or your website administrator a full report on the state of your website in relation to experience, speed and optimization.
An audit will show you where your website needs to be improved and which parts are ready for an optimum client experience.
Here are 8 reasons you need a website audit:
1: Assess the health of your website
It’s hard to fully understand your user’s experience by just navigating your website. There are many things that might be wrong that you won’t catch like broken links, duplicate content and page speed.
These issues might appear on the back-end of your website rather than on the front-end, which is where you might miss it. The overall health of your website will not only affect customer journey and how long your customers spend on your page, but it will also affect how Search Engines rank your website, since it is based on the quality of it.
These are all things that may intensely affect the behavior of your client when on your website.
A website audit will give you a list of errors in your website so that you can go back and fix it later.
2: Assess your website’s SEO
SEO can include blogs, descriptions, FAQs and a lot more.
Good quality content in your website will help get your website ranked, but if there are issues within your website, all the effort made with SEO might be in vain.
When auditing your SEO, how well your website is optimized for search is assessed. Things like keywords, traffic behavior, image and video optimization are analyzed.
On-site SEO is important for Google to understand if the information in your website is related to your industry. If it is, it will help your website’s ranking, which will in turn send more traffic to your website.
In this part of the audit, many things are analyzed such as meta description tags, H1-H6 header tag, keyword consistency, amount of content and more.
3: Assess website security
The security of your website is incredibly important not only to keep your customers safe, but also to search engines. Search engines don’t want to send people to websites that aren’t secure, meaning they could have a virus or other things that might endanger the user.
4 : Assess your keywords and how they rank
Another thing that is analyzed during a website audit is keywords. It analyzes your top 10 keywords and how they rank in the specific location it is from.
This means that it checks all your content and sees if it is using industry-specific keywords. These would be keywords that your competitors are using.
It also shows a summary of the positions for your Keyword Rankings. The higher you rank, the more likely you are to get traffic. Research shows that as much as 92% of clicks happen on the first page.
5: Assess the quality of your links
Search Engines use backlinks as an indicator of a page’s authority, relevance and ranking potential. There are many strategies available to gain links to a page to improve this factor.
It is important to double-check the links on your website by making sure they are secure links that are relevant to your business.
6: Assess usability
Usability is extremely important to maximize your audience and minimize bounce rates, which affects search engine rankings.
This assessment also analyzes how your website performs across different devices like mobile or desktop. And it is extremely important to make sure your website is optimized for both of these devices since most of the traffic originates from them.
When creating your website, it is important to take into consideration the different devices that it might appear on.
This part of a website audit is important to understand if your website is user-friendly.
7: Understand your performance results
Performance is critical to user experience. This part of the assessment analyzes page speed, page size info, number of resources available on your website for users. It also analyzes things like JavaScript errors, optimization of images, and much more.
Speed is one thing that highly affects users’ experience on websites. If a page is slow to load, it will most definitely have a high bounce rate.
8: Assess your off-site presence
A website audit will also assess your off-site presence, checking for links to your Facebook, Instagram, Youtube or other websites.
Social activity is incredibly important for customer communication, brand awareness and as a marketing channel to bring more visitors to your website. We recommend that you list all of your profiles on your page for visibility, and begin to build a following on those networks.
How often should you have your website audited?
A scheduled audit provides a benchmark for future improvements necessary to your website. It also ensures that you catch these errors before they become an issue. Having website audits will help you make sure your customers’ journey is optimized for best results. Having a website that scores well across all the important factors will help get you more leads and conversions, and will help keep customers coming back to your website whenever they need a service you provide.
We recommend that you have a bi-quarterly website audit if you are a small business and a quarterly audit if you are a larger business. Our website audit tool is FREE and easy to use, you also get a report almost instantly, so that you can get to work in making your website as user-friendly as possible.
At Digilatics, we provide a FREE WEBSITE AUDIT TOOL where you can just insert the link of your website and get a full report analyzing your website’s performance. And if you find any issues you would like to fix, feel free to contact us. We have experts on-site ready to help you with any of your digital marketing needs.
