Last updated - April 13, 2023
The Internet is full of websites of different kinds. It could be educational libraries, e-commerce platforms, company representative websites, or social networks; the choice is unlimited. Due to the massive competition in online information and resources, each website user needs to be on the edge of each research request in the search engines.
For example, Google is the most famous search engine, constantly changing algorithms for checking website quality. It consists of technical requirements, SEO fundamental issues, proper indexing, and other detailed requirements. You can surely follow all guidelines to align your content, keywords, links, and images and try to achieve the best positions in Google SERP (search engine results pages).
But, if you make a mistake, you will be banned, and all efforts are for nothing. A good solution for beginners and professional web admins to perform using Third Party resources website audit.
Types of Website Audits
As said earlier, there are several essential aspects for proper organic ranking of the website, so there are several types of audit, correspondingly:
Technical Audit
The technical audit focuses mainly on your website’s usage and functional characteristics. The main parameters are site speed, mobile version support, media content optimization, page indexation, and hierarchy.
SEO and Content Audit
This type of audit is focused on on-site optimization for search: location and usage of keywords, the correctness of links, user-friendly interface, everyday user experience, URLs, meta title and description availability, and image and video types. During this audit, you can find duplicated information and incorrect titles. This type of audit is the most important, as checking the heart and brain of your website.
Site Security Audit
Search engines have antiviruses and firewalls, which means they automatically block all websites with vulnerabilities as their usage may cause thefts of personal data and danger to users’ software. So, this audit checks in detail all possible threats.
Lead Awareness Audit
The primary purpose of this audit is to find the ways how auditory reaches your website. One of the resources to perform this audit is Google Analytics. The more you know about your auditory, the more services or goods you can propose to them with higher conversion at the end. You always need to know your targeted auditory. After analyzing the information from this audit, you can change your content to be more informative for your audience.
Competitive Audit
To be ahead of your competitors, you need to always know what they are doing. You need to find competitors without your audit, check how they are presenting themselves, and how they are correspondingly ranked. You can steal their ideas after this audit or create a better strategy based on their weak and strong sides.
There could be some additional types of audits depending on your company profile. One of the most common nowadays is a social media audit – usually, it includes linking all social media accounts to your resource and checking if they are correctly reflecting and promoting the idea of your brand. After this audit, you can establish social media strategy to increase brand awareness. The links to the social platforms should be located in the website footer or a specially dedicated place.
If you need to boost your website shortly, you must perform a paid campaign audit. It is required to determine the most catching keywords, what will be the estimated conversion, and what are the potential expenses.
It is recommended to perform all types of audits to achieve better results. Most of the resources propose combined solutions, such as Pr-cy.io. Please see the advice below for performing the comprehensive website audit.
Steps to Perform a High-Quality Audit
Here are listed the main aspects of each audit that should be checked, but usually, the Internet service performs the audit and provides detailed reports. This part of the article aims to guide through essential steps and explain the main parameters for checking. If you perform the audit with a good program, in the report, you will receive detailed information regarding each audit highlighting the aspects mentioned below:
- Every audit should start with searching for a proper tool for it and a choice of audit type. The Internet can offer hundreds of services, paid or free. As you understand, it is better to analyze a website from different sides.
Google has a program – Google Search Console – that checks the sitemaps, security, and website performance. Other popular ones are MozBar, Botify, Ahrefs, SEO Browser, Web Developer Toolbar, and many others. In addition, you can use several free programs or combine them with paid software.
- Technical audit is fundamental; it is better to perform it first. Slow downloading of pages, strange appearance of; mobile version, presence of 3XX, 4XX, 5XX, and other errors negatively impact the user’s experience and SERP accordingly. Site speed depends, for example, on image files. Fast-loading pages lead to more extensive visitor engagement and more significant conversion at the end.
The optimal load time for the website is 1.5-3 seconds, and the time for interaction of any element with the website should be less than 100 milliseconds. This audit also checks for manual or algorithmic issues impacting Google penalties.
- SEO audit is the other essential type of audit that must be performed. This audit checks the content for quality, the absence of grammar and spelling mistakes, how well keywords are spread among the page, how well you have chosen the keywords to attract the audience, and where tags are located.
The keyword performance should fit your brand strategy. All headings and texts should contain keywords for search engines to find the website. The most important information should be placed first, then the details, and after, you can add the rest (“Inverted Pyramid” by Jakob Nielsen). All content should be clearly structured in blocks with bullet points and spaces and well-illustrated.
- If you are sure of your antivirus protection, then you can skip the site security audit. But if your website was prepared by a Third Party (not CMS), you should check it for backdoors, hidden coding, and redirections to external resources. Sites with viruses or potentially harmful content are blocked automatically by search engines.
You should always install the latest software, and relevant plugins and ensure the usage of the SSL (secure socket layer) Certificate; all these parameters are checked during this audit. Also, the website should have the proper protocol; only HTTPS ensures encryption of the user data, so it is preferable.
- The next step, which is vital for e-commerce sites, is a lead awareness audit. This audit is aimed at marketing goals. This audit checks how Customers understand the website design, how they navigate it, and their purposes. You need to know your customers’ path from the homepage to other posts. You may need to change your design for better reading and more effective conversion.
The marketing offers and landing pages should be appropriately written for high profit. The Client experience should be flexible and guided at the same time. Moreover, each page should be a call-to-action (CTAs) and is part of your strategy. There should be at most 3 CTAs on one page; CTAs can be, for example, a link or a button.
- The proper finalization of a website audit is an analysis of competitors. Audits usually check all parameters on your website; you can also check on competitors’ websites for the same targeted market and keywords – to compare their performance with yours. You can grab some insights from this analysis. This audit helps to find your real competitors, check their backlinks, and find how their websites are ranked in search engines and why.
If you are a beginner, this audit should be performed at the beginning to understand where to start. For example, you can collect organic keywords or find your content gaps from competitors. This will help to create content at the beginning satisfying the requirements of search engines. But do not simply copy your competitors; search engines also ban all plagiarized content.
- You can perform other audits if necessary; the more detailed information you have about your website, the better.
- It is required to perform the audit and adequately analyze the reports and adjust and fix your website. After the audit, most resources propose a detailed list of steps to increase all parameters (SEO, performance, security, etc.).
It is not enough to prepare a beautiful website. The work with a website should be performed regularly; it’s like a living organism that requires constant care and maintenance. You will always be on the edge of the user’s activity if you perform regular audits. Please be informed that Google around four times changes its algorithms during the year, not including more minor updates. That means you constantly need to do audits and check the search engine requirements from time to time.
Recommendation After an Audit is Successfully Performed
The value of your goods and services should be clearly stated on the homepage and be the first thing the visitor sees, other menu items with highlights of your bestsellers should be easily accepted, and the shopping cart and check-in process should be intuitive. You need to continually update and publish new posts and goods on your website, especially on the top-visited pages of your website.
To increase your website’s popularity (traffic), you can propose lead magnets – any free goods or services instead of contact information. But, of course, you need to constantly interact with your audience by answering comments or organizing live streams. To prolong the duration of a visit to the website, you should include the internal links inside the text (better in the footer or the content). Still, they should be put manually, not automatically, as Google will punish this.
Remember, each website should be easily administered and edited if you want to update it as required regularly. This factor mainly depends on the proper chosen CMS (WordPress is one of the most recommended) or your website designer.
Benefits of Website Audits
The benefits of proper website audit are apparent:
- You will check the technical website infrastructure and evaluate it friendless to your Clients.
- You will estimate how search engines rank your website.
- You will identify your poor SEO features.
- You will check the website for internal bugs, broken links, and other problems with coding.
- You can evaluate your future conversion based on lead generators.
- You can compare your website with competitors.
You can always change the content or keywords based on this input and add catching images or videos. And perform another audit to achieve a better result. So it is always good to start with a perfect SERP!
Conclusion
Nowadays, a website is the most important digital asset of any business. It is the first place your Customer will go to check your goods or services. Of course, all social media platforms are also essential, but a quality website is still the leading platform for your business and sales. To serve this purpose, the website should easily fit the different needs of your website visitors.
The number of visitors directly depends on how well-optimized your website is. That means you should analyze your visitors, activities, needs, preferences, and how the website reacts and performs – and do a high-quality website audit. If you do not make proper audits, do not update your website frequently, and do not follow the instructions of the audits, you are constantly losing money. In addition, your website should be visible to the Internet community to provide you with constant sales growth.
