Learn Website Audit in 10 Easy Steps

A great website is like the digital version of the first impression of a business. According to a survey, 75% of people judge a business’s genuineness based on how good their website is. To make sure that the first impression of your website is a good one, knowing how to do a website audit for your website, along with the analysis of certain other factors as well, is necessary.

What is an SEO Audit?

Search Engine Optimization audit entails going over various key areas of the website and making sure that they’re SEO friendly so that it ranks higher on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This will help in boosting the website’s organic traffic.

This audit is carried out using several tools and is most effective if you follow a set method. When you search for an SEO audit for a website on Google, there are a lot of methodologies out there. To help you out, we have narrowed it down to 10 easy steps.

Checklist For a Website Audit

When doing a website audit, you need to make sure that you cover all the following areas to ensure a thorough inspection:

Check for Google Penalties

Audit your website for google penalties. If Google penalizes your website, it will naturally affect your rankings very badly.

You can easily check this by going to the Search Console and then clicking on ‘Manual Options’ from the menu.

If any penalties are listed, you need to come up with a plan of action and then work on it to get the penalty removed. Further, if your organic traffic suddenly decreases by a lot after Google releases an algorithmic change, this is another indication that your website might be penalized.

Analyze Domain Search Appearance

Whenever your business’s name is input in the search bar of Google, what comes up? Where does your name rank in the search results? Also, go over other things such as the accuracy of the titles and descriptions that come up.

Check whether the rest of the results that are being displayed are relevant to your business or not. If the answers to these questions aren’t feasible, start working on the optimization of your website.

Carry out Technical SEO Audit

Website auditing for technical SEO comes before off-page and on-page SEO as it ensures that your website is easily accessible by search engines without any hangups. Also, even though it says ‘technical’ one doesn’t necessarily have to be a tech expert to carry out this audit. Just take care that:

• Your website should be registered on Google Search Console as well as Bing Webmaster tools
• You choose a domain on Google Search Console because a website starting with ‘www’ (e.g. https://www.digitalready.com) and without it (e.g. https://digitalready.com) is treated as two different sites by the search engine
• Your URLs should be SEO-friendly
• The breadcrumb menu should be activated because it helps users to navigate across the website easily
• You should have structured data enabled as it helps Google understand your content better which increases your chances of being ranked higher

Do an On-Page SEO Audit

This will help you in getting rid of any discrepancies that are present in the content being exhibited on your website. Many people just focus on this part when it comes to auditing as it is the most important area.

When auditing your on-page SEO, make sure that:

• All your titles, meta descriptions, and images are optimized
• The headings as well as the text are formatted
• Go over your content SEO. Make sure that each page is unique and remove any content which got duplicated. Further, using Google Analytics, determine your most popular pages to ensure that the content there is high-quality. Your content should also be fresh, error-free, well-formatted, and relevant. These are some of the factors that need to be kept in mind
• Your internal link structure should be helpful to not just your audience but search engines as well
• There should be no broken links
• Content should be user-friendly

Perform an Off-Page SEO Audit

This is one of the important things to consider when auditing your website. Off-page SEO consists of the various techniques that one makes use of to promote a website on the internet. This is mainly done using backlinks.

Therefore, to check how your off-page SEO is faring, you need to decode your incoming links using tools such as SEMrush. Based on the report that’ll be generated, answer a few questions:

1. Out of the unique domains linking to your website, which are the most trusted ones?
2. How many links are directed towards your homepage and how many to the internal pages?

III. Which page has the most incoming links?

1. How many of these incoming links are keyword-based?
2. The ‘toxic score’ of each link is?

Based on the answers to these questions, you need to make the necessary changes. For instance, if you aren’t getting links from trusted domains, you need to get in touch with leaders of your relevant field and create awareness about your business.

Unlike on-page SEO, off-page SEO is not as simple and straightforward. This is why you should be sure of what you’re doing before you do it.

Optimize Site-Level Factors

Improve and work upon various site factors such as the number of pages, availability of blog, mobile-friendliness, age of the domain, and other such factors. All of these need to be optimized to help you in improving your rankings.

Work on Local Factors

Audit your website for local factors. You need to make sure that the details of your business such as contact information, latest updates, and other important details about its profile are updated regularly.

Other factors such as photos and ratings should also be kept-to-date so that your audience always has all the information they require.

Conduct a Content Review

This review will help you in improving your content based on your audience’s behavior. You need to uncover which keywords are working best with your particular business and make sure that they’re incorporated into the content.  

With the help of Google Analytics, learn what exactly clicks and doesn’t click with your viewers by studying the bounce rates and the average session duration. Based on these numbers, start working on your content.

Examine the User Experience

The UX (User Experience) is extremely important as it works on the usability of a website. When working on the UX, you need to ensure that it is easy for the users to navigate around the website, the content isn’t cluttered but also make sure that the relevant information is there.

The layout and design should be easy and pleasant, using the best call-to-action practices. You need to do proper research about the kind of design that best resonates with your particular audience and take inspiration from there.

Do a Competitor Analysis

While auditing your website, you also need to analyze how your competitors’ websites are faring so that you can also make changes to yours.

You can take the help of tools such as Competeshark to monitor their websites and get notified when any changes are made.

Conclusion

Following these steps for auditing your website will automatically improve your rankings as well as drive more organic traffic to your website. Auditing is an extremely important part when it comes to maintaining a website not just because of ranking, but also helps you in bettering your work so that you don’t make those errors in the future.