Ultimate guide to auditing your website

The performance of your website needs to be constantly monitored and adjusted for SEO. A strong website will achieve a better rank in SERPs and will have a better conversion rate. Regardless of how well optimized you think your site currently is, there is always room for improvement. To help you get your website perfectly optimized, we present to you the ultimate guide to auditing your website. And if you have no time to go through the process yourself, the Digital Dot marketing agency team will be more than glad to offer a free audit of your website.

What are website audits?

A site audit is basically a checkup to see how well the pages of your site are performing. This step usually precedes an SEO overhaul or a major website redesign. Therefore, before you start auditing your website, it’s advisable to think about which goals you want your site to achieve. Obviously, you’ll want to rank well in SERPs, but you should also consider what user experience you are offering. Thankfully, website audits, SEO, and UX all go together and will lead you to the same conclusion – your website needs to be well designed, efficient, and easy to use.

Logically, this begs the question: how will you know when your website is performing well and achieving your desired goals? The answer is always going to be that you should occasionally check under the hood of your site and have a website audit. Most audits are going to focus on technical SEO issues, and by fixing them you will let your website reach its full potential.

Here is our ultimate guide to auditing your website:

#1: Analyze your website’s current performance

Before you decide that something needs improvement, it’s a good idea to analyze the current state of your website. There are plenty of online tools you can use to check on various website metrics, or you can schedule a professional SEO consultation. Audits can give you insight into the technical aspects of your site, as well as an evaluation of your content. Professionals can also give you suggestions on which areas of your site need the most improvement.

#2: Optimize the performance of your site

The analysis of your website will reveal which features need to be improved and optimized. If your website is outdated and is performing particularly poorly, we recommend that you do a complete website redesign. You can reach out to experts for web design services New York to build you a new website from the ground up. Regardless if you are doing optimization or building a new site from scratch, you will need to ensure that your site offers a good user experience.

#3: Do technical Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Technical on-page SEO is one of the most important factors which determine how your website will be ranked. Here is what you should pay attention to when auditing your website:

• Inspect the metadata of your web pages – the meta titles and meta descriptions. Metadata is a short preview of your page that users will see from their search engine before entering your site. Both the title and the description need to describe what your page is about in a brief and interesting manner, with the use of relevant keywords.
• Check for repeating keywords. Every page on your website needs to serve a purpose and should have specialized keywords. If you keep repeating similar or identical keywords across multiple pages, they will be competing with each other for traffic.
• Don’t neglect local SEO. Make your website visible to users in your area by investing in local SEO strategies. This includes doing research on local keywords and having separate local landing pages.
• Fix technical errors. Take care of indexing issues, missing pages, and broken links. Your website analysis should also reveal any crawling errors which you should fix.

#4: Measure your site’s effectiveness and boost your conversion rate

An important aspect of auditing your website is improving how you perform when it comes to generating leads and conversion rates. All of the technical aspects of your website can only get you so far. In order to actually boost your bottom line, you’ll need to create a marketing campaign that helps bring more visitors to your site. Work with our local SEO NYC agency which can help you create opportunities to convert your website visitors into paying customers.

An important part of any website audit is analyzing how effective your CTA is. Your Call To Action needs to inspire users to perform the action you want on your site. Simple A/B testing is an effective way of finding the best solution which can boost your conversions.

#5: Optimize your content for search engines

The central piece to any marketing strategy is going to be unique and interesting content. Besides using content in marketing, you should also optimize it to perform better in search engine results.

• You can incorporate relevant keywords into your content in order to help your website reach more users.
• Structure your content with headings and subheadings.
• Optimize for featured snippets by offering concise answers and factual content. This will get you the rank zero position in SERPs.
• Update your old content. It’s not enough to just produce new content that is SEO friendly, you should revisit and update your old articles.
• Remove duplicate content. Make every page on your website unique. Therefore you should avoid placeholder pages with similar text or images.

6. See how you measure up to the competition

Making your website work better than it previously did is no small feat. However, to truly understand how well your site is doing, you should do a comparative analysis with your competition. You can measure page quality and performance, powered by Google’s own PageSpeed Insights. Then run a similar audit on other sites you want to compare yourself with.

Final thoughts

As you can see from our ultimate guide to auditing your website, it is going to take a lot of work to make your website stand out. However, all of the effort you put into applying SEO techniques will surely pay off. Once your website gets a better rank, you will see an increase in organic traffic. Offer your new website visitors an incredible experience on your site and work hard to convert them into loyal customers.