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How To Audit Your Website
As much as humans need regular health checks, so do sites. You may have a high ranking and well optimised page, but a website audit can dig even deeper and tell you why your latest blog post didn't go viral, or why your bounce rate is up.
In short, these audits can pick up subtleties and turn a great site into a supreme one, with a high quality user experience (UX).
Don't you want this? Oh, of course you do! So on we go with the show, then.
Why you need a site audit
Conducting an annual audit (for small websites) or a bi-annual audit (for larger ones) will help you track several issues and keep the performance of your site in good shape.
In fact, it will identify whether your pages:
• Contain any broken files and links
• Are user-friendly
• Remain SEO champions
• Have killer content
Failure to tackle these configuration check points will cause your website to plateau or begin to lose momentum and traction. You don't want to fall behind the competition, do you?
How do you audit a website?
A manual website audit can be a nightmare, even for the smallest website. Imagine having to run through EVERY SINGLE page yourself — you'll go grey before you realise it!
Luckily, you've got a panoply of website audit tools available that got your back! But first, let's have a look at what you need to audit and what the quantifiable results each tool will yield really mean.
Here's your website audit checklist:
1. Website content audit
Whipping up amazing content is a balm to bad SEO practices in terms of web traffic and conversions. Therefore, you better not cut corners with this.
Your focus keywords can give cues to search engine bots — are your pages trustworthy? Are they updated frequently? Are they ranking?
A full-scale site audit will also highlight any shallow and/or “duplicate” content. To clarify, duplicate content refers to posts or sections that are similar or identical to another piece of content on your site. Ideally, your website will serve a particular purpose, so the content on those pages should match.
A few SEO best practices for content relate to content that:
Is unique (stay away from plagiarism and duplication)
Is simplified and useful to users
Attunes with the site objectives and niche
Is well-structured and based on SEO guidelines
Has thoroughly researched keywords that align with search intent
Spelling and grammar are on-point
Features bullet points, numbered lists, and graphics
Uses external links to acclaimed websites and internal links to related pages.
Is mobile-optimised (short paragraphs with white space)
2. Website technical audit
Let's throw the technicalities to the mix! Technical issues can affect your SEO status (even if it's not your priority), so dealing with them will allow your website to run smoothly and be more user-friendly.
Your chosen site auditor tool will pick up any technical errors, such as:
Crawl glitches
These appear when the tool finds pages that are unable to be crawled by search engine bots
XML (Extensive Markup Language) sitemap
Your XML sitemap is a map with URLs (and their metadata) for search engine crawlers, showing you whether your sitemap is updated and formatted properly.
HTTP / HTTPS status codes
These determine how the server responds to the browser-side request, and they appear in a 3-digit form. Is your site’s SSL certificate up to date (i.e. “http://” vs “https://”)? If so, is it secure for users to access your pages?
There are 5 categories of HTTP status:
1xx Informational responses ( 100 – 199 )
2xx Successful responses ( 200 – 299 )
3xx Redirects ( 300 – 399 )
4xx Client errors ( 400 – 499 )
5xx Server errors ( 500 – 599 )
Broken images, files and links
Ensure that all of your graphics, animations, links and files show up fully and correctly on page.
Page loading speed and HTTP 404
Pages that take ages to load can hinder user experience. A popular example is the “404 Error/Page Not Found” message, which indicates that the server is unable to find what the browser requested. This can frustrate your visitors and prospective paying customers.
Robots.txt file
This reveals whether your pages are being indexed correctly. (Note that you can choose if you want certain pages to be indexed or not).
Mobile responsiveness
It's worth checking if your website provides sufficient accessibility for both mobile and tablet devices.
3. SEO audit
Part of these technical issues are also on- and off-page SEO problems. Common issues tracked in an SEO audit involve:
Duplicate, short, long, or missing title/meta tags
No Google Analytics code
Duplicate or absent title text or image alt text
Non-optimised in-links and anchor text
Missing or incorrect usage of H1 H2, H3 [...] headings and schema.org microdata, RDFa and JSON-LD (i.e., the semantic vocabulary of tags that webmasters use to mark up their content and make it visible to search engines)
4. Website UX design audit
Web design and user experience (UX) are the catalyst for more traffic and conversions. The way your pages are laid out is crucial, especially for e-commerce stores that are the equivalent to a shop window, so keep it simple!
Features such as Page Depth and Site Navigation measure how easy users discover, find information and browse through your website. If your site navigation is full of confusing terms, deep-buried content, or your design is all garish and clunky, it will inevitably lead to poor user experience.
These characteristics may annoy visitors to the point where they exit your website before taking any action (e.g. filling out a form or making a purchase). Although it's not a hard-and-fast rule, it's wise to keep most of your content within 3 clicks away from your homepage.
My top 3 digital site auditors
Ahrefs
This website crawling tool pulls things that are impacting your site performance. Check their YouTube channel and blog — they're filled with tutorials and articles that help you interpret the given data after each assessment and rectify problems.
Equally, this website audit tool scans and offers an useful bulk of information for you to figure out and improve how your website performs. Not unlike the aforementioned resources, there are numerous free trials and price packages.
Presenting itself as an all-inclusive tool kit, Semrush also functions in a similar way providing important data as to how to overcome troublesome website issues. Their scheduled audits give a benchmark for future improvements, ensuring you'll catch and fix problems that are going to damage your website further down the line.
Need a hand?
Even if you go on about with the best free website audit tools out there, I can come to the save! Site audits are essential, but they're time-consuming and require expert guidance to be efficient.
If you're ready for your website's MOT, or you’ve noticed that your rankings, traffic, and conversions have taken a nosedive, I can offer bespoke audits to fit your goals — anything from technical analysis, site architecture, image optimisation, safety and security, user experience, mobile friendliness, content, keywords research, and more.
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