Performing a website audit is as crucial as promoting your business across multiple channels. A comprehensive audit helps you identify technical issues and user experience improvements. Many SEO experts recommend that a company should perform a complete analysis once in a six-month time to make sure everything is working fine.
If you are new to this term and want to know what its key components are, then don’t worry. In this article, we will have a look at the all important aspects of a powerful audit for your site to keep it ahead of your competitor.
Pick the right audit tool
The first step towards conducting a powerful audit is picking up the right SEO tool that can perform most of the jobs in one go. Be it figuring out all the technical issues, page-loading improvements, content optimization, competitor analysis, or backlink analysis, you need an all-in-one tool when you are starting out.
There are several free and paid options available online for website analysis, check out which fits the best for your requirements. Some of the popular tools are SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Moz Pro — you can pick any one of these to begin your audit process or you can choose a suitable SEO packages for that.
Go for a complete scan
Whichever tool you use, add your website’s URL and run a full scan for your site. The benefit of a full scan is that you will get to know all the issues and improvements at the same time. It will not only save your time but also help you in deciding the priority of work.
Once you scan the site, you will see the option to generate a report if you want to send it to your team. In the complete scan section, all the issues will be listed along with their label of priority. You need to focus on fixing the high-priority issues first as they are hurting the most to your site.
Fixing technical issues first
Before anything else, you have to focus and fix all the technical issues that your site is giving. Technical glitches not only lower down your site’s ranking but also spoil the overall user experience. You will find issues regarding the 404 or soft 404 pages, the site’s loading speed, mixed content issues, security protocols configurations, and more.
All these issues are important to get addressed as they will drastically improve your site’s performance when fixed. We recommend you to make a complete excel sheet of issues and keep marking those that are fixed. This simple thing will help you keep a better track of progress if your team is working on the same.
Identifying SEO problems
Many people think SEO issues and technical issues are the same but that’s not correct. SEO issues are slightly different than the technical ones. Some of the SEO problems are duplicate or blank meta tags on a page, robots.txt improvements, XML sitemaps optimization, heading tags optimization, and much more.
After fixing all the technical issues, try to resolve all these SEO issues as soon as possible to improve the search visibility. Google and other bots can scan and index content much faster if the site is free from any kind of issues and it will ultimately help in better rankings.
Analyze and fix UX issues
Many people never pay attention to improving the overall user experience of their site and it lowers down their SEO efforts. With algorithms like RankBrain, it’s important to find and fix all the UX-related issues. Google pays a lot of attention while showcasing search results to the users and here better UX can help you gain an edge over others.
The easier to use websites are always on the priority of search engines because they save users’ time in finding what they need. Keep the website and individual page design as clean and easily navigational as possible.
Content audit report
After fixing all the technical and SEO issues, it comes to another important audit which is the content evaluation. Here you need to do an audit of your site and also perform a competitive audit so that you can compare it side by side. Note down all the important points where your competitor has an edge over your site.
While checking your site, search for thin page content, duplicate content, and outdated facts and figures. This content brings no value and it’s highly recommended that you should remove or segregate all the thin pages to create a single page.
Along with this, keyword optimization also plays an important role in improving your search rankings. Optimize all the old pages and blogs with the new keywords that the audience is searching online.
These were some powerful ways to perform an audit for your site and keep your online asset safer and more accessible to people. A regular site audit will help you gain more organic traffic and generate more online visibility.
