Auditing a website is no easy task. It requires an examination and overhaul of your site’s page performance just before you undertake a huge web redesign or search engine optimization (SEO). If you find that your website has been a bit stale, in terms of both aesthetic appeal and traffic, then website auditing might just be the solution that you’re looking for to revamp your brand. Use this article for your website renovation to ensure that prime SEO can take place.
Website Performance Optimization
Essentially, you can break down a website’s worth into two different components: its content and its technical performance. This is the job scope of a website auditor. Performing an audit will enable you to observe the performance quality of your site and determine how easily accessible your site is via search engines. Once you’ve got these two criteria down, you’ll be able to figure out the next best approach to improve your site.
Search Engine Optimization
Every content creator or brand owner wants their website to be easily found online. That’s how you generate viewership and garner a loyal fanbase of consumers. However, to work towards that goal, you’ll need to ensure that visitors can stumble upon your website, to begin with. A simple website audit will reveal to you any missed SEO opportunity or SEO pitfalls and help you to immediately rectify them.
Additionally, understanding the perfect SEO for your content will help you to redirect your focus to the right areas. By utilizing the right keywords or the right structuring, you can greatly boost your search engine visibility. The best way to execute this is to always prioritize your visitors first, followed by the search engine itself. It might seem a bit counter-intuitive and contradictive to the previous sentence but bear with me. Channeling all of your resources into understanding your target audience will save you the trouble of being overly fixated on modifying your site based on search ranking algorithms. It’s the completely wrong way to go about trying to earn the envied top spot of search engine results pages (SERPs).
By understanding your consumer demographics, you can keep track of their consumption habits and by extension, better cater to their ever-changing needs and demands. A change in your customer’s preferences should be the only constant here, and changing your website every month in a struggle to remain relevant in SERPs is an absolutely bad idea.
Maximizing Conversion Rate
Besides all that, website audits also help you to rethink the effectiveness of your website’s lead generation and conversion. In a way, this heralds back to the factor of SEO missed opportunities where you identify areas of said missed opportunities and convert these visitors into leads to add relevant CTAs. Any deficits in your landing pages will also be addressed and enhanced correspondingly to increase conversion rates.
Looking at all these points mentioned thus far, having a good grasp over your website’s content and technical aspects become quite a useful tool in generating more traffic flow and conversions to your webpage. They’re skills that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Criteria for Assessment in Website Audits
By now, you might wonder: “I’m keen on performing a website audit for my site but I don’t have the slightest clue on how to get started.” Well, fret not because I have curated four easy steps to guide you in the world of website audits.
1. Website Performance Assessment
This first part informs you about the nature of the viewership on your website. It details how visitors navigate your website — from the homepage to your ‘About Us’ page, etc. It might be helpful at this point to take note of the pages garnering the most traffic on your website. After which, ask yourself the following questions:
Is your website at its prime usability?
Forget about less is more, more is more here! The only way to encourage more traffic is to attract a group of viewers to your site. If you can’t even attract a base number of visitors to your page, there would be zero growth. Generating significant leads from a decent number of visitors will establish a solid consumer base. Hence, calculating viewership is a good indicator of your website’s performance.
Next, the overall design of your website needs to be intuitive and user-friendly. This means that visitors shouldn’t have to decode it like a puzzle to use it. Instead, everything should be clear enough for them to navigate around with minimal hassle. Cater to your typical user’s preferences. If a visitor is seeking some medical-related advice on your site, the presence of a search bar to aid him/her in accessing the relevant information is crucial in encouraging them to remain on the site. Taking advantage of the right tools will help to kickstart a self-fulfilling cycle of growth for your conversion rates.
Other possible questions to consider:
- Are all the main sources of information easily available through your main menu tabs?
- Is the web design simple yet sophisticated? Webpages shouldn’t be too cluttered and be properly spaced out. Unnecessary links and ads should be avoided at all costs.
- Avoid excessively long pages. These will hinder load times and severely slow down the processing speed of your website. This will be a major turnoff for a lot of users. You can minimize this issue by ensuring that your image files aren’t too big or your HTML and CSS are cleaned up when needed.
2. SEO Assessment
If the message isn’t clear by now, optimal performance is the key to success in website growth. However, we’re taking a break from the technical side of things and instead, this is where SEO comes into the picture. We want to make sure that our content rightfully caters to viewers’ requests and is of top quality.
Is This the Best You Have to Offer?
Rethink your content and view it from your consumer demographic’s perspective. Is this the kind of content they’re looking for? If not, how can it be modified? If yes, how can it be improved? These are two distinct questions because one requires a complete overhaul (at worst) and another requires an elevation or enhancement in quality. The information should always cater to the interests and demands of your visitors such that it could potentially solve some problems if they’re looking for answers.
Conclusion
Even though your major might not be in web design, fret not. If you follow the tips listed in this article, it will give you a solid foundation in your understanding of website audits. Alternatively, you can use a Server Log Analyser to easily analyze your website. This will ensure maximum efficiency when it comes to keeping track of your website activity. Be sure to also do your own research every now and then to find out more if you have to. There are plenty of other lists and articles online. The proliferation of the internet has facilitated the oversaturation of content that at this point, information is so freely given. Just remember, the backbone of every good business is a good website. In this modern age, let technology work to your benefit.