All You Need To Know About Site Audit

As competition is spiking in the digital world, businesses want to develop unique strategies and tactics. Although you can create an exceptional social media campaign and website design, it is not enough to win over competitors. At times, brands have an incredible web design with simple navigation tools, yet they fail to attract online users. After all, search engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in determining your webpage’s visibility.

It considers your site’s loading speed, mobile-friendliness, and various other factors before giving rankings. Thus, you have to keep up with Google’s regulations and evolving algorithms. Look into the top-ranking factors – backlinks, visual content, website interface, etc. to streamline the customer experience. Believe it or not, but a robust SEO strategy holds the power to make your business succeed.

Unfortunately, your job doesn’t end after optimizing the webpage for SEO. You have to continually monitor your website’s performance by conducting an SEO audit to identify your SEO campaign’s pitfalls. You can think of this audit as a ‘report card’ of your site’s functioning on Google. It ensures search engines can read your website, suggests changes, and gives insights into competitors.

If your webpage is lagging or not giving the desired results, perform an SEO audit. Here we are listing everything you should know about site audits.

Keep Tabs on Website Traffic

The traffic coming to your site is a reflection of your website’s performance. After all, the higher it ranks on the search engine, the greater the influx of traffic on your page. Thus, start monitoring your traffic to gauge direct, referral, social, and paid traffic. Since examining traffic manually seems impossible, you can check website traffic with this tool and set some benchmarks. It will let you count the number of unique visitors; website clicks while shedding light on user engagement metrics.

Similarly, you can track the desktop and mobile traffic ratios to allocate your resources adequately. Besides this, slow loading time is one of the biggest traffic killers. Most people don’t wait for more than three seconds for the webpage to load. As a result, it drives away potential traffic and leads from your site. In addition to improving the loading speed, test your webpage under heavy traffic load.

Enhance User Experience (UX)

In this modern era, Google is getting smarter with every passing day. It can read user signals and recommends a website with optimal UX. Therefore, look out for user experience while auditing your site. Firstly, dig into the low-quality features such as navigation tools, colors, theme, etc. Check if the webpage theme is going with your brand’s logo and colors. It is imperative to follow a color scheme so that visitors can relate to your brand.

For instance, if you have a red and yellow logo with italic font, use the same colors and style in your website context. Moreover, simplify the navigation tools and buttons. If you offer various products and services, include a search bar to let visitors find their desired products readily. Above all, use images and videos to enhance the visual appeal of your webpage. You can add multiple images and videos but remember to maintain a balance between text and photos.

Conduct Competitor Analysis

Believe it or not, but the site audit seems incomplete if you don’t spy on competitors. Firstly, find your competitors’ target keywords with the help of SEMrush or other tools. Needless to say, if your competitors can rank for keywords, you also have a substantial chance to rank for them. Likewise, identify what content type works best in your niche. If you see infographics, illustrations, or research studies doing wonders for competitors, feel free to follow a similar content format.

Lastly, delve into their link building strategy and identify the high-domain sites. For instance, if most of their high-quality links come from resource pages, consider citing your webpage there. It would expose you to top-notch influencers and bloggers in your niche. That way, you can also develop a connection and publish your content on their blogs.

Work on Technical SEO

Unsurprisingly, Google gives preferential treatment to sites that display specific characteristics. Does your webpage have any superior features? In your site audit, consider making a technical SEO checklist to ensure it is up to scratch. Here we are listing a few things you can check in your audit.

• SSL Certificate: Secure socket layer (SSL) is a technology that demonstrates your site’s security. It originates an encrypted link between a web server and browser, closing doors for cyberattacks. Thus, install an SSL certificate to safeguard your webpage’s security.
• Mobile-Friendliness: A ‘responsive’ web design adjusts automatically, making it accessible on every device. If your customers encounter zooming in and out troubles when accessing your site from mobile phones, optimize it for mobile devices. After all, Google takes the site’s responsiveness as a ranking factor.
• Data Markup: It is a code on the website to help Google understand the content better. It bolsters indexing, providing more relevant results to the searchers. It also enhances visibility through rich snippets, improving webpage traffic.
• XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap helps search engines understand your website. It is more like a roadmap telling your site’s location to the search engine. In case you don’t have one, use a sitemap generator to build one.

Perform A Site Crawl to Identify Errors

Can Google spiders crawl to your webpage? Sometimes, problems are lurking in the shadows which go unnoticed until you perform a site crawl yourself. It would give you rich insights into website performance while outlining potential errors. For instance, you may have set some pages to ‘no-index,’ which won’t let the search engine crawl to your page. Fortunately, a site audit will help you find those pages. Similarly, it will unfold all ‘404 errors’ – the pages that no longer exist. A site crawl would also reveal the internal errors with the webserver – the 505 errors.

Moreover, check your domain name setting (DNS) to ensure bots are not getting any errors while crawling to your site. Enter your domain name on the search console and check the current status of your webpage. If it shows a green checkmark, you are good to go. Otherwise, you will come across a breakdown of all issues that need repairing.

To Conclude

More than design and aesthetics, your website’s performance determines overall SEO rankings. In addition to working on its visual appeal, keep an eye on potential site errors and glitches by conducting regular audits. It will expose all broken links, loading problems, and irrelevant keywords. Simultaneously, an audit will discover discrepancies that can lead to Google penalties. Thus, safeguarding your website from landing into hot water while ensuring higher rankings.