The Significance of Site Audits

Updated on :October 14, 2023
By :CodesOrbit

Website Audit

What is the most concrete way to determine the efficacy of a website? It is conducting a website audit. A website audit is when you fully analyze the factors affecting your website's visibility in search engines. It reviews everything overall and allows the business to make all the necessary changes. The audit provides a complete picture and gives feedback over what to change and what to improve from your technical issues, damaging the site to your content, not encouraging a lot of traffic. When you regularly conduct or hold site audits, it improves engagement and performance. Moreover, it also helps you understand deeper and in detail as to why your sales are so stagnant or why your site is not generating the expected traffic.

Business and Website Audit

Many times, we are so engrossed in generating the need of products/services we are offering among the consumers that we forget to make sure if our consumers are even viewing our offerings or not. The website is the face of your business; it is how you interact with your potential customers. There are numerous times that your online presence and dealing will be the only customer experience the consumer will gain. It is your job to make sure it is worth it after all website audits are just for marketing purposes and customer convenience. When you look after your website, you are automatically looking out for your business's brand image. At times business owners or companies might even wonder who needs a website auditing; the answer is every small or big enterprise does! A good site audit can prove beneficial in the long run for you and your business.

Elements of Website Audits

A website analysis is when all the factors are thoroughly analyzed, and issues are resolved that may have gone unnoticed in the past. If you combine all the audits below, you have your complete website audit anyway.

1 – Technical Audit

No matter how hard you work on your content, your media posts, and the graphics, all your effort can go to waste if there is a technical difficulty. Technical audits focus on the fact that all search engine requirements are met for crawling and indexing.

2 – SEO Audit

SEO Audit includes link profiles, keyword analysis, goal conversations, traffic, and much more. There are so many ranking factors that affect your website's performance in the worst way possible, and this is where this SEO audit figures out how appropriately your website is optimized for search.

3 – Content Audit

This is how you interact, after flashy and eye-catching images; content is read to understand your business or company better – it is valuable to your business. This helps you build a better brand image; you can assess which type of content attracts the consumer and remove any that does not. Apart from this, you can also check your content's tone, if it is inviting or friendly enough if it is attractive enough that the consumer does not lose interest after reading two lines of what you have spent 37 hours writing and editing.

4 – Site Security Audit

This audit makes sure that sensitive information of the business and its clients are not at risk in any way possible. It makes sure that there are no possibilities of security breaches.

5 – Competitor Website Audit

In every market, there is competition, and every business needs to be aware of what its competitor is doing – competitor audits help you find ideas and opportunities that you can implement in your own marketing and promoting strategies.

6 – Site Health Audit

This audit helps you assess your website usability. The site structure, Meta descriptions, load time page titles, etc. It also determines the architecture of your website.

7 – Conversion Rate Optimization Audit

This is where you figure out what your consumers like on your website when they visit, what they prefer, which ways they prefer to give information or what they like searching for the most, and what stops or causes a hindrance for them to reach the final destination, etc.

8 – Recovery Audit

This audit assesses issues that are either algorithmic or manual, and it provides solutions for them to be resolved; this is done for site recovery.

Social media audit, UX, code audit – the remaining smaller, more targeted audits you can also focus upon if the need arises. These audits can help you get better whenever it is necessary or whenever you think it is required.

Significance of Site Audit

We often think that we have built our website up to the mark, and it is up to the required standard, so why go through the trouble of undergoing website audits? It is because of the change that is continuously occurring and requires you to be advanced every other day that you do not fall behind your competitors or follow older techniques in a modern world. Your content, speed, and code need to be updated because things change in the search engines – this helps with the rankings. Your website audit is only for your advantage, to further grow and flourish by making things easier for the users or visitors of your site. These audits provide you everything that you are required to know about maintaining your website. I will highlight some aspects below that can help you in better understanding the importance and significance of website audits

Website audits help you identify new SEO opportunities; during the auditing process, there is a higher chance of discovering pages that are not performing very well or discovering technical tugs to improve the consumer experience a little more than before. This is the way to interact with your visitors. This way, the site also reveals numerous available SEO opportunities that could benefit more largely.

The website auditing helps you optimize your site further. The website has gone through several changes over the years; at times, the content changes, older pages receive updates, maybe the company name or logo changes. For example, Jubilee Insurance changed its name in 1995, so it changed on the website too, and policies changed. During COVID '19 pandemic, a few companies added details regarding a few SOPs for consumer safety. Every little change leads to a majority of changes altogether, which results in your original website not existing anymore. Whatever issue the new changes bring in, website auditing makes sure that it eliminates those issues keeping the site fully optimized.

Thirdly, website auditing is necessary to keep up with the changes which I mentioned earlier above as well. It is not easy to overcome SEO challenges when you market a product or service online; you have to keep a lot of factors in mind to make sure that you know about the traffic that is coming to your site and what keywords are used to trigger your site. If you had 10 factors to take care of in the past, there might be a 100 now, and website auditing helps you get a better picture of what improvements or changes to make regularly. For that, you can use the best SEO software to ensure your website is SEO friendly and ranks high on SERPs.

Moreover, website auditing helps you with boosting conversions. There are strategies that you might have thought would do wonders for your business. Still, they fail miserably, or maybe they are not as effective as you thought they would be, perhaps there are several opportunities to make more profit or make sales in a better manner that you were not aware of in the past. Analyzing the site will help you gain new strategic ideas, and create new strategies which can ultimately snowball traffic to your website. It is also necessary to analyze the answers to all the questions you have in your mind for further growth, which is one of the major goals for any business out there in the global market, big or small.

Lastly, to sum it all up, website audits can help you recover and resolve any issue found on your website. HTML and CSS errors are also amended. It helps you abolish every issue triggering trouble on your sites, like the slow loading of pages or less traffic. A complete website audit provides you insights regarding the website traffic ranking, search percentages, and bounce rates along with feedback on various links or different problems with your website links, the broken links are authenticated and fixed, so the site is issue-free. It also ensures no duplication as such in terms of media or content.

Benefits of Website Audits

Contact Information

There are several times that the visitor calls or emails to acquire more information about the product/service they are likely to purchase. It becomes essential for them to talk to a reliable and authorized person to make critical decisions. For this purpose, it is essential to display contact information clearly and prominently on the website. Website auditing being the important tool will figure the best place to display the contact information – when the number of calls increases, our sales increase, and ultimately the revenue boosts. 

Organic Search

It is necessary and highly vital for the website to gain organic traffic, and a website audit guarantees that site arrangement is SEO friendly. No faulty code is blocking the crawlers. Also the URL structures present need to communicate well with the search engines – all this needs to be done because a website will never make it to the top of Google searches. When it does not appear in the top Google searches, it cannot gain much organic traffic. You can go through the buyer’s guide to SEO software to know more about how to select tools that can optimize your website for the organic search.

Keywords

The use of keywords needs to be done appropriately. You cannot fill your content with the one keyword repeatedly to appear in the searches, but you need to be specific and concise with the appropriate amount and use of keywords. The appropriate use is essential for any company's SEO efforts. This is where website audit helps you as it examines the current keyword count and figures out the content gaps and helps to assume what could increase traffic to your site.

Malware

Any user receiving the message that this site will invite any virus to their device will immediately shut it down. There are multiple times when the company is unaware that its official website is infected with malware, but search engines get to know immediately. The company reputation can be on the line if this prevails longer, and customer engagement can come to zero. The website auditing helps you regarding this issue as well because it identifies and deletes the malware.

Landing page

The purpose of a landing page is to provide the visitor the appropriate amount of knowledge regarding the service or the product for sale. It explains its use and further has content or media which convinces the visitor to turn into a customer. The design, content, and wording can help you with maximum conversions. This process might sound easy, but it takes months of thorough and exhaustive testing – the results can prove to be very valuable to the business. It is like a store in real life; you visit the store you like the ambiance, the décor, the smell, and the theme, you automatically want to associate yourself to the brand and want to buy its product. Your website or online store is the face of your brand. The first landing page should encourage the customers to scroll further. Website audits make sure you have such a landing page with the right keywords when searched for, have the appropriate content and the loading speed, etc. You can go through the best free and open source web design software to select one that can help you in creating attention-grabbing landing pages.

Usability

The visitor should know how to use your website, and it should be easier for them to navigate it and search for the thing they have been looking for. If your website is not easy to use and navigate, your visitors may shift to your competitors' website, and you may lose the opportunity in the form of a potential customer. There should be a prominent balance between the right amount of graphic material and the written content to grab one's attention. Here is when the website auditing saves you as it guides you regarding where you need to simplify a little and where to focus upon expansion. You can consider using the best web design software to eliminate flaws in your website on an initial level itself.

Better content

It is vital to know what your consumer likes the most when it comes to reading, what is the point of writing a million words when the consumer would not read any of it. You should know what interests your consumer the most. Website auditing helps you write the most suitable content that the audience enjoys and likes to read and leads to conversions. Content helps you with better marketing as social media and blogs fascinate a lot of consumers.

Loading speed

How much time do we spend on one site? A few minutes, I guess? If your website takes a minute longer than what the consumer expects, they will open the competitor's website to purchase. Everyone nowadays has limited time to spend on the internet, as everything online is for the consumers' convenience. Still, when the consumer needs something, the site won't even open, where is the convenience then? A website audit helps you figure out the cause behind such sluggish loading and offer details for resolving those issues.

Overall, website audits only make improvements that can further benefit you in the future. It can explain the overall improvements that are compulsory. Yearly, Google makes 500 changes to its algorithms, which means SEO is continuously changing, so even the trivial changes you make have a significant impact on time.

Main Areas to Focus Upon

Once you have understood how important website auditing is, you will realize that there are so many things or reasons why your website fails to achieve the status you imagined it would. Website audits are held regularly to avoid SEO errors. There is no need to be confused or panic; you will prioritize the three main areas in the beginning and work upon them for progress.

Firstly, you need to focus on the on-site setup, which includes URLs, site structure, etc. Query-based URLs are a significant problem as they activate various errors, such as content, which is duplicated. You should implement proper official tags to those pages signifying the original URL they belong to. If canonical tags are missing, Google considers your pages as duplicates, so you should make sure that there are no misplaced canonical tags, and multiple tags are present on a page. They should lead to a different URL, which is either relative or empty. You should also attach a relevant number after an archive subpage's title to avoid the duplicate title tag error.

Just go through this list of the best free and open source SEO software to select one that can help you in optimizing your website for search engines without investing a considerable amount.

Secondly, site audits are mainly to provide the user with better understanding and experience, which leads to SEO benefits. This will indicate that the page is performing well among the users, and there is traffic on the page. When there is a reduced bounce rate, a sudden boost in page views, and higher conversions. This means the website audit is helping, and your website is performing well. Website audits can improve the user experience by identifying the issues in Meta tags, which can confuse the visitor, interlinking, and all crawl related issues. This is the second area to focus upon after your complete website audit.

Thirdly and lastly, on-page issues. These can be broken links, lack of relevant headings, or missing meta descriptions – anything of the sort is to be prioritized – a few things can be fixed quickly. Still, a few might take longer than expected, but they need to be resolved because if they are not, it can adversely affect your search visibility.

Website auditing surely helps you identify issues that are resolved eventually, and that can lead you to further excel in a better manner than before. Still, the key is to rank things to fix according to their priority list; you need bigger returns with minimal effort, which should be your focus.

Conclusion

Once you have made sure that your website is out there in public, a website audit is like an essential tool to make sure that your website keeps on doing well constantly over the years. Like antivirus software being a necessity for your laptop or your mobile phone, a website audit is also essential for your website to run effectively. Your site will keep on growing, developing, and rank high in search engines. It will provide an excellent user experience, which will eventually lead to higher sales. Higher sales mean more profit, more loyal consumers, and more return on investment, which is remarkable for your business. A website audit will allow you to observe and maintain your website up to the standard continuously. Also, it would ensure your website remains competitive and grabs the attention of the visitors. Just invest in website audits if your website traffic is declining. It is better to take action before it's too late. Audit reports help you check for problems, errors, and inaccuracies that can be solved. An audit not only makes sure that it just looks at the website from the outside, but it gets to the roots of the problems that are occurring and fixes them to enhance the visibility of your website. If you have invested in building a website, make sure you invest in a website audit tool too!

CodesOrbit
CodesOrbit

CodesOrbit is one of the fastest and most evolving company in Pakistan currently and it offers a variety of solutions and services across different industries.

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