How To Conduct an Effective Website Audit

Before you embark on any online marketing, it is vital to ensure your site website meets certain requirements. Otherwise it’s likely that much of the marketing benefit is wasted and you won’t get the results you need. In order to avoid wasting your marketing budget, you need to make sure your website is in a fit enough shape to begin this exercise.

So without further ado, here is a checklist you need to consider when carrying out an SEO website audit:

Meta Descriptions

These are the meta tags within the head of your websites code which guide search engines to understand the topics the page discusses. Typically, most search engines will supply this text along with a link to your website in the search results. For many potential visitors, this text may be their first glimpse of your website, which is why it’s key to get these right!

Page Content

Ideally the text within your pages should use phrases you would like to rank for – but not all will be equal. Headings will have more influence than the rest of the text. By ensuring the ideal keyword density (around 3-5% for important phrases) you can expect to get better rankings in search engines.

There is no need to highlight that content should be unique and shouldn’t be repeated neither on other websites nor on the pages of the same website.

Duplicate URLs

Each page on your website should have a single URL. If there are several URLs for one and the same page, for example /article/ and /blog/article, than the crawler can treat it as having duplicate content and lower the position of both pages.

There are several approaches to the problem. The first one would be to avoid indexing one of those pages. This can be done with the help of robots.txt or using a nofollow tag in the header.

Another way to solve the problem is to use rel=”canonical” with a link to the page you need. In such a way search engines will know which page is the primary resource and will index it.

Site Speed and Page Load Speed

The speed of your website is a very important factor. Google and other search engines care about user convenience and thus, lower the position of slow websites. Moreover, users won’t wait for too long.
It has been estimated that if it takes more than 5 seconds for a page to load, most users will close it before its content will show up.

There are several aspects as to the website speed, including the amount of graphic elements and their optimisation, hosting overload, and the speed of site code. In addition, cache and compression setting also affect site speed. There is a great Google service with the help of which you can check the site speed, notably Page Speed Insights.

Website Usability / UI Audit

How easy your site is for search engine crawlers to index is one thing, but ensuring your visitors have the best experience possible, will assist them in finding what they have come for, which in turn will help your website have the best conversion rate it can. When a user comes to your website, they should be able to intuitively understand where they need to go. Users must understand where the necessary information is placed. If speaking about landing page, which aims to sell a service or a product, the button “buy” or “order” should be found in the most convenient area.

There are many services that provide A/B split testing that will help you determine where it is more effective to place certain elements on the page. This method is focused on taking some users to an alternate version of the page. After a while, when you have enough data, you can analyse which version works better (lower bounce rate and higher percentage of sales). Thus, you can check how effective a new design is before making it the basic design of the website.

This is not a complete checklist. But if you go through all the above mentioned steps, it will definitely minimise the difficulties of promoting a website.