Did you know that like machines that require regular maintenance, your website will need regular maintenance to ensure they run smoothly? So when was the last time you diagnosed the health of your website? Whether you have completed a website audit before and have stopped or never have done it once, you should regularly get a website audit done for maximum SEO and better conversion results. You might see that you have a better UI/UX and higher authority than your competitors but still not getting enough traffic to your website; this is where SEO website audit comes into the picture. Four main types of website audits come into play: technical audit, SEO Audit, content audit, and Backlink Audit.
In this post, you will find answers to-
Before diving into Website Audit, let’s find what audit means. In simple terms, an Audit is an examination or evaluation of something. A doctor diagnosing you before giving the medicine is an audit. A civil engineer audits the place before starting the construction to ensure the structure they create holds up.
A Website Audit is an in-depth analysis of the parameters that affect the search engines visibility of your website. A Website Audit is solely for marketing purposes as it helps detect what are you doing wrong in your campaign to help it improve for enhanced visibility on search engines.
As stated above, a Website Audit allows finding the critical parameters that affect your website.span>
I) Performance:
Find the weak points and help in better user experience, higher search engine ranking, and more engagement from your users— page speed, technicality or content performance, etc.
II) User Experience:
A Website Audit will help people discover the negatives of using your website, the best example being the time your website takes to load. It can also be related to the inability to make your purchases or subscribe to your emails, alerts. The worst is your website being redirected to your competitor’s website. Crawling the website by ourselves will help you better understand your user experience.
III) Google Algorithm:
Google likes to update its algorithm to enhance the user experience. A Website Audit will help detect any problem that leads to loss of traffic to your website, which directly impacts your sales. It helps you understand the reason behind the loss of ranking get to know why you are not getting ranked even after spending a handsome amount on your campaigns. Find if there are multiple or duplicate links that have been formed. Find out why your account got penalized by Google for not following their algorithms.
IV) Analyze your competition: Lastly, as we know that a Website Audit helps find our strengths and weaknesses, it will come in handy to analyze our competitor’s website, to help us develop improved strategies to beat the competition.
A technical audit is fixing our website to meet Google’s parameters to make our website easier to crawl and index.
Design: The design of your website plays a crucial role in improving your ranking in the search results.
Robots: The robots.txt file plays a crucial role in crawling your website. Check the robots.txt file to ensure no relevant pages are blocked from crawling.
Schemas: The scheme helps the search engine analyze the content on your page to offer better search results so that anyone clicking on your link will be assured to find the correct information they are seeking. Some of the schemas include Blog schema, Article schema, FAQ schema, Local business schema, Organization schema, Review schema, Product schema, Breadcrumbs, Sitelink, Video, Event, Job Posting, etc.
Mixed Content: Mixed content refers to a situation where your website contains content from secure (HTTPS) and non-secure locations (HTTP). For example, your website is secured with an SSL certificate, but the images or videos you have taken would be from a non-secure location. Google strictly prohibits such actions.
Mobile Friendliness: With the rise in the number of people using their mobiles to reach your website, see that your mobile response time is in a good state. If not, you should improve your mobile friendliness to attract more traffic.
Website Speed: The time taken for the page to load plays a crucial role in people staying on your website. Ideally, the load speed should not be more than three seconds. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insight Tools to improve your page load speed for mobile and desktop views.
Canonical: The rel= “canonical” element helps Google hint there is no duplication of content by consolidating indexing and link properties to a single URL. This is helpful if you have a single webpage version available in multiple URLs.
Sitemap: The XML sitemap helps crawlers crawl through your website and rank them. Use the Google Search Console Sitemaps tool to ensure you get 200 code status with proper canonicals. You should also insert the sitemap on the Robots.txt file.
An SEO audit is your report of your site’s “Googleability.” This allows you to make a well-designed and clean UX.
Keywords: Getting your keyword research done before writing the content is important. See if there are related keywords you can use for your content. There are several free tools like KWFinder that you can use.
Link Profiles: They indicate the health of your site. It can be based on external and internal linking that you use. Regular monitoring will help you get positive ratings and help your site rank better on Google.
Traffic Behavior: The traffic behavior will depend on the quality of content and relevance to the user’s search. There are over 200 different factors that can affect your traffic behavior. Having great landing pages will help improve your traffic.
Silo: The Silo structure is the architecture that helps logically arrange your website content to help the crawlers crawl your website. This helps boost your SEO ranking.
Goal Conversions: You should get up campaigns that will help you see how your goals are getting the required conversions. For example, a completed purchase, clicks on your link, filling of forms are some of the goal conversions you can track.
Metadata: Writing meta tags and descriptions with relevant keywords to the page will ensure better traffic to your website. This will also increase CTR as people can be assured that they are getting the correct information that they are seeking.
URL Optimisation:
Image Optimisation: Image optimization plays a crucial role in SEO audit. From attaching the proper format- PNG, JPEG, WebP. Compress your images using TinyPNG or WP Smush for the WordPress website to improve page speed. Write SEO friendly alt-text, define the image’s dimensions, make your images mobile-friendly and add your pictures to sitemap will help better crawl your website.
Video Optimization: A video SEO will help your videos be appropriately indexed and ranked on the search result. Try to add captions for your videos, engaging thumbnail, ensure your title and description matches your video, and embed your videos (though not in multiple URLs)
A content audit should be done at least every three months to keep the relevance of the content. Though content is part of the SEO audit, you can get a standalone content audit to help you with better insights. The voice of your content will also play a crucial role in getting the conversion. Ensure your content matches the keywords and has the same user intent to avoid bounce-off and potential customers visiting your competitor’s website. They are the cornerstone to improving your content marketing.
Create Goal-Oriented Content: Your content should be appropriately written to make users feel comfortable reading and viewing your content.
Work On SERP Title To Grab More CTR: Try adding keywords to your title to help users click on your website. Try to match your title with the content present inside.
Measure It Via Analytics Tools: Try to use free tools to measure your website content which will give you information from social shares on social media, backlinks, content length, and metadata. Google Analytics, SEO optimizer, Site Analyser, MySiteAuditor are some of the best free analytical tools you can use.
Google Analytics / Microsoft Clarity: Connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts to get in-depth results for each performance category like average session time, bounce rate, page views, etc. Microsoft Clarity is an analytical behavior tool that can help you observe website usage statistics, heatmaps, and session recordings and capture real-time data on how people use your website. The data recorded are all GDPR-compliant on people visiting your landing pages.
Find Rankings within ‘Striking Distance’: Try using striking distance keywords to help improve the clicks to your website with minimal time investment. Use the Google Search Console to export your data to find the ranking if they are on the first page (>10) or later (11-30). You can then implement strategies to improve your search results to get into the first page of the search result.
After performing our backlink audit or getting the backlink audit of our competitor’s website, we should evaluate sites that point to our website. Try to sort the good and bad links and make a strategy to improve your backlinks. After obtaining them from the Google Webmaster tool, review the backlinks manually.
Anchor Texts: The backlink anchor text is the anchor text used by another website to redirect to your website. This helps improve your ranking and allows the search engine to determine the keywords that are relevant to your website. They also help in deciding negative SEO attacks. For example, if your content is for the Indian audience but is getting backlinks from Chinese or Japanese content, then try blocking such backlinks.
Language: The tone of your language plays a crucial role. Try to get backlinks from the same country or language to ensure people find your content easily readable.
Spam Score: If you get backlinks sites having similar features that have been previously banned or penalized by Google. This does not indicate your content is spammy, but you should try getting backlinks for trusted websites.
Link Count: Try getting maximum unique links to target your website. If Google finds you getting multiple references from a single source, they will be counted as a single link domain.
Authority: Domain Authority and Page Authority are crucial aspects to keep track of to ensure your domain and page ranking stay high and can be easily read by Google’s machine learning algorithms.
Relevance: Lastly, the significance of the backlinks plays a crucial role in getting your website to rank better.
Basic Things to look out for before jumping into the audit: Content, Design, Lead Generation, SEO and Social Media are the basics you should be covering for a Website Audit.
Walking before you crawl: Sometimes, the webmaster might directly jump to getting the content created, generate backlinks, and other technical aspects while ignoring the crawlability—generation of robots.txt files, adding sitemaps and inserting links in the robots.txt file. Try to crawl the website yourself to find issues related to UI/UX, clickability, or your contact form is not working as required. Trying to make website changes without crawling your website takes shots in the dark.
Not Prioritizing the accessibility: With the robots.txt file, your website contains Meta robots. At times, it may be possible that the developer might unknowingly change attributes to no index or no snippet. Hence prioritizing each page is important during Website Audit.
Ignoring On-Page Ranking Factors: Some webmasters directly try to jump into off-page SEO and ignore the content part. On-page SEO is as important as off-page SEO. Write the content of at least 300 words on the page. Check whether the content is well written, provides good value, is relevant and compelling. Ensure the images have proper alt-tags. Use target keywords but avoid overstuffing.
Ignoring Off-Page Ranking Factors: Lookout for hidden text, spammy links, keyword stuffing, and ensure no cloaking your website, etc.
Using tools provided by google: Schema tester, page speed, robots tester, etc., are some of the tools to ensure your website is working at an optimal level and what changes can be made to improve the performance further.
How third party tool play their role in a website audit?
A third-party tool will bring fresh perspectives to your website’s research, review, and analysis.
People prefer tools to get the website audit done as they think it provides better and more accurate results. SEMrush, ahrefs, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, BuzzSumo, MOZ and Siteliner are standard tools used. Though auditing with tools is important, it’s important not to depend entirely on it. Manual testing also plays a crucial role in getting suitable parameters fixed to improve your rankings.
Problem-Solving Skills: Tools will help you find the errors, but at the end of the day, a professional will help get the changes made as per requirements and act on the best problems for rankings.
Daily GSC and google updates interactions that ordinary people can’t manage: A regular user would not regularly follow up with new google updates for better interaction. This is where webmasters are always up to the task to get the job done as they keep tabs on all the changes that help in better rankings.
Analysis for strong and weak points: A tool will show your strong and weak points, but the webmaster will act on them to help improve your website ranking.
Tools help you identify problems, and SEO Professionals help you solve them.
GBIM has the best SEO experts to help you with Website Audits. We follow all the new updates posted by Google Search Console to help your niche grow. We can help your website look attractive for your clients to avail your product or service. We guarantee to improve your website speed, be interactive, easily navigable, improve site security and make it appealing to the consumer 24/7. With our help, you can remain assured your website will function at the optimum level without you having to worry about website speed, traffic, and better guidance on web hosting. We will remove the site errors and boost your search engine visibility. Also, redirection issues (301 errors) and fix 404 and 5XX errors.
Visit the GBIM Technologies website to fill out the details you need for help or call us at +91 9967 020 785 / +91 9769 664 566 or mail at sales@gbim.com. We assure to help you with unmatched quality of service.