What is a website audit?
Let’s take you back to when your website was first created. You spent considerable time making sure the site map was correct, images were carefully selected, the user experience was considered, and the content reflected your mission. However, time has since passed, and you’ve not thought to put in that same effort again as you may presume everything is ticking over nicely.
Your website, in most cases, is a considerable investment, so it’s only fair to make sure it generates as much return as possible. Just like you service your car, a website audit thoroughly services every element to provide a complete and detailed analysis of your website’s health to identify and rectify problems early to avoid costly repairs or loss of business.
At Moorhouse Digital, our website audits look at every element to do with your website including; Google Analytics, keyword performance, competitor analysis, overall page structure, search engine ranking, content review, technical elements and usability. Each element is important to ensuring your site performance is optimised, here’s how:
Google Analytics
We take a deep dive into your Google Analytics to provide insights on how your users are behaving on your website, what content users are interested in and what pages are converting the most business.
Understanding how users interact with your site provides incredibly rich data which can be transferred into actions, such as adjusting your design and knowing what content is most engaging to produce more of it.
Google Analytics also identifies where website traffic is coming from which is vital to understand which channels are working best for you. It also shows how users found your website, via organic searches, paid ads or external links. This analysis provides useful information to whether your website’s SEO (search engine optimisation) is working for you and how the right strategies can improve your efforts.
Keyword performance
Google is constantly changing and improving to ensure consumers get the best and most relevant searches. This means that keyword phrases that once worked for ranking your website may not be working so well for you now. This could be due to technical issues on your website, page structure or even caused by competitors now outperforming you. Website audits analyse the use of keywords and can provide solutions for improving keyword performance to help you rank higher on Google and outperform the competition.
Competitor analysis
Our website audit not only evaluates your website, it also analyses your competitors to find out what strategies they are using. This will include their social media activity, the content they put out, their keyword performance, and their backlinks.
By better understanding your competitor, you can identify ways your brand may be missing out so you can make necessary changes to stay ahead of the game.
Overall page structure
When analysing page structure, we aren’t just looking at whether your content looks good. Page structure influences good SEO and is therefore an important factor in increasing your Google ranking.
Simple steps to ensure your page structure is optimised and SEO friendly include using the right title tags such as H1 or H2 tags. Heading tags should contain the target keyword phrases for your post which are essential for telling Google what your webpage is about and for Google to be able to rank your content in their search results.
Another important feature of page structure is your call to action. Having a clear call to action helps you turn website visitors into leads, so it’s important that it’s in an easily accessible place on your page. A website audit can help determine this by analysing lead rates and suggesting improvements.
Content review
By completing our previous steps of the website audit, we now know what content users like to engage with, so we know what content will work best for your business. We now need to analyse whether your content contains the right keywords which will gain traffic from Google searches and ultimately get you the leads. Our expertise in SEO can identify what keywords you need to be using to rank higher and is included in the audit results.
The content analysis will also look at whether your content is reflecting what you are trying to achieve as a business and provide expert suggestions for getting more from your online content. This will be compared against competitors in regard to relevancy and areas you may be missing out on.
Technical elements
People don’t like waiting, not in 2023. Facts show that bounce rate (people clicking on your website then exiting straight off) significantly increases the more seconds a consumer must wait for a website to load, with 40% of consumers abandoning the page after waiting more than 3 seconds. Because of this, site speed is now an official Google ranking factor.
During a website audit, site speed is analysed and issues impacting the speed will be determined. Features such as large images or videos and too much javascript can cause slow loading.
404 errors are technical elements which create a poor user experience. You often become overfamiliar with your own website that you may overlook certain links or pages which need addressing. Website audits mitigate these errors by careful sieving of your site.
If you have pages on your website with very similar content, you need to tell Google which page is the ‘master’ version of the page. This is done by canonicalizing URLs and is an important aspect of good technical SEO so that Google does not penalise you for duplicate content.
Usability
Along with technical issues, the usability of your website can be determined by your navigation structure. Audits can access how easy it is for users to find the relevant information and how easy it is for them to take action by contacting your business, buying products or signing up.
A poor user experience of your website can prevent users having an ordeal finding what they want or giving up and taking their business elsewhere. Our ‘hotspot’ technology can analyse where users click the most which is key to understanding what areas of the website attract the most attention. For example, a website audit may discover that a simplified navigational structure is needed to improve lead rate and our detailed report explains how to achieve it.
When do you need a website audit?
For small websites, a yearly website audit is recommended to maintain its credibility and avoid technical issues. For larger websites, bi-annual audits are highly recommended. So much can change in the world of digital marketing, so it’s important to keep abreast with the changes.
Website audits are also recommended when…
- You are considering redesigning your website: By carrying out an audit on your current website prior to a redesign, you can evaluate what’s working and not working. You can then implement these factors into optimising your new website
- You aren’t ranking for keyword phrases which you ought to be: An audit can discover whether you may have been penalised in search engines, or whether there are technical issues that could be stopping you from ranking.
- You aren’t receiving the website enquiries that you expect:This may be due to low levels of traffic or poor search engine ranking, but an audit will identify the issue.
- Your website is slow to load: A website audit will give you recommendations on what elements you may need to compress or optimise, such as javascript, CSS or large images that will help speed up site speed performance.
If you want to ensure that your website has a good user experience, and is optimised well for users and search engines, contact us to request a comprehensive and insightful Website Audit for your business.