SEO Website Audit
Website & SEO Analysis
A website audit is essentially a deep look into how your website functions—from the technical details, to user experience, to design.
Why should you conduct a website audit? Because it can help you identify what changes you need to make to increase your website’s return on investment, whether that’s in the form of improved rankings and site traffic, more email sign ups, engaged customers, or purchases.
A website SEO audit, which provides analysis to show you where you’re succeeding and where you need to improve, can be a valuable part of your customized SEO plan for your website. Although the ideal time to conduct a website audit is when you’re in the planning stages of a website redesign, there’s never a bad time to make sure your website is performing at its very best.
To help you know what to expect from an SEO audit, I’ll share what I look for when I conduct a website audit for clients and what my clients can do with the information I provide them.
An SEO audit includes:
Website Performance: The performance of your website plays a crucial role in the overall value your website brings to your company. If your site does not convert, takes a long time to load or is not mobile optimized, it could significantly decrease a potential purchaser’s confidence (and patience!) in buying a product on your site.
When reviewing a website’s performance, I provide analysis on a website’s SEO, site health, indexing practices, duplicate content, mobile usability, site speed, conversion rates, and more.
User Experience: This refers to a site visitor’s experience in interacting with your site from the moment they land on your website. Factors in user experience include (but aren’t limited to):
- Navigation (Can the user find what she’s looking for?)
- Information architecture (Is information organized logically?)
- Content (Is it relevant, authoritative, and high quality? Does it meet the visitor’s needs?)
- Accessibility (Is the speed and format optimized for all devices, including mobile?)
- Design (Does this reflect your brand identity and help the site visitor understand who you are and what your company is offering them?)
- Goal (What is the behavior flow to reach your goal and is it effective?)
Ultimately, if a user has a bad experience on your website, they’re not likely to convert to the next stage of the marketing and sales funnel. By identifying strengths and weaknesses in user experiences through website analysis, you can make key changes to your website that will improve your business’s bottom line.
Site Structure: Site structure includes the design structure, architecture, and navigation (including internal linking) of your website. These elements all have a direct effect on user experience as well as the SEO of your website.
It’s important that the site structure be both practically intuitive as well as aesthetically pleasing to your website’s audience. Whether it’s refreshing a design that is out of date (which can reflect on your business’s credibility) or making sure that a search engine can crawl and index the content of your blog, optimizing the site structure of your website can have a powerful effect on the results your website achieves—from increasing conversions to making a positive impression with your brand.
SEO & Online Marketing: SEO and online marketing are intrinsically tied to your website’s performance. Often, visitors arrive at your site by clicking from a search engine query, responding to an ad, or from a social media platform. Once visitors are on your site, they begin working their way through your marketing funnel to reach the site’s ultimate goal.
As a result, when I conduct a website analysis, I explore key SEO and online marketing questions, such as:
- Is your site optimized for Google's latest standards?
- Can visitors find relevant content easily, and is your content leading to conversions?
- What would optimize conversions on your website?
- Are you using social media correctly?
- Are the backlinks to your site high quality?
- How are your on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and keyword strategy supporting your website and online marketing efforts?
Your Competition: In order to fully optimize your website, it’s important to consider what your competitors are doing. When I conduct a website audit, I research your competitors’ tactics and provide you with website analysis to help you gain a competitive advantage in the industry.
SEO audit options:
A website audit doesn’t just show you how your current site is functioning. It provides you with a plan to move forward and shows you how to make the most of your online marketing investment.
When I conduct a website audit and provide analysis for a client, I offer them two options:
- Option 1: A basic, but in-depth, overview with discovery and remedy recommendations
- Option 2: A comprehensive written audit (which can serve as an educational reference) with discover and remedy recommendations
My clients can then take concrete actions from this analysis to make improvements to their website.
For businesses who undergo web audits at critical moments, such as updating or redesigning a website, a website audit can provide a critical guiding vision for success. But any company that goes through the process of auditing their website and receiving analysis can gain essential insights on how to increase their bottom line by optimizing their website.