Why does your website need an audit?
Firstly, what is a website audit?
Overall, a website audit is an in depth analysis of the wide range of factors that impact your website functionality, searchability, content and ease of use for visitors. You can also split them up into different types of audits such as:
A technical audit which looks at broken links, redirect chains, keywords, backlink profiles and much more. This is a great type of audit if your website refuses to rank well on Google.
A content audit will look for a strong understanding of your business and how your brand identity is being used across your website. For example, is your brand clear and consistent, do your visitors know immediately what your business does. This type of audit is ideal if you are re-branding or having a new website built.
An SEO audit measures how well your website is organised for searchability and will look at things like search engine rankings, traffic, conversions, image and video optimisation, links and much more. It is ideal if you are not quite getting enough sales or your rankings on search engines are consistently low.
There are also several other audits such as user experience, social media audits, Google analytics audit or a combination of all the above.
So why do you need a website audit for your business?
Improve your website user experience (UX)
When you’re using your own website day in and day out and know exactly everything that is on it, you also know exactly where to go for whatever you’re looking for. But if you took a step back and went onto your website in the eyes of a potential customer, would your website still be as easy to use?
Is there too many items on pages or maybe not enough, do you have clear call to actions and thought out visions of how a user will navigate your website? If not, it may not be that easy to use and could be costing you visitors and ultimately sales.
User testing can be incorporated into your website audit to see if it is truly easy and clear to navigate or this is something that may need worked on.
Improve website SEO
An SEO audit can highlight a multitude of missing items which will massively impact your website performance. Things such as page descriptions, alt text, headers, image tags, broken links, duplicate content and much much more can all hinder your performance.
If any or a combination of these issues exist on your website it will quickly reduce your ranking on search engines, leaving your website virtually untraceable for potential visitors and clients. Therefore, if you want to improve sales – SEO is key.
Competitor Analysis
By conducting a website audit, you will be able to directly compare your website to that of your competitors. You can analyse how well your website ranks against your competitors and therefore determine if there are any other sources of revenue that you are not currently using.
This means if you do find any missing opportunities for growth you will be able to implement them and find new strategies for growth in 2023.
Assess your website performance
At this point people expect a website to load basically immediately and if yours is slow to load it will result in extremely high bounce rates, cart abandonments and finally low conversions.
Google knows people will not wait on a website loading, so it uses site speed as a ranking factor and if your website performs poorly here your ranking will drop dramatically. So, performing a site speed as part of a website audit could be invaluable information to maximise conversions and lower bounce rates.
Optimising Conversion Rates
Conducting a website audit can be the perfect chance for you to look at how well your website generates leads and if these leads are converted or not. In analysing this you will be able to pinpoint any missing or poor performing CTAs (call to actions) and identify any poorly designed landing pages. This will help optimise lead generation and increase conversions.
Need help with an audit?
Ultimately a website audit is an invaluable tool for any business and will always result in some valuable insights which can help improve business performance and conversions. If you think it is the perfect time for your website MOT, get in touch as we would love to help and we just so happen to have an amazing offer on our audits, quote – WEBSITE AUDIT BLOG when you contact us.
2023 is the year to make sure your website is performing at 100%