How do you do a website audit?

Thinking it’s time for a website redesign, but not sure where to start with auditing your current website? Or are you looking at improving your current website to get more traffic but not sure which tools to use? Then look no further, we cover the main tips on auditing your website to in this blog.

Choose a site audit tool

Using website auditing software that’s closely linked to SEO (search engine optimisation) is the right thing to do from the point at which your new website goes live. If you haven’t been using any SEO software then it’s not too late. Choose an industry leading tool like Link Assistant (SEO Power Suite) or SEM Rush and you’ll be well on track to understanding what’s good, bad and potentially ugly about your website. These powerful tools also have lots of free training videos so you don’t need to be an SEO whizz to start getting better results from your website.

Run your site audit

Entering the URL of the website you want crawl into your auditing tool will produce a site health check result and will determine where errors exist on the site and what you can do about them. A good auditing tool will throw up suggestions for improvements to things like user experience, readability, and on page optimisation tips. Most likely you will see critical errors which need fixing immediately, things like 404 errors and broken links which are very bad for user experience. Then there will be less serious warnings which need addressing but not imminently, such as minification of images and slow loading pages, all of which when fixed will give a better experience for users on your website and you'll see a boost in your website rankings.

Check which keywords you rank for

An audit tool will show you which keywords you rank for organically in search results pages and should be used to help you determine where you need to put more focus into optimising pages you really want to be on page one for. Making changes and regularly running keyword reports will show you where you are making progress! And a good piece of software will even give you keyword suggestions as well as readability tweaks and even indications of how well your competitors rank for the keywords you’re both targeting.

Dovetail in with Google analytics

Using a site audit tool should be done in conjunction with Google analytics. Drilling down into key metrics like how long your users spend on your website, whether they keep coming back, whether they are engaging with your content and how many people actually enquire will be important in understanding where improvements need to be made.

If you don’t have time to do a website audit, or you want some help with your first one then contact us today and we can help get you started. We also offer SEO packages so it’s worth having a chat with our experts to find out how we can help.