You might be surprised at what a site audit reveals about your website…
Saying the internet is a busy place is an understatement. As of December 2021, there are over 1.9 billion websites on the Internet and it continues to climb higher.
With all of these websites competing to stay relevant with the search engines, it is important to make sure your website is foundationally strong and has an SEO plan.
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What Is A Strong and Effective Website?
An effective website is more than SEO. It is user-friendly, answers user’s questions, enjoyable to use, cohesive, and is brand-centric. Beyond the visuals, there are many behind-the-scenes components that go into a website.
A website audit looks beyond the visual and looks at the technical pieces of your website. It determines what is working and what needs improvement.
If you already have a website and are ready to rank higher and improve your visibility with the search engines, then a website audit is a good starting point.
But, what is a website audit?
A website audit is a complete analysis of all the factors that determine your website’s visibility to search engines, such as Google. This commonly referred to as the technical piece of SEO. The technical SEO includes:
- Indexing and crawability
- Redirects
- Mobile friendly
- Broken links
- Images sizes
- Empty meta descriptions
- Localization
- Site speed
- Optimized images
- Social signals
How Do You Run A Website Audit and What Will It Determine?
To conduct a site audit, we run various tests and generate a detailed report, which is analyzed for insight on any existing website issues.
The goal is not to have a technically perfect website but to determine if there are any issues that could be limiting your ability to appear in the search rankings.
Based on the results of the audit, we then make recommendations to improve the visibility of your website in search engines. Examples may include fixing broken links, adding meta descriptions, improving titles, adding keywords, optimizing images, making your website HTTPS, etc.
If SEO is new to you, the site audit reveals where you will want to begin work. We talk about the most important ones and come up with a plan to fix those issues. Remember, the goal is not to have a perfect website but one that is seen favorably by Google.
Most of our fixes can be done during one of our Development Days.
Why Do I Need A Website Audit?
If you are familiar with SEO, but not getting the results that you want then you should consider a site audit because it can pinpoint if and where issues exist.
If the website audit reveals that your website technically looks good, we can then look at other SEO factors such as how much content do you have on your website, are you optimizing for keywords, and how many backlinks do you have.
We can also run a competitor analysis to find out where and why your competitors are ranking higher and what you need to work upon.
Example of a Website Audit
A client hired us to perform some well-needed maintenance on their website as they dropped in the SEO rankings and their website was running slow.
We did several behind-the-scenes technical items to speed up their website from 17.8 seconds to 3.5 seconds. To improve the site speed quicker, we would need to move them away from a shared hosting platform to a high-speed Google platform, which was not in their immediate budget.
We went through the report below and adjusted several items, such as their broken links, converted their website properly to fully using HTTPS rather than some content displaying as HTTP and some as HTTPS. We added empty alt tags with long-tail keywords they were trying to rank their articles with.
Our goal was not to have a “perfect” report but to make some small adjustments that made a better user-experience and to boost some pages back up into the rankings with SEO.
Have An Audit Run On Your Website
Websites and Search Engines are ever-changing. Because of that, it is important to audit your website at least once a year to ensure that your website is performing at its very best. If you are interested in Create IT Web Designs conducting an audit for your website, please contact us.
