If you’re a business owner, you will know how crucial it is to establish yourself on the internet. With the pandemic and increasing acceptance of online shopping, more and more people have begun to transition to the internet. This means there is more potential to make earnings online, and having a website is essential to represent your online storefront.
SEO optimization is an excellent way to optimize your website to obtain more visitors. This is why many businesses will opt to hire the services of a digital marketing agency, like BoomCycle. However, if you’re someone who wants to optimize your website yourself from an SEO perspective, then auditing your website is crucial. But what exactly is website auditing, and what makes it so necessary? How can you audit your website for SEO? This article will discuss all of these things in detail.
Without further delay, let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
What Is Website Auditing?
Website auditing involves the examination of your webpage’s performance before undertaking the process of search engine optimization and redesigning. In essence, a website audit provides you with insight into how effective your website is in its current state. You can then understand what you need to change to achieve your goals and improve your website. This brings a range of benefits which are:
- Website Performance Optimization
- SEO Optimization
- Increase in CTR
- Identification of Issues.
In the next section, we look at how you can complete auditing your website from an SEO perspective. We will first look at the processes you will need to undertake and the assessments you will have to make during these processes.
The Processes To Undertake in Website Auditing
Using a Site Audit or SEO Analyzer Tool
A site audit or SEO analyzing tool is a great asset that can make the process of auditing significantly faster. This software will scan through your whole website and provide you with any recommendations or issues that it may uncover. There are many such software and tools available out there. Screaming Frog and Beam Us Up are great examples of tools capable of this and can even let you customize the scanning process.
Locating Technical and SEO Errors
After using site auditing software, you will want to look for technical errors within your website. This includes speed, performance, indexation issues, and hundreds of other SEO factors. This also includes looking at the user experience of your website and locating anything that may hinder users. You will want to focus this analysis on web pages with the highest traffic. You can use various tools to locate these errors, including Google Webmaster and Google Search Console. They also provide various other features like analytics.
Assessing Website Content
You can have the most optimized website, but it will be useless without significant content. This is why, just as you focus on the technical aspects, you should also give equal importance to the content on your website. You can use grammar-checking software like Grammarly to optimize the content’s grammar. However, to determine whether the content is helpful, you will have to do so manually or hire someone who has experience with content writing. You can also use analytics to understand whether visitors find your content valuable.
The Assessments to do during Website Auditing
Website Performance Assessment
Assessing website performance is vital as it will help you understand the user experience of your website and how visitors will navigate through it. You can then identify any issues or areas where there is room for improvement to help enhance website performance. You will likely be doing this for the various web pages on your website, but you must prioritize the most important pages that will likely get the most traffic. Many aspects are part of website performance that you will be assessing. Some of these are:
- Usability
- Navigability
- Accessibility
- Page layout
- Conversion paths
- Page Speed.
The goal here is to understand the performance and make it as smooth as possible to enhance the user experience. This makes the website a lot more attractive to visitors. The more visitors you get, the more chances you have to turn leads into sales. This also fulfills SEO guidelines set by search engines like Google meaning a higher chance of appearing at the top of search results.
SEO Specific Assessments
Consider what the purpose of search engines is for a second. Search engines rank pages based on what they think fulfills or satisfies users’ intentions when they search for something. That is why search engines like Google set their guidelines to ensure the content is the best for their users. The aspects that pertain to these SEO specific factors include:
- High Quality and Relevant Content
- Keyword Performance
- On-Page SEO elements like URLs, meta descriptions, and page titles.
High-quality and relevant content is vital because it is what users will be searching for in the first place. Therefore, you should check if your content is valuable and has high readability. Choosing keywords carefully is also essential as it is the keywords based on which Google will provide users with results. Users search for specific search keywords and will be displayed with relevant results. Therefore, figuring out keywords that are high-performing and relevant to the content is crucial.
Additionally, optimizing certain on-page SEO elements help Google index and crawl your website more effectively. This leads to a higher chance of your website being ranked higher. Therefore, you should make sure that all these are added. For example, alt tags tell Google what the pictures on your website are about so they can display them appropriately in the Images search results.
Technical Assessments
Last but not least comes the technical assessment part of your website audit process. You will want to do this in the presence of a developer or someone with IT expertise, as this will involve some heavy technical jargon. You will be looking at many technical aspects regarding the technical assessment stage. This includes:
- Mobile-Friendly Optimization
- Error Codes
- Code Efficiency Assessment
- Website Architecture
- Crawler Indexing Definitions
Making sure that your website is optimized for mobile is crucial for two main reasons. Firstly, because many people browse the internet on the mobiles and secondly because search engines like Google prioritize mobile-friendly websites. You can use the Google Search Console to check if a website is mobile-friendly. Additionally, you should extensively check website functionality to see if anything leads to errors. Devs will be a lot more experienced with this and know you should check whether it gives any error codes.
Another thing you should assess is whether the code for your website is used efficiently. Too much unnecessary code will slow down your website. Various software and tools are available to check whether the HTML and CSS code is too much and whether it needs to be minimized. You can even find plugins on CMS platforms like WordPress that can assist you in this aspect.
Additionally, you should check whether your website uses robots.txt files and XML sitemaps that define what they can and what they should crawl to a crawler. Typically, search engine crawlers have a crawl budget, and it is in your best interest to make the crawling processes as quick and smooth as possible for a better SEO ranking.
In conclusion
SEO optimizing your website is crucial as it allows you to get a high amount of traffic to your website potentially. Before optimizing your website, an SEO audit is necessary as it will indicate all the improvements and optimizations you need to make. There are different processes involved that typically involve using software tools and assessments that you will make during these processes. We have discussed these topics in the article above and hope it has brought more light to this extensive topic.