A wholesome website audit brings the USP, pros, and cons of a website into clear view. A proper audit for your site is similar to a whole-body check-up for a human. It will give you an understanding of your website’s health and performance.
A website is a unit consisting of several parts including the content, image, links, URLs, call-to-actions and videos. Therefore, auditing the site on your own can be quite a struggle. Most teams hire professional auditing teams and software to take a look at their site’s SEO, performance and marketing strategies. All-in-one software programs like Siteimprove have helped thousands of organizations establish their dominion on the web.
However, if you are about to perform a website audit on your own, for the very first time, you need to remember the following points –
Always begin with an excellent crawling tool
Choose a crawling tool that is simple yet efficient. Free tools are also available, but they are not as powerful as the paid ones. Choose your domain and subdomain for crawling. Crawling the entire site lays the groundwork for the rest of the audit, and you should always begin with this step.
Prioritize the accessibility of your site
What is the point of creating branded content when the users and search engines fail to access the content at all times? Not paying enough attention to site accessibility can render great content worthless. Check your robots.txt files to find out which files the search engine bots can crawl. If you want to rank for a specific keyword, it is essential to ensure that the search engine crawlers can visit the pages containing the keyword. Running a thorough audit will help the site owners see which pages are visible to the crawlers and which ones are not.
Pay attention to your on-page ranking factors
There is nothing more important than your on-page ranking factors for determining the visibility of your site on the web. Apart from content, you should pay attention to headers, sub-heads, images and other media for ensuring the optimization of your site. An audit can help you understand if you are using the right targeted keywords, and if you are using the Headers (H1 and H2) optimally.
Do not forget your off-page ranking factors
When you finish fine-tuning your on-page ranking factors, you need to pay some attention to your off-page ranking factors as well. These include inbound and outbound links. Are all your outbound links active? Do they still lead to high-authority websites? What is the overall performance of your site as compared to your competitors? Analyzing your competitor’s performance might help you unearth nuanced factors that are affecting your site.
While search engines keep changing and altering their algorithms, it is the website owner’s responsibility to keep his site ship-shape. Website audits are compulsory for every website owner, who wants to embrace the new SEO trends and stay visible to all their target audiences.