A site audit is a way to check a website for many problems. It checks to see if your Website has been optimized for search engine traffic by seeing if any of its file systems or links are broken, how quickly it loads, how easy it is to use, and if it has good content.
Site audits should be performed regularly because, although your site still receives visits, you want to guarantee that it is attempting to maximize its potential. If you don’t address these issues, your traffic may stay the same or go down, and the number of people buying from you may also decrease.
SEO is an ongoing procedure that calls for you to keep looking at your Website and making changes to it. By doing regular site audits, you can ensure that your site or a client’s site has always been set up for SEO success.
How should a site audit be carried out?
Doing a site audit by hand takes a lot of work. Even for experienced SEO professionals, performing a site audit is difficult, especially for older, larger sites. When there are thousands, many thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of pages and resources on a website, an audit tool is required, but manual work is required for the audit to be effective. Fortunately, several SEO tools can make Website audited financials even easier.
Choose a Site Auditing Instrument
We made our Website Audit tool, but many other tools have come out since then. Ahrefs has its auditing tool, and SEMRush has one of its own. There are also more specialized tools like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb that only do audits.
These paid SEO tools have the finest reputation for being comprehensive, accurate, user-friendly, and comprehensive. It’s important to remember that a free site audit tool and a paid one are very different regarding how well they work and what they can do.
Use the Site Audit Tool to look at the URL of your Website.
If you’ve decided on a paid SEO tool, enter the URL of your Website into the site auditor. The web auditor will crawl a site so that they can make a full report on every one of the problems on the site. Each tool has a slightly different way of showing the result.
For example, the Tools Site Auditor will provide a complete list of website problems, rank them in order of priority, and count the number of problems in each area. This makes it simple to identify what needs to be corrected and tick items off the list. You can examine the issues by type once you have this report.
Find Technical Errors
When most people hear “SEO audit,” they think of technical problems. Even if SEO isn’t your top priority, fixing the technical problems will make your site run better and be easier to use. All website owners must conduct site audits often because of this.
- Crawl Errors: occur when the program discovers pages that search engine bots cannot crawl.
- HTTPS Status: This tells you if the SSL certificate on your site is up to date.
- XML sitemap status: Your XML sitemap is like a map for search engine spiders. This informs you if your sitemap is set up correctly, has all the updated pages, etc.
- Site and page loading times: See how fast your website and pages load. When pages have a long load period, it can be hard for users.
- Mobile friendliness: Is your Website available via mobile devices? Is there a bug or something wrong with access?
- Broken images: Check to see that all of the images on your Website show up correctly and for broken links.
- File robots.txt: This tests to see if your pages are successfully indexed.
- Broken links: Find any “broken” links, which means that users can’t utilize them or that the page they direct to doesn’t exist anymore.
Identify SEO Problems
Some things that could be called technical issues do, without a doubt, overlap. Both on and off the page, SEO has problems. All of these things can have some effect on SEO. Here, we put everything into the SEO category that wasn’t covered in the technological part of the site audit. Most people think about these parts when they think SEO is better than a frequent website audit.
Look at Design and UX.
Many SEO site audit tools look at your site’s overall design and its easy use (UX). Both are critical for how people engage with your site, how you communicate with customers while on your site, how long they stay on your site, and if they become customers.
Site Navigation and Page Depth are two ways to measure how easy it is to use and find information on your site. For example, it is recommended that most of your material be located within three clicks of a Homepage.
Check a website’s content.
SEO and keeping people on your site depend on your content’s quality. Here, it would be best not to try to save money. A comprehensive site audit will reveal which web pages rank higher for your target keywords and which pages may not. It’ll additionally find pages with little or duplicate information.
Some duplicate content on your Website might be too close to other content. Every page on your Website should have a clear goal, which should be reflected in the content on that page. Google can interpret duplication as indicating that the information isn’t very beneficial to users or that the webmaster didn’t take the time to create unique content.
Make a list of everything wrong with the site.
The last step of a site inspection is to list everything that needs to be fixed on the site.
Most gadgets generate a digital report containing basic troubleshooting recommendations that you can tick off online.
It allows you to create a checklist that your team or client may complete and mark off when a task is completed. You can also add an audit KPI specific to a site to a report to see how items have evolved over the years. You also can share the checklist with the other people on your team or with the SEO agency users are working with. You can print the report if you’d like a hard copy.
Keeping track of what has to be done is simple if you have a list of all the technical, SEO, layout, or content issues. This way, you’ll understand where to focus most of your SEO efforts and won’t miss any important facts. When you’re finished with Tools’ Report Builder, you may add anything metric you would like to an SEO Report.
Conclusion
Site audits are an important part of optimizing your site. By fixing your Website’s problems as they arise, you can keep it running smoothly before they become too hard to handle. So, you can take care of problems a single at a time to guarantee your Website is prepared for SEO success.