I’ve survived! After hacking through (literally) millions of URLs, sifting through insurmountable amounts of spreadsheets, and wading my way through site crawls, I’ve finally completed my first full audit of a website. While, I know that description might scare you away, I actually had a ton of fun digging into the meat of one of our many awesome websites. Not only was I able to diagnose issues to tackle in the future, but I was also able to learn more about our website and company than ever before! A website audit is certainly a big endeavor, but it could be exactly what your company needs in 2019. Below we’ll take a look at some of the best benefits of a website audit.
Benefits of a Website Audit
What is a Website Audit?
Before we can climb the mountain that is a website audit, we first need to know what it is? Similar to an SEO audit, which I covered in the past, a website audit takes a look at your entire site from multiple angles. You’ll take a look at things like content, functionality, link building, and other aspects of your site that provide the foundation of your brand. Below we’ll take a look at some of the most important benefits of a website audit.
Overall Website Health
Like our own bodies, some ailments affecting your site might not present many symptoms on the surface. Luckily, a website audit could detect issues that could cripple your website down the road. It can help detect navigation issues. For example, you might not be leading your consumers to the correct landing pages. Ideally, a full website audit will catch this. It also identifies potential gaps in content structure, technical gaps, and website speed. The overall health of your website is something that should be examined every year. Whether it’s a broken plug-in, large videos, or simply a messy landing page, one of the biggest benefits of a website audit is the ability to diagnose an ailing site.
Content Audit
We’ll get into the SEO aspect shortly, but let’s first just take a look at the raw content. One of the biggest benefits of a website audit is finding content gaps. A content gap is essentially a topic that you might not be covered on your site. For instance, if your site deals with cooking, you might want to consider a section devoted to cooking schools. This will help you generate more traffic and ideally, more conversions on your site. You’ll also want to check for duplicate content as well, which can hurt you from an SEO standpoint, but we’ll touch on that shortly.
You also need to be looking at the quality of your content as well. Website crawlers with Google are aware of content that is not valuable, short, and repetitive and will penalize the website and search rankings for content that is seen as inferior. If the content on your website is deemed low-level, it will not rank high in the search rankings. A website audit will help you identify this thin content. Then, you can beef it up and rank for even more keywords in the future!
SEO Content Audit
I’ve mentioned it before, but an SEO audit should be an essential part of your website audit. Since a good portion of traffic depends on Google, it’s probably a good idea to make sure your SEO is up to snuff. This can include things like using the correct keywords, interlinking, and link building. This is also a good time to perform a link audit. This will help you find broken links and link building opportunities. Are there any SEO practices in use on your site that are known to generate a red flag or penalty from Google that could hurt your site rank? This is also the time to look for those spammy links that could potentially harm your site.
Another SEO aspect you want to consider is your URL structure. You want your URLs to look as clean and concise as possible to Google can crawl them. They should include the keyword you’re ranking for. They also should have the proper coding to avoid duplicate content and to ensure Google isn’t wasting time crawling unnecessary pages.
There’s certainly a lot more that goes into a complete site audit, but these tips should help you get on your way. Do you have any more benefits of a website audit to provide? Comment below!
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