This article is a guest post by digital marketing expert Erik Bunaes of Endorphin Digital Marketing originally published on December 2020, and has since been updated with additional information.
For small businesses, your website is often your first point of contact with potential customers. If it’s outdated, slow, or hard to find, it may not be fully supporting your business growth. That’s where a website audit comes in – helping you evaluate how well your site aligns with your goals and identify clear opportunities for improvement.
In this, you’ll learn what a website audit is and the 6 simple steps to conduct your own.
What is a website audit?
A website audit is simply the process of reviewing your website and its visitors’ behavior. This allows you to discover high-performing areas of the website and areas that may need improvement.
Regularly reviewing your website can also help you stay on top of your customers’ continually changing needs, interests, and preferences.
Besides looking at the content and structure of your website, it’s critical to regularly review your website’s visitor behavior, including clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements. A common tool for measuring this behavior is Google Analytics, a widely used, free web analytics service from Google.
How to do a website audit
1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine is more likely to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword. By matching the content on your website with the words a user is typing into a search engine, you can improve the chances that your website will appear in the search results.
In a website audit, examine your search engine readiness (or optimization) to see how well it’s set up to generate visitors from search engines. There are a number of elements to this examination, including reviewing the use of web page addresses (URLs), certain HTML code elements, and text (on a page, image, link, and more).
In addition to the coding and content on a page, an audit examines the number of links from another website back to your website. These backlinks are important because they signal to a search engine that someone else considers your content useful and informative enough to link to.
2. Usability
Usability is how easy and intuitive your website will is for visitors to navigate, find information, and complete key actions such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or contacting your business. It also includes how well your website performs across different types of devices. For example, if your website doesn’t work well on a mobile device, it won’t get a great grade for usability.
Since search engines want to send users to websites that work well and have content that matches what they’re searching, a difficult and low-performing website won’t be included in the results.
During a website audit, you should put yourself in the shoes of a first-time visitor and evaluate how easily someone can use the site. Start by navigating the website on both desktop and mobile devices to make sure pages load correctly, text is readable, and buttons are easy to tap or click.
3. Performance
Evaluating how well your website performs is another important element of a website audit. Your website performance includes how quickly and smoothly your website loads and functions for visitors.
Strong website performance helps ensure your visitors have a positive user experience, leading to higher conversion rates and lower bounce rates (when people leave your website right after landing on it).
You can measure this by reviewing page load speed, time spent on your page, source of traffic, and user interactions with your site.
4. Social media activity and presence
Social media activity is also an important element of a website audit. An active and consistent social media presence helps reinforce your brand, drive traffic back to your site, and signal credibility to both users and search engines.
While social media activity doesn’t directly impact search ranking, it can increase content visibility, encourage sharing, and attract more visitors to your website.
For a website audit, you’ll want to review how social media is integrated into your site, like profile links and sharing options, to help ensure your online presence is supporting your growth.
5. Website security
Website security is an important element of a website audit. The better your website security is, the better you are at protecting your visitors’ and customers’ information. A secure website builds trust with users and reduces the risk of data breaches, malware, or unauthorized access. This reflects well on your business and will help you rank higher in search engines.
Keep your website secure by regularly reviewing your software, plug-ins, and HTTPS, to ensure all is up-to-date and follows cybersecurity best practices.
6. Website traffic
Another important element of a website audit is a website visitor traffic review. Google Analytics provides valuable information and powerful insights into customer behavior and preferences.
For example, Google Analytics tracks important historical data for any time period going back to when you first installed it, including pageviews over time, total pageviews, unique pageviews, average time on page, bounce rate, percent exit, and more. You can also see a list of your web pages ranked by the highest visitor traffic. This is great data for seeing which pages are most important or interesting to your visitors.
With this data in hand, you can make decisions on changing content, adding new content, or redesigning pages.
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Performing website audits and reviewing website visitor data is a smart investment in your business. As these skills develop over time, you can uncover valuable insights, support smarter decisions, and more in the long run.
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