Website audit is an analysis of every factor that has impact over performance of a website in search engines and social media. The purpose of a website audit is to find weak points in a marketing campaign that has impact over poor performance of a website. There are many reasons to go for a website audit however search engine optimization and content marketing are the main ones.
Reasons to choose website audit
When a client come to an SEO company to improve their web presence, the firm choose “website audit” as an initial process. There are many reasons to choose website Audit services and the top reasons are –
Understand Where You Are Starting From – SEO is a long term process, A Digital Marketing firm needs to do so many things to fulfill client’s goals. Suppose you have to reach a certain destination, if someone is asking what time it will take to reach the destination, the answer of course will depend upon from where you are travelling. If you are travelling from a nearer destination, it will take lesser time. If you are too far, it will take more time.
It is almost the same process when you choose a Digital Marketing process. Whatever your marketing goal is, the cost, time and effort to get it depends upon where exactly you are starting from. And this is why, you should not ignore website audit process. A good website audit helps you understand where you stand. You need to know important ranking factors and the performance of your website.
Strategize with SMART Goals – Your business goal should be clear, smart and strategized. The goal should be achievable, target specific, relevant, time bound and measurable. Goals with these points are far better than any general goal. Suppose your business goal for this year is to get 15% more sales as compare to previous year, you need to create a strategic plan. A quality website audit can help you set business goals in an efficient manner. A website audit helps businesses to set smart goals in following ways –
- As stated earlier, Website Audit help you understand, where your business stands and current goal is achievable or not.
- A website Audit process help marketing team to create very specific goals that is achievable within a time frame. For example, a goal based on website audit help you understand what activities to be done on a website to get it ranked. Like, what should meta tags and what should be the anchor tags for link-building process.
- A website Audit help business owners understand which goal can take more time and which goal can be achieved within timeframe.
Prepare for More Extensive Audits – A quality website audit is the key to help website perform better but it should be a never ending process. Doing a simple website audit and achieving the goal is good but this should not be only your ultimate goal of your business marketing process. There are many types of extensive website audit processes and you need to use them for getting as good results as possible.
The advance website audit processes including social media marketing audit, user experience audit are important to further consider for a business website. A business or brand that is focused to get as many leads as possible need to understand website audit is like never ending process. One needs to opt advance extensive audits for better performance of a website.
Types of Website Audit
However, there can be many types of Website Audits but here is a list of top 7 website Audit processes –
Website Health Audits – A website health audit covers layout and usability of a website. It also covers a list of new opportunities for key performance indicators (KPIs).
Website Security Audits – Website Security Audits is one of the most important factors because if there is any lack of security, the sensitive information of business and users can be leaked. The National Small Business Information reported that more than 44% of small businesses are attacked by cyber attack. The same report also explained that there was cost over $20,000 to handle this request.
Competitors Site Audits – Analyzing competitors website gives several opportunities to grow. A website owner understand that what competitors are doing to get leads and calls online. One can know competitors websites back-links, social media presence, website speed, content quality and much more.
Conversion Optimization Audits – This type of Audits help businesses convert visitors into customers. Main goal of this audit is to suggest some good changes so that more visitors can perform the desired action.
Social Media Presence Audit – Google takes help of over 200 ranking factors to rank a website in search results and social media presence is one of the most important ranking factors. A website needs to have good presence over top social media websites including Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Lockerdome, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin etc.
Duplicate Content Audit – Website that contains duplicate content confuse Google and other search engines. Search Engines don’t like copied contents and so a website needs to have quality content. Duplicate Content Audit covers URLs of plagiarized pages so that you can make them unique with original contents. Plagiarized content can be result to get banned by search engines. This is a common issue and can be easily resolved by adding SEO friendly contents and re-submitting website to get indexed.
Google Penalty Recovery Audits – Google Penalty Recovery or Red Flag Audit helps website owners understand if a website is penalized by any of Google Algorithm updates or through manual process. The audit helps business owners to understand why their websites have been penalized and what is the required process for recovery.
What does a website Audit look like?
First of all, You should understand that an Audit report is not simply as Screaming frog report, A W3c validation report, bunches of Google analytics data or tool reports of any kind. A website audit report is not just a set of data that is generated by any type of tool which can be done by yourself too. Anyone can generate a report from screaming frog (or any other tool) and make it look like they did it by them self.
What you are paying any website auditor expert is to do is to take help from the tools and their expertise/experience and create an effective report that shows clear report that is descriptive and clear to understand by yourself. This is for what you are paying for. Right?
Every company presents site audit data in their own way. However here is a list of some of the points that should be clear and easy to understand in every website audit report –
Summary Analysis – Your website audit report will contain so many things. There should be a summary analysis section where you can quickly understand what are the major issues and what are the right steps to practice to get maximum calls and leads.
Red Flag Warnings – If your website is penalized by search engines, it is very important to fix it ASAP. Your website audit file contains if there is any type of penalty for your website and the required steps to fix it ASAP.
Data – Your website Audit file should contain an array of data that shows so many data of different ranking factors. For example, what are the top keywords, positioning, alexa rank, number of back-links , social media presence and much more.
Actionable Recommendations – Apart from data analysis, Your website audit report should have a section, showing things to implement for getting better business outputs. There should be expert recommendations to fulfill business goals of a business website.
Hire brain not a tool –
If someone is going to send you free website audit report or if someone is sending you a website audit report in a very low price, it is more likely that you are going to take the data generated from a free or paid tool. These types of reports are not much clear and they are not as per search engine’s algorithm updates.
Be sure that you are hiring not the automated tools – Your website audit is going to be simple and great only if an expert is creating it. Be sure that the person is experienced and have good knowledge in conducting good website audits. Remember that cheap SEO is not cheap because it takes a lot of time and money in back-links cleanup process.
However, using automated tools only for creating website audit report is just crap but if an expert is taking help of some good tools, they can create a final website audit report that can be easy to understand, descriptive and to the point. Here is a list of some of the popular tools, used by Digital Marketing experts to create great website audit reports –
Google Analytics & Google Webmaster Tools : It’s well known that Google Analytics and GWT are very helpful to know crawl errors, sitemap errors, any structure data errors, reviewing index pages, bounce rate, number of page views, traffic sources, keyword positioning and much more.
Alexa Rank & Moz Tools : Alexa Rank and Moz tools are important to know traffic and authority of websites. Alexa rank, Domain authority and Page authority are important factors.
Screaming Frog : Screaming Frog is a great tool and very helpful tool for creating website audit. It allows you to use a domain and crawl it in the same way as Google and other search engine crawls.
Some other popular website audit tools include – Small SEO Tools, Copyscape, SE Ranking, SEOtimizer, MySiteAuditor, UpCity, SiteAnalyzer and WooRank.
Best Tool – Your Brain :- Yes your brain is the best tool to make great website audit report. It’s up to you to show website issues in a good manner and it’s up to you how you are recommending to overcome the issues. Experience and knowledge will make your website audit report unique.
Conclusion –
You may not even know it but Google and other search engines continuously make changes to their algorithms to make better quality of search results. A through Website Audit report will help your website perform better because you will be knowing in detail about the issues and steps to follow for getting better results. Regular SEO audit help you customize your marketing campaign properly and it makes you sure that the campaign will be as effective as it can be. Our website audit process includes an array of ranking factors including inbound link analysis, website content, number of back-links, title and description tags, website design & structure, heading tags, competitors analysis, social media presence, Blogging, duplicate content check, link and page errors, target keyword analysis and much more.
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