What is a Website Audit, and Why it Matters?
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As a species, we humans are prone to assume we know more than we actually do. It doesn’t matter if you’re an expert on a subject or a novice. You’re likely to overestimate your actual knowledge.
Two psychological terms detail our affinity to overrate our own knowledge: the Dunning-Kruger Effect and the Illusion of Explanatory Depth. Essentially, each of these terms describes a phenomenon in which individuals believe they know or understand something they don’t.
But the question remains, how do we learn what we don’t know? You can start by actively seeking feedback and additional knowledge. These two actions are foundational for improving your metacognition – or thinking about your thinking.
Still, you may be wondering, how do these psychological concepts relate to digital marketing? Well, because there’s a real chance you think you know more about your website and digital content’s performance than you do.
Let’s say you have a great-looking site and you’re creating excellent digital content. There’s still a possibility you’re not optimizing that content’s performance. That’s why a website audit is so essential.
It tells you all the things you don’t know you don’t know.
So, keep reading to learn what a website audit is and why it matters for the success of your business.
As previously stated, a site audit examines each page’s individual and cumulative performance. Such an audit is worthwhile for any site, whether new or mature. Because even if your site is generating traffic, it might not be reaching its full potential.
Site audits help you determine whether or not your site/a site’s page is optimized to achieve its traffic goals. And if you’re not addressing these potential points for improvement, your traffic could either plateau or even decrease.
Follow these seven steps to help you complete a site audit for yourself.
The first step in any audit is to select which audit tool you will use. There are many quality choices, so there’s really no wrong choice. Potential site audit tools you can use include SEMrush, Ahrefs, Serpstat, Raventools, Moz, and Screaming Frog.
A note about these audit tools: to get the complete list of benefits from a site audit, you’ll likely need to use a paid version. There are some free site audit tools, but they won’t give you the full breadth of detail.
This step is the easiest of the seven. After selecting your desired website audit tool, plug your site’s URL into the tool. Then let that tool work its magic. Your chosen tool will “crawl” every site page, looking for errors or potential issues. You’ll likely need to bake in at least an hour for the tool to complete the whole site audit.
After your chosen tool has finished auditing your site, you’ll receive a complete list of every issue the audit has flagged. One of the first sets of information you’ll notice is a list of technical problems.
Possible technical errors your site audit could flag include:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) requires a mix of technicalities and artistry. So, many of the technical problems your website audit will uncover will help your site’s overall SEO rankings. Still, some SEO components aren’t covered in the technical section of a site audit.
Common SEO errors uncovered through a site audit include:
Read all about SEO & how it can help boost your site performance here.
Another facet of a site audit is analyzing your website’s design and user-friendliness (UX)/ user-interface (UI). These traits are vital to show search engines how users interact with your site. Analyzing your site’s design and UX provides helpful information like how long users stay on your site or how often they convert to paying customers..
Quality content is essential to both your SEO and your conversions. A site audit helps you evaluate your site’s content by identifying your pages that rank for focus keywords. Similarly, the audit will locate pages with shallow or duplicate content. Shallow or duplicate content can hurt your SEO efforts.
Finally, after analyzing each aspect of your website audit, you’ll need to generate a report detailing all your found issues. This report should include recommended fixes for every issue/problem in the report. You can use this checklist to track what work has been done and what still needs to be completed.
Now, we know how to conduct a site audit. But what do you get out of this audit? Why does a business need to audit its website?
Periodic site audits are essential to any website’s SEO efforts. A site audit helps you identify where you can improve SEO and alerts you to missed SEO opportunities.
Your site audit will comb through your site’s content and its technical performance. You can double-check your site’s technical setup and assess its implementation through the audit. By evaluating your website, you can determine how well it works for the average user.
Your website audit can also help you evaluate your site’s effectiveness in converting visitors to leads and/or sales. With a thorough site audit, you can spot where a CTA, landing page or pop-up could help improve your conversion rate.
The entire point of a website audit is to learn what you don’t know about your site. A site audit will teach you more about your site’s SEO, technical performance, conversions, and how it stacks up to your closest competitors.
By learning what you don’t know about your website, you can significantly improve your site’s performance.
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