When was the last time you audited your website? This year? Two years ago? Maybe even four years ago?
If you answered two or more years ago, you should consider planning an audit soon. When you conduct a website audit, you can re-optimize elements of your site to increase your traffic and subsequently, your leads.
So, what should you look for when doing an audit? Most include technical components, but you should also focus on the performance of your design and content. Use this guide to perform your audit and begin making improvements to your website.
Technical Component Checklist
The underlying elements of your website, like your sitemap, affect the performance of your site. That’s why you should never skip out on this integral part. Begin your technical audit by:
- Looking for oversized images or files that can be reduced. These are common causes of slow site speed.
- Correcting any 404 error, broken links, or re-direct messages.
- Ensuring you have a responsive design, so your website design looks and functions great on desktop, mobile phones, and tablets.
- Performing a website crawl to uncover any missed on-page or off-page SEO opportunities such as keywords, anchor links, meta tags, title tags, and alt text. Resources like Screaming Frog SEO Spider can assist in this.
- Checking to see if your website URLs are the correct length and not keyword-stuffed.
- Making sure you have a site structure, and your webpages are internally linked for faster indexing by search engines. This includes having a functional, easy to use navigation.
- Looking to see if your site is secure and uses https vs. http.
Content Checklist
If your content is poor, your inbound marketing strategy is struggling. Start your content audit by:
- Reviewing blogs for any potential spelling or grammar errors.
- Ensuring your content is helpful, engaging, and you have pieces that align to every stage of the buyers’ journey.
- Updating any factual inaccuracies regarding your industry, company, services, or products.
- Removing any duplicate content such as blogs, webpages, meta descriptions, or case studies.
- Looking for and implementing social share buttons somewhere on your site to aid in easy content distribution.
- Checking for strategic use of CTAs and other lead generation offers and creating more (or less) if needed.
Design Checklist
Your website design serves as the first impression of your company for many of your leads and customers. If you’re not regularly checking to see if your design is impactful, you may be steering people away from your site. Perform your design audit by:
- Making sure your design aligns with your branding.
- Asking a customer or other outside source to perform a blink test to see if you’re portraying your company and services well.
- Seeing if the design flows, your content is easy to read, and your graphics high quality and not obstructive.
- Looking for a good balance of text and graphics.
- Assuring your design is modern and up-to-date.
Audit Tips
After you complete your audit and discover areas for improvement, the fun is not over. Here are some additional tips.
- Have another person from your company look your website over for any places where you can improve as well. They may find something you don’t.
- Plan out your updates on your company calendar. You can plan to make all your updates all at once or over time. Either way, make a note of when you’re going to do this, so your team and other stakeholders can be aware.
- Schedule regular audits to maintain the health of your website. Keep it on a public calendar, so others within your company are aware.