When you have a website for your business and want to enhance it’s search engine visibility, then a website audit (or “site audit”) is a perfect starting point for your website.
Many businesses integrate SEO Practices for online promotion strategies but not necessarily get the desired results. Here the Website audit comes into play, as it provides you all the information regarding your lack of direction and lack of efforts in the particular area for SEO purpose.Website audit can also provide answers to why you are experiencing low traffic, decreased sales, low conversions, and high bounce rates.
What is a site audit?
A website audit is a full fledged analysis of everything regarding your website’s level of search visibility over various search engines. A complete and thorough web audit will give you a deeper and clearer understanding as to why your site is not generating the traffic you want it should or why your sales and conversions are not improving as per your efforts. This can include, but is not necessarily limited to:
- Indexed pages
- Mobile-friendliness and responsiveness
- Updated and optimized content
- Meta data
- Page redirection and page errors
- Responsiveness to various devices
- Social signals
- Backlinks
- Meta Tags
To conduct a website audit SEO firms run various tests and trials to generate and derive reports and conclusions that provides all the information and insights for updation and enhancement of website.
Various aspects of a Website SEO audit are :
1) Technical Audit – making sure your site is well coded and runs effectively
2) On-site Audit – full review and analysis of all pages for proper keyword use in all significant areas (H1-H6, title tags, content etc.)
3) Off-site Audit – analysis of backlinks,anchor text,authority, citation and trust.
4) Social Audit – review recent visibility , mentions and posts
5) Local SEO Audit – if you are a local business, make your website optimized for local and that you have citations and other elements needed to gain local listings and place in directories
Duration for a Website Audit –
Various kinds of Website audits are carried out by SEO agencies for their clients depending upon the clients’ requirement, clientele base and size of business. Generally clients having vast businesses when opt for website audit , it takes 2-3 weeks for audit process. When smaller businesses opt to have website audit the duration lasts for 2-3 days as they have a less number of web pages and information.
All about improving your Website
Whether you are completing an audit in-house or looking to hire an expert to complete one with you, the sooner you act the better. Every audit performed is custom tailored to the specific situation and needs of the client. An audit will typically include:
- Technical Audit of your website
- Keyword analysis
- Content analysis
- Backlink identification and review
- Competitor research and analysis
Few Tools offering Free Website audit are as follows :
- SEMRush
- Raventools
- Moz
- SEOptimer
- Domain Hunter
- Google Analytics
- Google webmaster, and many more.