Your organization has a website. You are pretty proud of it, too. That’s great. But is the website actually doing something for your organization, or is it just gathering digital dust on an internet shelf? A good way to figure that out is to put your site through an audit. A comprehensive website audit conducted by experts can tell you a lot about how you’re doing online.
A website audit’s primary purpose is to analyze both the technical and aesthetic aspects of a website in order to identify:
- Technical and security issues.
- Areas needing improvement.
- Opportunities for better engagement.
A website is only as effective as its ability to connect with users in a meaningful way. Without a connection, a website is of very little value. Of course, organizations can put up a website and hope for the best. They can also have that site audited.
Website audits are something we do here at Webtek. Please feel free to reach out if your site has never been audited. In the meantime, here are the five key components a comprehensive site audit:
1. Technical Considerations
It is not unusual for a website audit to begin with an analysis of its technical capabilities. One of the first things we look at is page crawlability and indexability. Both of these things matter for the simple fact that Google and its competitors are not going to display pages that are neither crawlable nor indexable.
Technical considerations also include:
- Site architecture.
- Page speed (load times).
- Sitemap and robots.txt.
- Broken links (404 errors).
- Responsiveness and mobile friendliness.
The responsiveness and mobile-friendliness aspects are critical at a time when more people are using their phones to go online. A site needs to perform well on mobile devices or search engines will rank it lower.
2. On-Page SEO
Search engines rely on SEO to do what they do. Therefore, a good website audit takes a hard look at on-page SEO. This includes analyzing things like title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and even keywords. On-site content is also analyzed for quality and relevance.
On-page SEO also takes a good look at images and links. Images should be optimized and properly tagged. In terms of links, an audit looks at both internal and external linking structures.
3. Off-Page SEO
While there is less organizations can do with off-page SEO, there are still a few things in this category that a website audit considers. At the top of the list are backlinks. An audit analyzes a site’s backlink profile alongside competitor backlinks. It also looks at brand mentions and citations for both traditional and local SEO purposes.
4. Conversion Capabilities
Because conversion optimization is a recognized part of SEO, a comprehensive website audit will look at a site’s conversion capabilities. This part of the audit looks at things like calls to action, user flow navigation, and A/B testing.
5. Content
While content is part of the on-page component, it is also a separate component unto itself. Auditors look at content to identify both gaps and opportunities. They look for thin content, duplicate content, and content that search engines would consider junk. Most importantly, a website audit looks at content freshness, relevance, readability, and engagement potential.
If your organization operates a website that has never been audited before, you might be surprised by what an audit turns up. Webtek Digital Marketing offers website auditing services throughout Salt Lake City, Utah, and beyond. We encourage you to have your organization’s site audited – whether by us or another service provider. An audit can literally change things for your organization.
