INTRODUCTION:
According to the digital 2023 data report by Steefy How Many Websites Are There in the World? (2023) – Siteefy
There are more than 692.0 million internet users in India, whereas 5,16 billion internet users are there worldwide.
To that there are 1.13 billion websites in the world.
The surprising fact is that 82% of these websites are deactivated. The remaining 18% which makes 200 million are active.
Now let’s talk about trends, as we are aware small businesses are booming in India, according to GoDaddy’s Small Business Data Observatory 2023 – Business Results for India – Blog
In the last five years, 55% of new small businesses have launched in India.
For these small businesses, the main source of sales and to reach customers in all parts of India is through e-commerce websites and shopping apps. 66% of small businesses have their websites.
This makes having a responsive website a survival point for businesses. That makes website audit an important factor to keep this site running without stumbling.
One for making new customers, and two for supporting the current ones.
Your website must appear on search engines when someone searches for your business on the internet. How well does your website rank among your competitors?
Is your website responsive enough?
Other things like, Does your website work well on mobile or desktops?
Does your website have content that adds value to your site?
Do all internal links work on your site?
When small things like this don’t work well on your site, the search engine would drive traffic to other websites instead of yours.
If your website takes too much time to load or doesn’t have a call to action at relevant places, a customer might jump to another site.
To prevent and repair all these situations website audit plays an important role.
This blog takes you through some effective and proven steps to perform an audit report of your website.
What is a Website Audit?
So that it can have an improved user experience.
An SEO website audit is conducted to analyze how well your website ranks on search engines.
To check if your website has covered all the aspects that search bots analyze to rank your site on SERPs
This makes website audit an essential factor in the online presence of a business. Carrying out an SEO audit of the website helps online visibility, improves overall ranking and customer experience, and makes purchasing easier and more convenient.
One should consider viewing competitors’ websites to see if there are any blind spots they are missing. Make sure that your website is more attractive and easy to use.
You must frequently do a website audit to keep track of the performance of your website.
It might be a case that your website does not have any gaps or errors, you still need to conduct a website audit to make sure everything works well on your site, just like it is supposed to.
On the other hand, if you find errors you can fix them as soon as possible.
What is The Purpose Of a Website Audit And Analysis?
Before we go into detail about how to conduct the website audit, let’s first learn why a website audit is important and required for your website.
As the business world has gone digitally, the proper functioning of your business website has become a crucial part of its online presence and rate of online visibility.
Businesses must ensure that their website works smoothly for their visitors, to take them where they want to, and to have better engagement.
To ensure that every visitor is a retained customer. This is the shortest way to rank on SERPs.
But that’s not it, there are plenty of aspects that a business needs to take under its wings before it takes flight.
This flight is made easier by website audit,
The website audit and analysis will help you filter out all the bugs that hinder your progress on Google search as well in terms of the user experience of your website. To help you gain your online traffic goals and give you an idea of how and what precautions and actions are needed to be taken to achieve them.
To further look for how your site needs to be optimized and identify the tiniest issues that need fixing.
The core benefits of Audit are:
Helps in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your website
An SEO website audit helps you find blind spots on your website.
What aspects of your website work well and what aspects do not work or need to be included?
You should do a competitor analysis for your website to find what website essential aspects they are focusing on. And identify how your website is on the better or worse side of the internet.
Identifying these issues will give your website a new outlook which will not only improve your ranking on Google but also boost the user experience of your customers.
Areas of improvement for website audit
Once you identify the gaps in your website you can work on improving those aspects that will directly affect the performance of your website.
If you carry out website audit regularly you can identify major key performance factors and keep your website updated.
It does not only help you to work on your weaknesses, you can work more on your strengths making them the major performance factor of your website.
Online Visibility/Rankings on the Internet
SEO audit is essential for improving search engine visibility. To keep your website up to date you need to perform a website audit from time to time to keep up with the latest changes that Google keeps introducing.
For example, for whatever content is present on your website, the search engine considers E-E-A-T. (E-Experience E-Expertise A-Authoritativeness T-Trustworthiness)
This provides search engines with credibility and relevancy license of website content which is one of the important aspects of any website.
Search engines also take into account the overall working of your website. The design, content, and technical aspects.
Is your website regularly updated with upcoming changes?
Is it being managed and optimized regularly?
This all contributes to the overall ranking and visibility of your site.
Determine selling goals
A good website knows what its users are searching for, what they need the most, and how to make it easily visible. This is why we do website audits. To know what your customer requires most and how to provide them with easy accessibility.
A good website that has a call to action at the right places.
Blogs that educate customers about products and services.
A well-written case study of customers and clients that has been part of business and their feedback.
A clear statement of mission vision and values
All these things add value not just to the website but to the business entity as well.
Everything that a business does has an end goal of making their customer satisfied, making a better website is also for the same.
Better user experience will eventually lead to increased sales.
How to do a website audit?
You can get your website audit done in several ways. There are multiple tools available online both free and paid.
Some of the most efficient tools for website audit are:
Semrush Free technical SEO audit with Semrush SEO analysis tools
Hubspot HubSpot | Free SEO Tools
An even better option is to hire an SEO expert to audit your website and do regular optimization.
If you are doing it by yourself consider going through the steps given below;
1. Check for the URLs
Before starting with the website audit, gather essential information related to your site’s domain. Such as;
- How is your website URL & is your website Secure?
URLs
URLs are important to find pages of your site on the internet. They are one of the ranking factors as they not only help viewers but also help search bots understand what your page is about.
There are a few things you need to keep in mind while forming URLs,
URLs need to have keywords that describe the exact content of the page and thus do not mislead the server. They should be short and exact and describe the page content. Use a hyphen to separate words. You should make a standard URL naming process.
Security
Security is a major factor when it comes to websites. They are vulnerable to multiple security risks.
Hacking cases are increasing day by day, and thus to prevent that google has come up with many security regulations.
Security plays a major role in SEO. If a website is hacked, google as well as other servers would flag it to keep visitors safe and away from it, which would risk leakage of their data. This will automatically lower your website’s rank in SERPs, and your website traffic will be driven to other websites and thus prevent conversions.
In 2017 google came up with another security measure that if any website uses basic HTTP will be marked as unsecured on Chrome web browser.
This will help visitors stay away from such sites. As a website owner, it is necessary to be updated about all such updates.
These are the two things to check before diving into a website audit.
This is a way to know how good your website is doing from a Google crawler perspective.
On-Page SEO audit of the website
Check following this while doing On-page SEO, these features play a major role while Google crawls your website to rank them on SERPs
Title tags:
- Check if all your pages have different title tags, duplication confuses bots and your page might end up getting unnoticed
- Make sure your title tags call for action which increases CTAs
- Your title tags should be under a limit of 50-60
Meta Description:
- The meta description should be a precise description of what is the blog about, making sure it answers the most searches on search engines which will in turn help increase CTAs
- The meta description works elevators pitch for your content, so make it as convincing as possible for viewers to click through
- Your meta description should not exceed 160 characters
Heading tags:
- There should not be multiple <h1> tags on the page,
the remaining headings are supposed to be <h2> tags
- There should be a clear hierarchy structure of heading tags that will help crawlers classify content
Alt tag:
- Your alt tags should be relevant to the context of the image.
- Your image may take too long to load if it exceeds 100kb. So make sure they are under this limit
- Your alt tags should not exceed 125 characters
Url optimization:
- Use exact keywords to form the URL. Take out unnecessary extra words
- Make sure it is short and simple
- There are other things in the format of URLs like you should not use capital etc
Content gap analysis :
You can do a competitor analysis to find what more content you can add to your site, such aspects can be followed,
- You can add internal links to blogs and services pages if they are missing
- Service Pages can be improved by adding some content and sections like Reviews, Work, etc
- Navigation
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly as most of the population is smartphone users.
A clear navigation bar, custom 404 page, sidebar, and avoiding clutter in the menu, etc make a smooth navigation website.
Visitors might jump to other websites if they are not able to navigate easily on your website,
You can use the free tool Ahrefs WordPress for content audit, monitor backlinks, and grow organic traffic.
Technical SEO
Page speed:
No one will ever stay on a page that takes too long to load. Page speed has always remained a ranking factor.
Also, remember that loading speeds on mobile and desktop are different. Speed on mobile is more important because 91% of traffic comes from mobile users. https://www.woorank.com/en/blog/tips-and-tools-for-creating-mobile-websites
You can check your page’s speed on-site audit as well as page speed. A tool that helps you analyze a website’s speed.
Sitemap issues
Indexing:
Google can’t rank your website if you have not indexed your pages.
Index only those pages that you want Google to rank. All pages on your website do not need indexing. And it is completely okay to not have all pages indexed. Amid pages, feed pages, etc need no indexing. Blog pages, home pages, services pages, etc are important to be indexed.
Issues with indexing should be fixed;
Redirect issues that do not take users to the desired page and lead them to a random page.
There can be issues with HTTPS, like slow loading, broken links, and error messages. To read more about this check out the Page Indexing report – Search Console Help
Robots.txt:
Robot text is a very important factor as it is a security factor. It helps certain pages private which you don’t want outsiders to view.
It needs to be in a structured format.
Add rules to your robot.txt file, add it to the root of your site, etc.
You can use the Google Webmaster ​robots.txt report – Search Console Help
check your Robot.txt
Structured data markup:
Also known as schema markup:
Here are some of the important schema that should be added to your site,
Website, FAQs, Service, Person (For Blogs & News), Logo, Aggregate Rating, Review snippet, ItemList, VideoObject, Local Business, etc
This Google tool will help you create and correct structured data markup for you
Schema Markup Testing Tool | Google Search Central
Open Graph and Twitter tags:
The following things are crucial to include;
Og title: This will be visible whenever someone links your website. So create it in such a way it draws attention but also short and uncomplicated.
Og name: Remember that this differs from the actual title of your webpage and is usually shown under the title itself.
Og: description – it’s a brief description of your website. This should be no more than 2 or a few lines.
Og: type – This is a tag to determine the type of content
Og: image – URL for an image that you want to display. The minimum size is 50 by 50 pixels and must be in JPEG, GIF, or PNG formats.
Og: URL – The URL that you want your content to link to.
Monitor the ranking of your site
The best way to track the effect of all medicines you take to repair your site. This is the best way to track the ranking of your site.
It helps to track;
- How the traffic has been improved from before
- How it has shown an effect on SERPs in different geographical locations
- Compare the rankings of your site with your competitors
Keep a close eye on manual Google updates:
As Google keeps on giving new updates regularly websites must be in sync with it. So that it does not lag behind SERPs.
Conclusion:
The website is a great start for a business website for its success.
Remember that this process is a constant and never-ending process to keep your site updated.
So go digital. And be updated.
