If you own a business site, you might have to perform a website audit at some point to improve the site’s ranking and get it to function well. In this post, we will look at what a website audit is, the benefits of doing one, and finally, how to audit your website.
What is a Site Audit?
To put it simply, a website audit is a combination of processes intended to evaluate how well-suited the site is for search engine indexing. Among the issues uncovered in an audit include the website’s SEO integration, content quality, and underlying technical issues that may be preventing proper indexing.
Why Do You Need a Website Audit?
The truth is, great content on its own will only give you some basic traffic numbers. It’s only when you combine it with things like on-page SEO, proper keyword research, and link building that you will get to see more qualified traffic. And the only way to know how much you need to improve is to do an audit.
Notably, it is important to know that a good website is one that provides value to its visitors and easy access to search engine crawlers. What’s more, you can audit your sites by yourself with some basic training, or if you can not handle the stress, outsource the job to a pro.
How to Perform a Site Audit
As mentioned earlier, you can choose to give the job to a professional or go the DIY route. If you choose the latter, you are advised to use a SEO audit tool.
These tools crawl through all your content and identify gaps and missing elements such as broken links and incomplete meta tags. They also show your average page load times so you can compare them with your competitors.
For you to get actionable results, you need to use a credible, and preferably paid audit tool. You also need to do lots of research on SEO, linking techniques, and learn how Google algorithms work. That way, you will know exactly what to do when you get the audit results.
Good Habits to Adopt
To reduce the number of future site audits and to make the auditing process easier, you need to:
- Upload a Robots.txt file to alert the search engines algorithms what pages to crawl and prevent pages that are not well-optimized from being indexed and hurting your rankings.
- Research the most relevant and up-to-date keywords in your niche and integrate them into your content.
- Create a straightforward sitemap for your visitors.
- Ensure all your content pages have good heading structures and relevant metadata.
Take Away
The internet is always under perpetual development. So, in order to keep up with the increasingly cut-throat competition in the eCommerce space, you need to improve both the content and technical aspects of your website. And like a map to a traveler, regular site audits are your best bet at knowing what changes to make.
