Do you want a winning website—one that draws the right traffic and converts quality leads? One that is worth every cent that you’ve poured into it? With a rock-solid website audit and maintenance plan, you can outstrip your competition online.
What Is a Website Audit?
Your website is a business asset. Like a car in your fleet, a website audit is like the head-to-tail check of a major service. Website maintenance would be the tyre changes, alignment, aircon re-gassing and other in-between things you do.
If you keep your site well-maintained, there will be less to fix by the following service (audit).
So, why call it a website audit and not a website check? Well, that’s because the methodology and the findings report are similar to a financial audit. Not to mention that the audit will definitely help you plug any holes where Rands and cents may leak!
Why Do I Need a Site Audit?
Google changes. People change. Your site has changed!
Each month you’re adding content, updating information, changing images—adding promos. These minor tweaks can cause broken links or a bloated back-end. It can slow our site down, or send visitors to 404-error pages, which is bad for user experience. Search engines penalise your site for these problems, lowering your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) score
Talking about search engines—did you know that Google alone makes roughly nine changes to its search algorithm per day?* Some changes hardly detectable other times Google rolls out a core update, which significantly change search rankings. Google’s latest update was released on 17 November.
Don’t forget your users. Their needs and preferences continually evolve; your site needs to keep up. People like to see a maintained site. An article about SEO last updated in 2019 is hardly helpful today. User experience is crucial to your SEO!
A website audit performs a thorough check of your site health. It provides a comprehensive list of what to fix, a view of what to improve, and where you’re meeting your metrics.
It is like a scorecard telling you where your site is performing or underperforming—so you can achieve your goals.
How Often Should You Audit Your Site?
Sticking with the car analogy, you want to regularly service your site for optimal performance and avoid expensive breaks!
If you’re active on your site, you’ll need to audit frequently. eCommerce sites, in particular, continually add and remove content, run campaigns, or update products. It’s probably best to look at a light monthly audit, scheduling deeper ones twice a year.
Showcase (or brochureware) sites will likely only need audits every four to six months, provided they are maintained in between. If you have an aggressive content marketing strategy, then you’ll need more.
How to Perform a Website Audit
There are several types of website audits, each focusing on a specific performance aspect. SEO audits, content audits, technical audits, usability, backlinks—and more!
- Get the right tools.
You will need the right tools to perform each type of audit. There are many free website checker tools online, but no single solution checks everything—despite what they might claim. Google Analytics tells you about your traffic sources, but Google webmaster tools rates the relevancy and quality of your backlinks. - Consolidate your data.
After running several analyses, you need to bring the data together to paint a single overall image of your site’s health. You must look at the results together to view problems in relation to one another and pinpoint possible cause-and-effect. This will help you to prioritise fixes properly, too. - Measure the results against your goals.
The only way to tell if something is working or not is if you have something against which to measure it. You might have pivoted your business model to adapt to the pandemic—but your website didn’t get the memo. - Set new KPIs and create an action plan.
Now you’re in the perfect position to redefine the metric you want to measure. Once your KPIs are set, you can implement strategies to achieve them. - Maintain your website.
Create checklists from your learnings to reduce future issues. For example, make a rule to update or purge one blog per month.
All Sixes and Sevens
Your ability to interpret your audit reports directly affect your chances of implementing meaningful change. You want to achieve data-driven digital marketing success.
Website auditing requires a keen understanding of the digital marketing and search engine landscape. As with your car, a working knowledge is enough to do an oil change or identify a bigger problem, but a mechanic knows how to strip the engine.
A comprehensive, professional audit will spare you a complete overhaul in the long run.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Put some serious horse-power into your site.
*Source: https://goingclear.com/how-often-should-i-audit-my-website/