Identifying website issues with a website audit and fixing them as soon as possible ensures that visitors and search engines have a great experience navigating through your pages and posts. Having a website functioning efficiently and providing the best possible experience for your users is required to convert sales and keep end-users on your site and coming back.
Many business owners don’t completely understand exactly what a website audit involves or why it is important. If you are one of those business owners or admins that use the website every day and have a good understanding of how to navigate through it–you’re not able to see problems first-time visitors might be experiencing.
When you have SEO consultants perform a website audit for your site, you have an opportunity to have your WordPress website analyzed by a fresh set of eyes to identify where you can make improvements. Below, we take a closer look at the details of a website audit and why they are vital.
What Is A Website Audit?
A website audit is essentially a deep dive into your website by SEO consultants to identify any issues and areas for improvement. Website audits can cover a tremendous amount of detail, depending on the type of audit, or audits, that you choose. Using all of the information collected, you can implement strategies to bolster your website moving forward.
For example, at Big Red SEO, all of our website audits start at a minimum by analyzing your search engine rankings, website navigation, end-user experience/flow, and your site content.
Once we have evaluated each of these elements of your business website, we will review the visuals of your website design to find out how we can help you improve the functionality, look, and feel of your website. With all of the data we gather as SEO consultants, we can lay out a strategy to correct any concerns, either by you or by us, to make your website a better end-user and search engine experience.
Why Do You Need A Website Audit?
Just as you would get your vehicle serviced regularly, it’s essential that you carry out regular maintenance of your business website. Carrying out an audit of your website will help you find any areas that could be harming the health of your website and improve the overall visitor experience. Auditing your website can also help you identify some common website interferences that could affect your site’s performance with the search engines.
Identifying Navigation Issues
We always pay close attention to a website’s navigation when auditing a business website. Common navigation issues such as an overloaded menu, too many drop downs, no way to navigate back to the homepage easily, lack of a search function, difficulty locating contact details, and poorly laid out content can all hinder the user experience.These concerns can be challenging to identify when you are used to browsing your website every day or if you were the one that wrote the content yourself. With a professional website audit, these issues and other navigation problems can be easily identified and corrected.
Incorrect SEO Optimization
To ensure that your WordPress website features at the top of the search engine results, you need to have an effective SEO strategy in place. A website audit will pick up on where you can improve your SEO efforts to ensure better results going forward. Whether you need to rethink your targeted keywords, reoptimize your onsite content, correct meta problems, implement H1, H2, and H3 headers throughout your content or simply ensure that your site is indexed correctly, there are a lot of things that you can do to improve your SEO.
Other factors that need to be reviewed and addressed;
- broken links
- missing images
- URL structures
- duplicate content
- Schema Markup / Microdata
Mobile-Responsiveness
You will need to ensure that your business website is designed to be mobile-friendly, as this is also an important ranking factor for search engines. At Big Red SEO, we ensure every website we build is mobile-ready to ensure that you have the best-ranking opportunity in the search engine results pages.
Slow Site Speeds
Google has indicated that site speed is a ranking factor in its algorithm, and, as such, you should optimize your website so that it is as quick as possible. Having SEO consultants professionally audit your business website will allow you to identify any critical aspects that might be slowing down your website. We may also be able to find opportunities where you can implement code to speed up your WordPress website. All of those improvements will positively impact your SEO efforts.There are so many aspects that can contribute to slow site speeds that this is one task best left to experienced website designers. While an SEO expert can identify website slowdown issues, they are often unable to provide ideal solutions and instead refer you back to your web designer to resolve them. Luckily at Big Red SEO, Kim and Conor have experience at both the technical as well as the visual.
Server issues, overloaded databases, incorrectly formatted problems, too many redirects, unnecessary JS and CSS files, and using too many plugins on your WordPress website can all have a negative impact on site speed. These are all areas where we can help too.
We always advise making a backup of your website before attempting to update anything. If you’re unsure of the correct steps that need to be taken to clean up your business website, be sure to contact us about our website audit services so you can put an effective strategy in place to improve your website’s performance.
A Website Audit Will Ensure Your Website Performs Optimally Going Forward
Having a professional website audit performed will help you identify where you can improve your website design, functionality, and performance. What’s more, a thorough audit of your business website will allow you to enhance your SEO strategy so that your website performs better in search engine rankings.
Contact Kim and Conor to learn more about our auditing services and how we can help you take your business website out of hiding, allowing you to reach more potential customers.
Curious what a website audit looks like live? Check out our YouTube channel where we perform several audits on the fly.