Is your website optimized for the search engines? How can you tell for sure?
Proper search engine optimization is crucial to online success. From keyword research to page load speed, everything matters.
For instance, 39 percent of users will leave a website if images take too long to load. People won’t stay on a site that has lots of pop-ups or illegible fonts. Poor quality content can increase your bounce rate too.
A website audit checklist can help determine what’s wrong with your site and where you can get better. It’s a fundamental step to improving your SEO efforts and conversion rates.
Website Audit Checklist: Things to Consider
The search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to provide a better user experience. Thus, it’s important to make sure your site is optimized for search bots and human visitors alike.
This is where an audit checklist comes in handy. Basically, it covers the most common SEO issues that affect your performance in search results.
The goal is to identify weak points that are driving users away and hurting your rankings. These may include irrelevant keywords, broken links, duplicate content, and more.
Once you’re done, you’ll have a clear idea of how to optimize your pages for maximum impact. This can result in higher conversion rates, increased sales, and more traffic.
A website audit checklist should cover three key areas:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
Each of these areas can be broken down further into several categories like:
- Keyword analysis
- Competitor analysis
- Technical analysis
- Indexability
- Page load speed
- Quality of internal links
- Quality of outbound links
- Broken links
- Website architecture
- Server location
- Content quality
- Brand signals
You must also consider the blog categories and tags, social signals, and search friendliness. A good website audit should cover all search engine ranking factors.
How to Perform a Website Audit
As you see, putting together a website audit checklist isn’t easy. For this reason, it’s recommended to hire a SEO expert. However, there are a couple of things you can do yourself.
The first step is to make sure that Google can easily find your site. Check the XML sitemap on your domain and install Google Search Console.
Next, make sure your targeted keywords are placed in the key areas of your site, such as the meta data. Watch out for missing title tags, duplicate meta descriptions and other issues.
For instance, each page should have a unique title. Make sure the Robots.txt file is not preventing the search bots from crawling your pages.
You also need to check the inbound and outbound links, site speed, and mobile responsiveness. Your website shouldn’t take more than two or three seconds to load. Otherwise, it will drive users away.
These are just a few of the many aspects to consider when performing a website audit. The more in-depth you go, the better.
Wrapping Up
Unless you’re a SEO expert yourself, it makes sense to hire a specialist.
The best SEO agencies use advanced tools to check your site and ensure it reaches its full potential.
What are the most important points on your website audit checklist? Are there any areas you’re concerned about? Leave a comment below!
