Website Audit: Try This Checklist & Tools to Boost Your Ranking

Website Audit

This article explains technical & non-technical aspects of the complete website audit that can be beneficial for your increased traffic & and business growth.

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What is a website audit?

A site audit is a process of evaluating the search engine friendliness of a website. Consider it a comprehensive assessment of its overall performance. An audit reveals which tactics and technical elements get prioritized in improving SEO positioning. In other words, it works to identify issues that may prevent a website from appearing in search engine results pages (SERPs).

The rules and guidelines of the government must adhere to while doing the audit. Before large-scale search engine optimization (SEO) or website redesign, a website audit examines page performance. Auditing your website could determine whether it is optimized to achieve your traffic goals and provide insight into how you can improve SEO. 

“Website health audits entail analyzing the overall health of a website and identifying any issues that require urgent attention.”

This article will explain website audit, its different types, benefits, and parameters.

A website audit is a comprehensive examination of a website to determine its smooth operation, complete security, and seamless end-user experience.

It is beneficial –

  • Examine the website based on the factors influencing its visibility in Google search results.
  • Provide a thorough examination of your website.
  • Unraveling issues hampering the performance of the website.
  • Make suggestions for improvements to your website.
  • Increase user engagement and website traffic.

Now that you understand what a website audit is, let us look at the different types of website audits.

Website audit types

Every website is unique. It has its challenges that must be addressed and resolved. As a result, various types of audits aim at specific areas of an official site. The following are some examples of common types of website audits:

Website Audit Types
Website Audit Types
  1. SEO Audit: An SEO audit examines how your website ranks in search results. An SEO audit includes variables: keywords, link profiles, traffic behavior, goal conversions, and metadata. This website audit tool would assist you with a comprehensive all-inclusive website performance audit.
  2. Content Audit: Content gets reviewed in SEO audits. However, standalone content audits to ensure that your voice is consistent with your brand. It also identifies the content that is causing conversions. A fantastic tool, i.e., SEMrush, helps you get a detailed and comprehensive SEO audit report.
  3. Technical Audit: Trying to keep up with SEO algorithms and producing high-quality content will not produce results if there is a technical problem. As a result, a technical website audit looks for broken internal links and redirect chains, irregular XML, and other issues.
  4. Design Audit: It ensures that the design of your website is visually appealing for a better user experience. It looks at whether the content, structure, and colors contribute to a great user experience. To Check for a great UX audit, go for this fantastic tool.
  5. Competition Website Audit: To ensure your business is unique, you must know what your competitors are doing. Analyzing your competitor’s websites can help you develop strategies for improved business performance.

If you want to know more about website auditing, check out WittySparks Review section.

The detailed explanation of how to boost your business by utilizing various aspects of a website audit.

How website audit can improve your SEO?

There are numerous SEO audit methodologies available. Whether you are a small business looking to optimize your site for organic search or an agency looking to do the same for a client, there are glitches you might probably face.

It could be hard to recognize where to start, how in-depth your analysis should be, and which SEO tools will help you glean the most valuable information.

To cut through the clutter, we identified ten essential components of a successful SEO audit. And we will go over not only how to carry them out but also how to fix any problems that arise.

Whether you are an experienced SEO or a small business owner tinkering with your own Squarespace website, following the ten steps in this guide will put your website on the path to organic search dominance.

Let us get started.

An SEO audit entails evaluating your digital assets to ensure the site is optimal in search results. It includes the learning of:

  • Capture or scale your strengths and successes.
  • What are the errors that need to get rectified?
  • What is not working and should get avoided?
  • What is not working and needs to get fixed?

The problem is that there are several aspects of SEO that can quickly become overwhelming. We simplified the SEO audit into ten core steps in this post, but if you have a large website, you might consider categorizing your SEO audits. Continue reading to know about different types of SEO audits.

An SEO audit is like having your vehicle oil changed. As you are aware, regular oil changes are one of the most critical ways to extend the life of your vehicle. An SEO audit looks at your webpage infrastructure required, on-page elements, and off-page essentials to improve Search Engine visibility, usability, and website conversion.

A website SEO audit is needed to get conducted regularly. It ensures the long-term success of your website.

SEO audits are critical players in keeping your SEO strategy up to date. If your website is not optimized for search, you are losing a lot of search engine traffic and the potential attention of the customers.

There are several reasons to conduct a website SEO audit.

Several reasons why you should conduct a website SEO audit
Several reasons to conduct a website audit
  • Changes in algorithms: Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are constantly updating their algorithms to provide better search results, and you should be aware of these changes so you could perform appropriate changes to the content of the website.
  • Webmaster Guidelines: Because popular webmaster solutions from Google and Bing are constantly changing, you must ensure that you are compliant. You could use SEO Buddy, which could help you throughout this journey.
  • Website Errors: Your site must contain no error messages or broken links. The audit will expose the errors, enabling you to transmit them and recover lost traffic.
  • Titles and Meta Descriptions: When you appear in search results, the first thing visitors will read about you is your title tags and meta descriptions. They must be relevant to the content of the site.
  • Outdated Information: You may have outdated content on your website. It is critical to provide search engines with relevant and fresh content. Provide them with a reason to return.

If no one visits or returns to your website in six months, rethink the content or remove it. If you are striving for a comprehensive SEO tool, which could help you optimize your site & do good SEO, Mangools could be your best bet.

How to do a website audit easily?

Do not be misled by Google: a website audit is more than just SEO. It is about design and UX, lead generation on your website and ease of administration, website content, and interaction with social media (as HubSpot experts consider).

A website contains dozens or hundreds of web pages. Website auditing is critical, so check up to ten pages that lead a company to its goal (the main page, a website link, and pages of the most popular products/groups of products).

Create your styling audit template using this checklist.

Website audit Checklist

It will close the deal for prospects still in the learning and research stage, and if done correctly, it will keep bringing customers back.

A business-to-business (B2B) transaction, usually referred to as a B-to-B transaction, is a transaction between businesses, like a manufacturer and a wholesaler or a wholesaler and a retailer. 

Your website audit is the most critical component of your B2B business.

In our experience, many businesses throw together a website when they first establish their company.

Many businesses believe that including contact information and business, information is sufficient. However, when it comes to scaling up, having an optimized and performing website audit will yield more for business.

Hence, an ultimate website audit checklist is required. We will break it all down for you to know what you need to do to rank high in Google searches. Identify the percentage cleared by your website.

Let us get this game started.

1. Begin with the Fundamentals

Fundamentals mean checking Google Analytics to measure the performance of the website.

You must have a Google Analytics account that you monitor regularly. Your Google Analytics reports will show patterns and trends in your organic search traffic, such as which pages are performing well and which are not. It is the first thing on the checklist.

2. Ensure that there is only one version of your brand.

You have not got cloned. Yet when it relates to your website, it is a different aspect. Many small firms must avoid getting numerous Google-indexed versions of their website audits.

What exactly do we mean by that? Multiple URLs may appear different, such as HTTP://, HTTPS://, http://www & https://www.

Your main web address may be the same across the board, but having multiple versions means your site needs more consistency, which can be problematic when tracking down who is visiting.

There is an easy way to test this and ensure that the site always goes to the same address: Enter the versions listed above into your search bar. If your website audit is well-configured, they should all redirect to the same description. 

What if it does not redirect? Set up 301 redirects in your website settings so that all versions automatically become the same URL. Remember that consistency is ideal in this situation. Redirect 301 verifies a requested URL’s redirect status and examines its route.

3. Maintain Your Content.

While performing a website audit, consider removing close-to-the-bottom content so that Google only reads and ranks the pages that provide the most value to your potential customers.

But what exactly does low-quality B2B content imply? Landing pages with fewer than 100 words, category or tag pages, and broken links are all examples. They, believe it or not, lower your overall search ranking—which can be a critical issue when trying to scale up and find new customers.

Sometimes the simplest solution is to update the page rather than remove it. Simple fixes, such as updating broken links (no more than 404 error pages!) or removing them entirely, can make a significant difference.

If you are new to all of this, tools like Google Search Console can assist you in determining which issues are the most pressing and which need attention.

Extensive tools, like Outranking.io, assist content designers in settling their marketing goals.

It is about more than revamping when it comes to content. You should also ask yourself: Is the content on my website achieving the intended goals?

Categorizing your content by type will help you stay organized and ensure your website is well-organized. Collect prime metrics for each piece of content so that you can examine it and see how well it is performing. You will be able to improve your strategy from there.

4. Strive for Speed!

Consider your website as if you were the one visiting and looking to buy a service or product. What keeps you from clicking buy when you visit consumer websites? Most users claimed that slow website load times prevent them from closing a sale.

To test the speed of your page, use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool. Follow their recommendations for optimizing load times and lowering bounce rates, and you will see an immediate improvement in your ranking.

5. Check your Navigation.

Websites, like architecture, have clear hierarchies that allow users easy navigation. Examine your website information from the perspective of a potential customer.

Are the pages accessible? Is your website user-friendly? Is it simple to navigate your buyer’s journey? The answers to these questions will assist you in determining which pages to optimize.

Make your header/top navigation sticky, or add navigational links to your footer. It will improve the usability of your website. Again, SEMrush is a great tool to check if your website navigation is optimized or not.

6. Make it versatile.

It may seem obvious, but if a company website is not mobile-optimized, it makes it much more difficult for someone to stay—and that much easier for them to leave for one of your competitors.

As one might expect, Google has a solution. You can use a Mobile-Friendly Test to determine whether your site is optimized and to identify the issues that need attention.

7. Plan your SEO strategy.

When optimizing your website, you must consider search engine requirements and the user experience. B2B SEO is critical—for ranking on Google, but you should also provide value to your customers. Respond to their inquiries and address their concerns. Create a community.

One SEO tool that is rapidly evolving and prevalent amongst SEO proficients is Surfer SEO.

To improve the SEO of your website, review the backend elements such as meta descriptions, page titles, keyword usage, backlinks, and more. It is quite a bit. However, from a content audit standpoint, you will want your content to provide your target audience with what they want, which is high-quality, engaging content.

It is where keyword research comes into play. When searching for a keyword analysis tool with simple UI, outstanding efficacy & accurate results, KWFinder is flawless and ideal. Here, Long Tail Pro is a veteran among long tail keyword tools.

Do you want to reach out to a local audience? Is it a national one? Of course, it depends on your marketing objectives, but you can use this audit checklist to check your keywords and improve your rankings.

8. Examine Your Primary Competitors.

Competitors can be a source of danger on your side or your best learning opportunity, depending on your perspective. While auditing your website, look at the competition to see what and how they are doing.

Is it hard to navigate their website?

Does it take a long time for their pages to load?

Are they in the top three search results for your industry?

These are some considerations to bear in mind as you work on your website. Sure, everyone strives to be the best in their field. What you put on your site, and how it performs and engages with visitors, will truly set you apart.

Now that we know the delivery process, let us talk about design.

9. Adhere to a Style Guide.

Adobe is primarily the foundational text for many designers when it comes to design. If you are getting started, their adherence to style guides is beneficial.

A User experience stylebook is the sole supplier of design documentation that provides guidelines for the look, feel, and tone. It helps with brand consistency and continuity and controls a critical aspect of the user experience when they visit your website.

Following a style guide ensures that the user experience is consistent from page to page. Remember that consistency is essential.

Is your style guide up to standard?

Here are some visual consistency checks you can incorporate.

  • Be sure that your logo is consistent across all of your pages.
  • Make sure your background images are of the same style so that the transition between pages and sections is not too abrupt.
  • Check that your icons have a consistent style, and if they do not have one, try replacing them with icons from a single family, such as Fonts Illustrations (which can get integrated with Divi).

10. Remember to socialize.

Using social media to drive traffic to the website is an essential form of optimization. Your social posts should include links to your website regularly, but your homepage should also include links to social accounts.

It encourages visitors to your website to connect to you and follow you for notifications. You can quickly expand your engagement on social media with Revive Social.

“A website audit is designed to provide webmasters with a comprehensive and detailed analysis of their site’s health, performance, and speed.”

Website SEO audit checklist 

Website SEO audit checklist
Website SEO audit checklist 
  1. Explore options for link building.
  2. Identify potential information architecture enhancements.
  3. Find (and correct) thin content.
  4. Identify (and eliminate) duplicate content.
  5. Examine keywords for optimization.
  6. Enhance metadata.
  7. Determine opportunities for page updates.
  8. Analyze the page speed.
  9. Check for site errors.
  10. Change from HTTP to HTTPS.

Tools – Weapons for assisting and improvising audits.

Auditing a website is not cracking up the issue. Working day in and day out takes a lot of time and resources. As the auditor must go through hundreds of pages, it necessitates a keen eye for detail—some of the best tools SEO auditors used to make their jobs easier.

There are tools in the market, make the work of SEO auditors much easier. Auditors can perform manual checks on each web page without spending time.

Today, you can easily find hundreds of different websites with audit tools that can assist you in identifying problems with your website. Website oversight tools help to identify issues in your system. A professional auditing team can be maintained to ensure satisfactory results.

1. Ahrefs Site Audit

Ahrefs Site Audit works like a mini lab to examine the health of your website. The system can identify 110+ technical issues, ranging from critical errors to minor defects. Whatever is causing your website rankings to suffer (broken links, redirects, images, or entire CSS and JavaScript files), you will find and fix it quickly.

There is no need to Google something unclear to you. You can use the Ahrefs dashboard to understand what is wrong and how to fix it. It is very convenient! Site Audit is also user-friendly because there is no need to install clunky software. After all, it is a cloud-based tool.

It depends on the size of your portal website, but overall, website scanning is quite fast. Because Ahrefs can crawl JavaScript pages in addition to HTML pages, no page will go unchecked, and you will get a complete picture of your site.

2. ContentKing – SEO Audit

ContentKing, the only legitimate SEO auditing and monitoring platform, provides complete situational awareness, allowing to improve and maintain organic search visibility.

ContentKing continuously monitors the site, notifies you of on-page issues and changes as they occur, and allows you to take action before your rankings suffer. You will have the most up-to-date insights on your SEO performance without waiting for crawls to finish with 24/7 Monitoring and Alerting.

  • 24/7 Monitoring: No more jonesing for a crawl; ContentKing monitors everything happening on your site in real time.
  • Real-time Alert: Receive instant alerts and resolve SEO issues before they affect your bottom line.
  • SEO Change Tracking: See what got added, removed, and even changed within a page.
  • Actionable Insights: All of your SEO data is in one place, accessible to anyone on your team with no training.

ContentKing – Real-time SEO Auditing

A cloud-based real-time SEO auditing and monitoring platform.

ContentKing logo

3. GrowthBar

GrowthBar is a straightforward SEO Chrome extension that provides instant access to critical SEO data points about any website and reveals the growth channels and keywords working for them.

The tool helps to investigate the highest-performing search terms, keyword ranking difficulty score, domain authority, link-building data, page word count, Facebook ads, and other features. GrowthBar makes it ridiculously simple to implement SEO and increase organic traffic.

4. Screaming Frog

If you want to analyze your entire website at once on your desktop, Screaming Frog is a good option. Although not strictly an audit tool, but rather a crawling tool, Screaming Frog crawls your website and presents you with all potential SEO issues with your website.

It functions as a comprehensive site auditing tool, reporting on over 30 specific parameters, such as meta descriptions, outlines, response time, anchor text, security, and so on.

If you have up to 500 pages, Screaming Frog is the tool for you. The tool generates reports on over 30 metrics, such as meta descriptions, outlines, response time, security, anchor text, and more.

5. Sitechecker

Sitechecker is a fully featured SEO platform that consolidates all SEO data in one location and assists in tracking website performance. It includes functionality for one-time checks (SEO audit, keyword checking for website positions, on-page SEO checker) and ongoing monitoring (monitoring keyword rankings, tracking backlinks, and website monitoring).

You must try the free Sitechecker SEO extension to improve page quality and SEO performance in one click.

Sitechecker offers pricing plans to suit all budgets. The clarity in design, how-to-fix guides, and custom SEO reports speed up and simplify the SEO website audit process.

6. SE Ranking Website Audit

SE Ranking is one of the best tools for identifying errors and preparing a list of tasks for your content, web development, and designers to analyze9. The tool crawls your website and returns over 70 parameters, such as domain overview, pages, meta, content, images and links analysis, and mobile optimization.

What distinguishes SE Ranking Website Audit from others is that it groups all errors into a single report with simple tips. After the analysis gets completed, you can save the results in PDF format for future reference.

7. Seoptimer

Seoptimer is a free website audit resource that reports critical errors on your website but also suggests ways to improve your search ranking based on the evaluation. You can quickly install the Chrome extension and begin working through your website pages one by one.

8. MySiteAuditor

One of the preferred site SEO audit tools is MySiteAuditor. This tool is best suited for critical website SEO audit services and can get incorporated into your website. It helps in assisting you in generating more leads. MySiteAuditor is a tool that works directly with the ranking algorithm of Google.

MySiteAuditor, unlike other tools, identifies specific website pages for target keywords. The results can then be fetched in PDF format or sent via email for use in developing regular strategies.

9. Google Search Console

If you are starting in SEO, Google Search Console is the perfect tool. This free tool provides a fair amount of insights and a summary of important things to note, such as broken links, page load speed, indexed web pages, HTML markups, and more. You can also determine your position on the website by looking at the number of clicks and impressions in SERP results.

It falls short of offering a complete photograph for your website, which is a significant disadvantage. Nonetheless, it is an excellent tool for conducting a preliminary website analysis.

10. Whatagraph – SEO Report Sample

Whatagraph, an SEO reporting tool, makes assessing SEO performance a breeze for marketing agencies. This tool combines Whatagraph with essential SEO tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SEMRush, and others to compile valuable metrics into a single marketing report.

It provides a detailed insight to your clients within only a few clicks. Track and display total organic visitors, clicks, impressions, CTR, link-building statistics, and more. You may use this tool to visualize data in several ways, including lists, tables, charts, images, and comments.

Using one or a combination of these tools in conjunction with an advanced analytics tool for marketing will allow you to evaluate your website and differentiate yourself from your competitors.”

Benefits of the Website Audit

Depending on the scope of your website, a content development audit can take anywhere from a few hours to several months. However, an impactful evaluation will enhance your virtual existence in a variety of ways, including:

  • Identifying Issues in Your Content On the Site: As you review your content assets, you can start to address performance issues, fix broken links, and improve the accessibility of your site. These improvements will not only improve your website search value but will also increase its appeal to both new and returning viewers.
  • Identifying Content Repurposing Opportunities: Valuable, current information improves site usability, search ranking, and visitor loyalty. However, creating content from scratch is sometimes necessary when you have blog posts, contributed articles, and other advertising material that can be repurposed to achieve specific goals.
  • Diagnosing Content Gaps: A website audit not only provides an inventory of the information on your website but also highlights areas where the site lacks the information your audience is looking for the required information. By identifying content gaps on your site, you will be better prepared to create new content that provides value to your site and brand.
  • Content Quality Assessment: The quality of your available content should get evaluated during your website content audit. Is the quality high, medium, or low? Is it long, dense content, or brief, light content? Google website crawlers are aware of repetitive, short, and valuable content. They can disincentive your site in search rankings for it.
  • Improving Your Data Structure: You may have excellent content on your website, but it is useless if inaccessible. Use relevant analytics data, such as search terms, to figure out how to make your content easily accessible to your audience and search engines.

A content audit aims to provide a comprehensive framework of content that needs to get discarded, edited, reorganized, optimized, repurposed, or created from scratch. A partial audit is another effective method for maintaining your website because it takes samples from prime areas of your website, such as the main landing page, and then improves them based on the information discovered.

“A content audit entails carefully reviewing your website’s existing content to ensure it is relevant, accurate, and engaging.“

SEO Audit or Website Audit
SEO Audit

Ideally, the content audit process will reveal effective website content, shortfalls where content needs recreation, and identify areas where existing content is outdated or no longer useful to site users.”

A solid website is the first pillar of a solid online reputation. According to studies, 75% of customers judge the brand’s reputation based on its website. As a result, regular website evaluation is necessary to provide the audience with a better user experience.

The best way to do so is to audit your website, which allows you to assess its performance and health. It aids in filling gaps that affect your end-user experience and conversion rate.

The Parting Thought

The written pillar blog is solely dedicated to small business owners, marketers, freelancers & online business owners. By applying the given framework, you are going to see a great results in your online business.

A regular, scheduled audit acts as a benchmark for potential enhancements and ensures that major issues that will cause problems in the future are identified and corrected. For small websites, we recommend an annual audit, and for larger websites, we recommend a bi-annual audit.

Additionally, after a site goes live, a site audit should be performed to address any immediate issues and speed up the rate at which the site is indexed.

FAQs

What should be in a breakthrough website audit?

A successful and revenue-generating website consists of several components. Checklist for Website Audit, Marketing/Sales Objectives, Efficacy (data/analytics), CMS Design / Management Ease, Usability, Structural integrity (SEO), Content & Security.

How do I grow my business by website audit?

It is critical to evaluate every aspect of the site to ensure easy navigation, a better user experience, and peak performance. This is where a website audit can help. Periodic website audits can assist you in enhancing your site’s efficiency and visibility. As a result, your company will have a good opportunity for growth.

How frequently should I audit my site?

There is no hard and fast rule; some advocate once or twice a year, while others advocate as frequently as possible. However, aiming for a website audit once every quarter is a good starting point.

What is the typical lifespan of a website?

The genuine answer is that the lifespan of a website varies by industry and company, and several variables will determine how frequently a business should refresh its website. It will help to ascertain when a website needs to be updated.

How long does a website audit typically take?

An SEO audit can take anything between 2 to 6 weeks. During this time, an SEO specialist is trying to analyze and reveal SEO opportunities on your website. Nevertheless, bi-weekly or weekly check-ins keep you and your team informed of progress.

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