“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
If your company website hasn’t been audited in the last two years, you’re in for a lot of surprises, and I’m afraid they won’t be good ones. A website audit will tell you where you are and set you on the right path to success!
A lot has changed in the way that Google and other search engines analyze and rank the pages of your website. You will need to know where your problems are and fix them now.
One of the areas that you should be very concerned about is the user experience/user interfaces that your website provides. Combine this with a simple item like not having a website secure with an SSL certificate; either one will kill your chances of ranking high, regardless of your diligence with creating good content. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, Google won’t consider your website to be compliant with the latest standards.
Today, one needs to dig deep into a website and identify the issues that will greatly affect your website’s ranking for keywords and phrases and how your website stacks up against your competition.
How deep should a website audit be? The answer is really in depth from the first to the last page and goes through each and every page looking for all the elements that are used to build the site. This means all the coding, not just looking at Meta, ALT, Heading and other tags.
This is what a deep audit examines:
Global performance information
World position
country range
CategoryRange
Classification Audit
Keyword Ranking Status
UI and user experience
call to action
Mobile friendly?
Readability
Content overview (on page)
keyword focus
URL structure
Title tags
meta description
OG Labels (Open Graphic)
Header Tags (H1 – H6)
Content (Number of words, etc.)
Internal linking and anchor tags (link structure)
Image names and ALT tags
optimization analysis
Exclusions page (robots.txt)
Inclusions page (sitemap.xml)
URL redirects (301, 302, www/no-www)
duplicate content
broken links
Validation code
Page speed (CSS, JS, caching, image sizes)
SSL configuration (http vs. https)
Link analysis overview (off page)
Incoming Followed Links
Root domain linking
Authority and Trust
Social Media Metrics
Competitive Link Comparison
Visibility and reach in social networks
Here are some details of what an audit is about
Worldwide performance information
These are metrics to show the health, reach, and awareness of your websites compared to other websites globally, nationally, and within a given industry.
Classification Audit
A rank audit is an analysis of how your website ranks for keywords and phrases. This audit can be expanded by performing a competitive ranking audit that includes an audit of the ranking of your competitors. Another element of auditing can look at how many keywords and phrases on a given website rank in the top 5 search positions compared to the next 20 or 50 positions. This will help find more optimization potential for rankings >10.
UI and user experience
UI = User Interface and UX = User Experience. This is not a straight-by-the-numbers analysis, but having a good UI and Look & Feel can lead to a good user experience. The good UI elements that drive a good user experience are clear. Call to action, good text readability and the website is mobile friendly, just to name a few examples. This is important as the search engine can measure user signals. If a visitor after searching for a keyword or phrase is satisfied with a certain website due to good UI and UX, he will not return to the search engine. They will most likely take action on the website, such as purchasing a product. This generates revenue for the website owner more often than a website with a poor user interface and user experience. Websites with positive user signals will rank higher.
Content overview (on page)
Content analysis is a large and important part of a complete website analysis. This touches everything visible on your website.
The keyword focus audit looks at how well you’ve identified and targeted the keywords people use to find your page.
However, the good content does not stop here. It is also used to determine the quality of content by measuring the appropriate word count of the text, applying the correct information to META (non-visible) information such as META descriptions, image ALT tags, internal links, etc. Finally, is this page ready to be properly linked to any social network like Facebook and Twitter?
Indexing Overview
Technical analysis, such as the indexing status of a website, is important because if search engines cannot index the website correctly, they cannot understand the content and meaning of the website.
Indexing starts with choosing the right pages to be indexed and those not to be indexed. The Google search robot takes very little time to index a website. Google Bot only indexes a specific number of pages on a site. Analysis drills down into your website to help determine which pages to index and which pages to exclude from the index.
Scanning for potential broken links is important to prevent people from landing on an error page. Getting to an error page by clicking on a broken link can cause dissatisfaction and frustration for the user. If the user returns to the search engine results page and performs another search, Google will rate this behavior as a bad sign from the user.
Link analysis overview (off page)
The Internet is a “net”! It is a huge network of links that point from one web page to another. But linking is a double-edged sword. It is important that two linked resources have contextual meaning to each other. In this case, it provides greater value for the user and the search engine, as well as for the determination of the ranking.
An analysis will check all incoming links with respect to their contextual value to the web page and their possible level of toxicity. This identifies the transfer of authority and trust to the given page. If the links are created just to get higher rankings, they may be considered spam by search engines.
A complete and deep audit will provide all the information about your website in the form of a detailed report. This report will be your roadmap for the process of making the necessary fixes to your website for higher rankings.