Your website is a virtual office/showroom of your business. It reflects your business online. You need to audit your website and make sure that it is both user and search engine friendly.
What is website audit?
Website audit involves inspecting and adjusting every element of your website to enhance its performance and to recover from Google penalty, if any. Simply put, it’s a professional health check of your website.
It covers all the major areas of a website – Technical, On-page and Links.
- Technical – Some of the technical elements that are audited include hosting issues, server downtime, coding errors, flash, java, site structure, page speed, canonicalization of content, etc. These elements, if not corrected, can seriously impact the usability of the website; this in turn, can give a negative impression of your business among your visitors. Technical issues also make it difficult for search engines to crawl and index your website.
- On-page – When it comes to on-page elements, content, design and usability are important ones. With respect to content, duplicate content, keyword optimization, user generated spam, hidden text, meta content are inspected. Usability, navigability, URL architecture, call to actions, etc. are also reviewed as part of on-page audit. Search engines can easily detect if your website has issues with respect to content and usability. Google Panda targets websites with low quality content.
- Links – Links, both internal and external, of your website are inspected. Internal link audit involves review of anchor text, site architecture, broken links, etc. External link audit checks the number of links to your site, their quality, relevancy, acquisition pattern, anchor text, etc. It also checks for broken links, toxic links and the links going out from your website. This audit gives you a clear picture of the issues with the links of your website and helps you avoid Google Penguin penalty.
Why website audit?
Even before you invest in SEO or digital marketing, you need to get your website audited. Here are the reasons why:
- Helps you customize your SEO and online marketing campaign.
- Helps you know your website’s search engine and user friendliness.
- Helps you analyze and improve conversion issues on your website.
- Helps you spot overlooked opportunities and gives you insight into new strategic ideas.
- Helps you know present and potential search engine penalty issues.
- Helps you know if your site has been attacked by negative SEO methods.
When to go for a website audit?
Business owners generally get their website audited when they see significant drop in organic rankings and traffic. But we recommend you to go for an audit at least once or twice a year. If you keep adding content and changing your website each month, we recommend you to go for a website audit every quarter.
Each year, Google changes its search algorithm around 500 to 600 times. Any change to its algorithm can hurt your rankings. Here are some of the major updates in Google’s algorithm last year.
- Pirate 2.0 – Oct ‘14 – To combat software and digital media privacy
- HTTPs/SSL Update – Aug ‘14 – To give preference to secure sites
- Pigeon – Jul ‘14 – Targeted local search results
- Penguin 3.0 – Oct 14 – Targeted link spam
- Panda – 4.1 – Sept ‘14 – Targeted low quality content
Panda and Penguin are continuous updates. Other major updates to Google algorithm include Hummingbird, Payday, EMD and Top heavy.
Can you audit your website on your own?
Website audit is a complex and time taking task. The Internet may give you some idea of what all is required to check as part of a website audit. You may also figure out some tools to help you with the process. But, you may not be able to make sense of the data you collected unless you have expertise. Auditing a website the job of a professional; in fact, a team of digital marketing professionals each having different area of expertise.
Professionals from each niche, SEO, brand management, websites and technology and content, review the website from their area of expertise. They use tools to gather the data – compare and contrast reports; and using their experience they assess what that data means to your business. When it comes to website audit, you are really paying for the experience of the auditors.
Choosing a website auditor
There are many so called website auditors out there in the market. Choosing one can be intimidating. The first thing you need to do is avoid website auditing tools or software.
Seasoned professionals not only know how to identify issues, but also know how much time and effort each recommendation takes to implement. They offer actionable recommendations that are major and at the same time are easy to implement.