Why You Should Audit Your Website

By Leigh Farrior

Why You Should Audit Your Website

Auditing your website can help maintain your brand, keep your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and lead generation tactics at their best, and ensure things like good user experience and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance. Here we discuss the steps involved in conducting a website audit. Read time: 3 minutes

You’ve got a website, you’re updating, adding content on the regular, and you’re promoting it on all of your marketing avenues. Great job! One question for you: When did you last audit your website? Even if your site is a “brochure” type of site where the content is mostly evergreen, you don’t want to set it and forget it. Partly because of the updates & advancements in technology. But mostly because auditing your website can help maintain your brand, keep your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and lead generation tactics at their best, and ensure things like good user experience and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance. 

When should you complete a website audit? An annual audit is generally sufficient, but if you are ensuring ADA compliance, you may want to audit your website as often as every quarter.

There are multiple things that go into a website audit, but all can be narrowed down to 5 topics: 

  • Site Architecture: audit of your navigation, search-friendly files, security, and broken links (to pages or images).
  • User Experience: analysis of your Google Analytics, website speed, viewing device responsiveness, photo compression, accurate hosting levels, interactive elements, form functionality, and ADA compliance. 
  • Content & On-page SEO: audit of your content for issues like inaccuracies, duplicate content (on-site and on other websites), content gaps, and areas that can be consolidated. Your on-page SEO tags should be compared with your Google Analytics and adjusted as needed. You’ll also want to make sure your images are SEO-friendly by being named correctly and having concise alt tags.
  • Marketing Objectives & Lead Generation: make sure your forms are optimized and collect the information that is most important to you—the shorter the form the better (and fewer required fields). You’ll also audit your copy to make sure that it is effective, has clear calls-to-action and converts customers.
  • Competitor Analysis: if you have strong competitors, it could be worth your time to review some of their websites to see how you can stand out from the crowd.   What should you have when you’re done? A full list of website issues and descriptions to guide your web team (whether in-house or your agency) in updating your website. It is ideal to order this list from the most urgent items to resolve to the least. 

A website audit can sound intimidating. Think of it like an oil change on your car. When you keep up with the maintenance it's fast and prevents other mishaps from happening when least expected (and usually most inconvenient). Same thing with a website audit.  While the time it takes to do an audit depends on the size of your site and if you’ve ever done one before, it is almost always time well spent. 

Interested in hiring out the audit? We’d love to talk with you about completing your audit and helping ensure your users have the best experience (and convert leads!). Contact Susan to schedule a call to discuss your needs!