We live in a digitalized world, where customers seek an omnichannel experience to shop. That is why having a professional website for your business is very crucial as it has the power to convert a one-time visitor into a regular customer. If someone wants to purchase an item from you, most chances are that he/she will likely surf through your website first. Hence, your business’s website is an essential tool in making or breaking your business. Taking care of your website is equal to taking care of your business.
A website audit identifies problems or shortcomings your website may be facing. It gives you a detailed analytical report about your site’s performance and health. That can help in improving your site and identifying issues that could be damaging to your business. It can also help you improve your business’s online visibility tremendously.
A website audit typically includes traffic, navigation, mobile optimization, user experience, functionality, and user engagement.
Reasons Why Your e-Business Requires A Site Audit:
Website Security Audit
A website security audit is one of the most crucial tools of a website audit. It helps keep the website secure for the business and its visitors by preventing any security breaches. For example, this can include private and personal information (phone number, house address) the visitors might have shared while logging in to your business’s website.
A site audit focuses on what is happening currently. A site health audit helps identify and access any usability, speed, technicality, or content structure issues your website may be facing. If you are a beginner or lack experience, you can consult a professional company to audit for the site. For example, you can check out the link https://www.semrush.com/siteaudit/ for more information regarding the site audit. That will enable you to protect your website from any cybercrime and security breach. The best part is; your efforts will be minimal – the Semrush Tech SEO- Site Audit tool will do everything for you!
SEO Audit
An SEO audit detects any functionality problems with your search engines. It will analyze your search optimization and tell you where your site is best suited for and where it lacks behind. That includes traffic, image optimization, video optimization, and analyzing keywords. A negative SEO is when businesses deliberately use an SEO strategy that will harm their competitors. An audit can help identify and resolve these issues.
CMS Audit
Content management system or CMS refers to the management and modification of digital content. Content is an essential tool for your business, especially if you have an e-business. It is a critical component in attracting customers and clients. If the CMS on your website is dated, your business and its website can be at risk. Updated CMS improves your website’s functionality as well as fixes technical errors.
Social Media Audit
That is perhaps the essential type of website audit. Social media has become the king influencer amongst all other digital media platforms. Hence, having a social media presence is immensely important for your website. Social media audits can analyze different channels like blogs, influencers, and others and judge what works better than the other. That will not only result in greater engagement but also thoroughly improve your website’s visibility.
Duplicate Content Audit
The last kind of site audit is a duplicate content audit. This audit helps prevent confusion between websites with similar or the same content. That saves a website’s ranking to suffer. Sometimes a duplicate audit is also counted under SEO audit. However, since it’s a prevalent issue, it is important to highlight it separately.
Website Loading Time
The On-Site SEO Audit will check why your website is lagging and its loading speed. Google even brings down your site’s ranking if it takes too much time to load. Some reasons for your website’s speed to slow down can be compressing or heavy images, more HTTP requests because of reduction in redirects, unoptimized CSS, caching issues, bulky site code, and excessive overhead your database.
Site audit helps recognize these issues so you can work on them at your earliest. Moreover, you can now check your speed optimization through Google’s Page Speed Tool.
Navigating Website
That is probably the most overlooked problem of web holders. Since they spend a considerably huge amount of time surfing through their website daily, they might not find problems with its navigation which otherwise, might annoy visitors. Such features include excessive linking – when users have to unnecessary click on different links to reach their desired destination. The ideal number of links a user should click is three. Anything more than that will start annoying your visitors, and they might close your webpage and open a different one. That can also give your competitors a boost.
No dropdown menu and jotting up too many navigation bars can also make it hard to navigate websites. Missing search function, no clickable links, too much content on the homepage, no ALT text next to images, and lack of consistency also add to these problems.
Auditing can help prevent your website by showing such errors and issues. You can also try a user testing audit to make your website more user friendly.
Unoptimized Website
From pointing out useless, unnecessary data to ensuring indexability, audits can help improve your website’s optimization to a great extent. They can help you rectify broken links, identify untagged images, and fix misused headers. Audits ensure that unique and correct metadata is used on each page and provide the proper usage of URL links. Lastly, audits also help in optimizing off-page activity like guest blogging and brand mentions. The Off-Site Audit includes; social media audits and the number of backlinks your website has. The more backlinks, the better it is to generate organic traffic and more substantial leads.
Conclusion
A site audit is essential for all kinds of businesses, irrespective of whether they operate on a large scale or a small scale. It becomes even more critical for e-businesses since they solely rely on online platforms and digital mediums to increase sales
Additionally, site audits should be after every three months as regular audit checks can improve your business’s performance and visibility on search engines like Google. That will enable the company to grow and also enhance your website traffic and SEO ranking.
