How to Do a Website Audit
Websites are 24/7 sales team members – working overtime without ever asking for a commission. Shouldn’t you treat these saintly sales machines right?
A website’s average “shelf life” is 1.5 to 2.5 years, so doing a site audit once or twice a year is essential to staying competitive online. How? Let us ask you something first: What is your website’s technology, search, and lead performance?
These three questions offer the answers your site needs to improve. These answers may reveal SEO breakthroughs, UX updates, or signal that your site is ready for retirement. You don’t have to be a digital marketing guru or have a degree in computer science to answer these.
Let’s examine how to audit your website and what to consider when deciding on changes, upgrades, redesigns, or overhauls.
What is a website audit?
Luckily, the IRS is not involved.
Companies audit finances, compliance, and operations to ensure these branches and systems run smoothly. You don’t want to miss a penny, receive a fine, lose operational effectiveness, or anything that could hold up revenue. Website audits have the same idea.
A website audit thoroughly analyzes your company’s front-end (what a user sees) and back-end (the mechanics). It identifies issues and areas for improvement so that your bottom line isn’t affected.
Site Audit Question 1: How’s Your Website’s Technology Performance?
It’s important to preface that websites and search optimization are never a one-and-done deal. The internet is changing even as you read this. Feel that? Even new sites need further updates to address technical changes and impacts from algorithm updates or market shifts.
Here’s what to look for when doing a website audit for technology performance:
Site Speed
You don’t need to be a developer to know if your website is on an older platform or server or written in an older programming language. The site load speed will tell you. One in two consumers will ditch a website that takes more than six seconds to load. Wouldn’t you? Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights can check how fast your pages load. Other tricks, like optimizing images, can reduce loading times. Hosting can also be a culprit.
User Experience
Is your layout easy to navigate via menus, content organization, and other formatting? Move from page to page like a customer would to find out. While there, make sure CTAs and other inactive features work correctly. If you are unsure, testing through conversion optimization can help back that theory up with data.
Is your site visually appealing or dated? When lined up next to your competitors, does your website shine or blend in? We hate to say it, but looks matter.
Mobile Friendliness
Did you build for mobile responsiveness? If not, jump on that ASAP. Even if you built a responsive site, take out your phones and tablets to double-check how your site is rendering. These devices get updates all the time, which could affect your site. If it’s not looking good, it’s time to act fast.
Site Audit Question 2: How’s Your Website’s Search Performance?
What does my SEO have to do with my website audit? Everything.
Your website is the nucleus of your digital marketing. It holds all the content powering your SEO and paid media. To top it off, the search landscape is constantly in flux due to algorithm updates and changes made by competitors. You have to stay on it. Even if you’re ranking on page 1 but not seeing the traffic boost—thanks to AI-driven snippets and zero-click results—it’s still crucial to test your visibility and ensure you’re appearing in those prime spots.
Conducting a website SEO audit is vital to understanding how your website powers your SEO and paid media and how it can do better.
Content
It is king. It reigns supreme. It takes work. You should review site content for accuracy, timeliness, and ability to meet user intent. Even ranking on top doesn’t guarantee a traffic boost thanks to zero-click results—it’s still crucial to test your visibility and ensure you’re appearing in those prime spots. Make sure the content is readable and provides clear CTAs. Adding content isn’t exclusive to text. Add imagery, videos, charts, and other eye-catching ways to deliver information.
SEO Elements
There are a lot of little things that go a long way in SEO. Check title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, and header tags include relevant keywords. Also, check your links. Broken links make for a bad experience, so fix, delete, or set up a redirect as needed.
Technical SEO
Have someone look under the hood at things like robots.txt, sitemap, and your CMS plugins to ensure search engines can effectively crawl your site. Checking structured data and schema markups for new features like featured snippets and AI Overviews can help populate your content in those top spots.
Site Audit Question 3: How’s Your Website’s Lead Performance?
When everything looks good technically and on the SEO front, does it matter if you don’t see leads and conversions? Of course not. Audit your leads and conversions from your website to see what’s working to drive revenue.
Forms
Test your contact and sign-up forms to make sure they are working properly, getting delivered to the right place and that form is collected in one centralized location. What is the immediate response when a user submits a form? Make sure there’s a good confirmation message or continued flow of usable content in place – giving the user confidence that their info will be valued and incite action. You may identify needs such as separating forms, adding more details to those forms, opportunities for more email touchpoints, or making changes to the sales process.
Analytics
Examine user behaviors from discovery to purchase using tools like OuterBox’s LOOP Analytics and call tracking. This data can inform keywords and other strategies by focusing on what’s working. Once collected, aggregate your lead data to find trends.
Size Up The Competition
Company websites don’t exist in a vacuum. For B2B businesses, customers look at three to five companies before finalizing a sale. While not as numerous on the B2C side, you still want to see how you compare. This comparison doesn’t mean a complete re-brand or replication of what other companies do, but it can help you inform your experience and differentiators.
Do I Need an Agency Website Audit?
Even with self-service tools, figuring out and fixing these performance indicators can get very technical. You need experts like the folks at OuterBox to help define needs and implement them.
An agency website audit can spot improvements, create goals, and provide strategic next steps to achieve those goals. Your website should be your top sales team member, bringing in leads like a boss. Your business can grow when you invest in your website and treat it like the top sales team member it can be.
