What Is A Website Audit and Why The Heck Do You Need One?13 min read
A website audit is a strategic examination of your site’s structure, content, performance, and overall health. It involves reviewing and analyzing the traffic your site gets, user behavior patterns, how your content ranks for targeted keywords, and the speed and overall performance of your site.
Your website is an extremely important part of your business and your messaging, and it needs to support your business goals in every way possible. As your business grows and evolves, as your audience changes, and as the way people use the internet changes, your website will inevitably need to change, too. A website audit can help you identify a strategic plan for improving and updating your website. Here are four of the most important reasons to consider a website audit.
Reason #1: Improve User Experience
No matter how much planning you did before your website was built, humans are humans, and sometimes they behave differently than anticipated. Your potential customers might not be navigating the site the way you assume they are, and if they can’t find what they’re looking for, this could result in a bad user experience.
Using things like analytics data, we can analyze how users interact with your website and the navigation paths they follow. These user insights pinpoint where improvements should be made to help people navigate the site and find the information they’re looking for.
Reason #2: Optimize your SEO
Search engines are powered by algorithms, and those algorithms change frequently (we’re looking at you, Google). If the content on your site hasn’t been updated in a while, search engines could see it as outdated, which makes it less visible in search results. Perhaps your content is outranking a competitor for a keyword you’ve never considered targeting before. Or your content might not be ranking at all for keywords you’re actively pursuing in your marketing efforts. Because of the ever-changing nature of the internet, content that gets published and never touched again quickly becomes irrelevant content. An SEO audit provides an analysis of current keywords, how you stack up against competitors, and opportunities to rank for other relevant keywords and bring more traffic to your site.
Reason #3: Identify Technical Issues
Things on the internet break. Code incompatibilities arise over time as WordPress, site plugins, and the software that powers the internet update. Your site might load great for you on your desktop computer and high-speed internet, but how does it load for your users on mobile devices and LTE networks? Are those photos you uploaded three years ago too big and slowing down your page speeds? A website audit provides valuable insight into how fast your website loads, what sort of technical issues are slowing it down or impacting your search rankings, and ways to streamline navigation.
Reason #4: Maximize your ROI
Search engines and pay-per-click (PPC) ads send traffic to your website. Is your website ready to guide that traffic to a conversion? Is the content on the page relevant to your SEO and advertising efforts? Do the calls to action grab attention and drive traffic exactly where it needs to go? Are your forms collecting the right information? As your SEO and advertising efforts change, aspects of your site might need to change to support them. A website audit is a great way to surface those potential issues and formulate a plan to address them.
Yes, You Need A Website Audit and DVS Is Here To Help
Trying to improve user experience, optimize SEO, identify technical issues, and maximize your ROI without doing a website audit is like trying to tighten a screw with a hammer. Before you fix something, you need to know what tools will work best. Our team of marketing strategists and content specialists are here to make sure your website is the best it can be. Let us know what your challenges are and we’ll get started on an audit!