Your website is your brand’s digital calling card that’s intended to attract audiences and grow conversions. If you’ve ever tried to design a website, you know that the journey can be quite complex and sophisticated, particularly if you want it done right. Over time, you may have discovered some changes you want to make to ensure your website is as updated and user-friendly as possible. However, before you embark on this challenge, it’s important to conduct a website audit.
What Is an Audit?
A website audit is a detailed examination of your existing site, intended to help you find any bugs, fixes, or weak spots in your current design. Unlike an audit you may endure from the IRS, a website audit is nothing to be afraid of or ignore. This process will help you assess marketing functions that are essential for success in today’s business world. When you undergo an audit, you’ll help ensure that your processes, systems, and tools are all aligned for growth and positive returns going forward.
In short, a website audit helps to make sure you’re not spending valuable time and resources in vain.
Why Would You Need an Audit?
Over time, trends, technologies, and users’ expectations change and evolve. If your website hasn’t been audited in a while, you could have outdated features that are unnecessary — or worse, ineffective.
Website audits help identify elements that can ensure a smooth, functioning product your audience can use seamlessly when they come to visit you.
The following are a few reasons you might need an audit:
- Decreased rankings. If you’re experiencing a hit to your rankings in the search results, it’s probably time to evaluate your site on the parameters that determine your visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Lack of knowledge of your current status. A website audit will give you an in-depth analysis of your site, so you’re armed with all the information you need to make improvements or changes.
- Poor performance. When you conduct an audit, you’ll unravel issues that hamper your site’s performance.
- Decreased website traffic and user engagement. An audit can help you identify reasons you might be seeing less traffic and user engagement so you can adjust your approach and attract more users.
How Audits Benefit Website Design and Content
Now that you know a little more about the importance of website audits, let’s talk about how you can benefit from this process.
User Experience
Audits help fix issues with your website that ultimately will help it load faster, make it easier to navigate, and function as a mobile-friendly interface. Each of these factors combines to enhance users’ experiences, which will further increase conversions.
Access to Data
Website audits examine a variety of data sets, including the content on your site, as well as its technical performance. When you’re armed with great data, you’ll be better able to understand what’s working well and where you need to pivot to achieve greater success.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Your SEO efforts are more important today than ever. Since Google is constantly making changes to its criteria and algorithms, it can be easy for a site to become outdated in terms of SEO pretty quickly. Google’s priority is to keep its searchers happy, so it’s constantly changing the metrics that determine high-ranking sites. If you don’t keep up to date with these changes, you risk losing any progress you’ve previously gained. A website audit is an optimal way to take a peek into the inside workings of your performance, as specified by the latest SEO standards.
SEO audits examine things like bounce rates, core web vitals, and other essentials set forth by search engines so you can see how your site performs in these categories. With this knowledge, you’ll have an idea as to which areas you need to improve on and where you’re being successful with your SEO efforts.
Information Structure
It doesn’t matter if you have the best content on the internet — if it’s not accessible, nobody will find it. Part of a website audit involves pulling in pertinent information from analytics data so you can determine ways to make your most effective content as easy to find as possible—both by your visitors and the search engines. (This goes back to boosting SEO!)
Conversion Rates
It’s the role of a marketing manager to generate leads and increase conversions. These tasks are hard to do if your website isn’t up to snuff. A website audit will help identify and bridge gaps in your website so you can improve areas where you might be missing out on conversions currently.
Functionality
Website audits give you insight into things that may not work as they should, such as broken links, page errors, corrupted data, and missing features. You can then work with this information to make changes and updates accordingly.
Compliance
Compliance is a huge issue in the business world, and you don’t want to fall short of where this is concerned. A website audit will help ensure you comply with all the necessary standards and online requirements.
Our team here at Zero Gravity Marketing is happy to help our clients conduct website audits and achieve optimal success with the knowledge they gain from this process. If you need a starting point, all you have to do is reach out to us!
