How to audit your own website
Websites are often more complicated than they need to be, and we all know that it’s easier to just add another page, or make a quick update on your site rather than taking a step back to make sure that everything is running as it should be.
Audits help you improve your site, improve your user’s experience, increase your search ranking position, and - frankly: are a good idea to keep everything organised and tidy!
3 benefits of auditing your website
1. Improve your SEO
A website audit evaluates a site for both its content (words and images) and technical results, like its SEO ranking.
An audit will help you see any places you could improve your SEO and will work out how easy (or not) it is for users to find the content they are looking for on your site.
An audit will give you a list of suggested SEO changes you can make to improve your site.
2. Spot errors early
A website audit helps you to get ahead of any problems early and fix them before they do your site's reputation any damage!
3. Learn about your competition
Completing a website audit gives you the opportunity to compare your website to your competitors.
You can see how well you rank against your competition for your chosen keywords. And, you can even carry out audits on other people’s sites so you can learn from what they are doing well - or not so well.
Where to start with a website audit
Start by running your website through a site audit tool
Wild SEO Agency trusts from an SEO specialist called ahrefs. They even have a helpful video to show you how to use the site audit tool.
Assess your website’s design
When was the last time you updated the look and feel of your site? Does your website look like it’s up to date and has been designed recently? Or, are you still using the design you started with years ago?
Design isn’t just about the look of your website - although a fresh and clean design does instil more trust in users. It’s about how accessible and user friendly your site is. Are your navigation buttons clear, are your chosen colours easy to see, is your font large enough for someone with limited vision to read?
Asking yourself design questions can help you improve the user experience of your website.
Think about different devices
Is your website mobile friendly? What about people accessing your site on a tablet or screen smaller than an average desktop?
Google has a free mobile-friendly website checker that you simply put your website URL into and it gives you a result.
More people search for Google results on their phones than on their laptops or desktops so it’s super important to check mobile-friendliness in any website audit!
Find and fix broken links and pages
We’ve all been there; you click on a link on a website and it throws up a 404 error. It’s frustrating and makes the site look like it doesn’t know that something is wrong.
Thankfully a site audit tool will find broken links and pages for you so that you can easily identify them and fix them.
Think about the quality of your website content
Does everything on your site need to be there? Do the words you’ve chosen, the navigation choices you’ve made, and the images you’ve chosen make sense?
Sometimes the simplest thing you can do to audit your site is to send it to a friend who doesn’t know what your website is about and ask: does this make sense to you?
Is your content unique, or just copied from elsewhere? Is it formatted in a way that makes it interesting to read… you could think about breaking up text with subheadings, bullet points or images.
A little bit of quality control of your content goes a long way!
Few more tips to improve your website:
Wild SEO Agency often writes blogs with practical tips and advice on how to improve your site using techniques we’ve learnt from auditing clients' websites and seeing what needs improving. Have a read…
Discover ways to make your website instantly more accessible and inclusive for all your users
Get started on optimising the images on your website improving the search ranking of your site, decreasing loading times and making your content more accessible too.
Top tips on improving the mobile users experience of your website.
Website auditing is Wild SEO Agency’s bread and butter
A Website audit is nearly always the first step we take when working with a new client. We run a comprehensive audit of your website and give you recommendations to implement. So, if you want to get started with an audit and don’t want to do the admin yourself: please get in touch. We’d love to work with you.