Websites evolve. For some businesses, their website has been online in one form or another for years. It could be the original site that’s had a design change, or it could have had various reiterations over that period. As sites evolve, things change which need to be audited to ensure the health of the website remains in top condition.
Changing the URL structure to be more friendly and then not checking for 404 broken links is a quick way to provide your users with a bad experience and start lowering your conversion rate. Weekly site audits are carried with all of our managed services to ensure you keep on top of any potential problems before they have an impact on your customer experience and your search presence.
For clients that utilise our SEO Consultancy & Training services, we recommend tools that will make your internal site audit process easier to manage and quicker to action.
Search engines such as Google use crawlers, AKA spiders, to crawl your website and index content. Premium tools give you the ability to do the same and provides invaluable information on the structure and content which are used to identify issues and revise areas of improvements.
Free tools such as Google Search Console, will also be a good place to identify site issues. The data will be more limiting than that of premium tools, however following Google’s recommendations is always worthwhile, considering it’s their search engine you want to rank well in.
Premium tools will give you far more data insights, which you can use to increase your rankings and conversions. The tool we use for all of our clients to carry out site audits analyses over 120 on-page and technicals from surface-level issues to critical errors.
This includes a wide range of parameters from crawlability that checks over 20 indexability and crawlability parameters including crawl budget waste, incoming internal links, page crawl depth, and HTTP status codes to HTTPs implementation that identifies potential security issues such as security certificate issues including mixed content warnings, server issues and missing HSTS support.
It doesn’t all have to be technical though. Areas above we carry out as part of a managed process, but if you’re calling upon our consultancy or training services, then there are less technical areas of a website audit that would be just as beneficial for you to carry out internally.
Take an e-commerce site as an example. It’s possible for these types of sites to contain over 1000 URLs due to the number of products the business supplies. That’s too many pages for you to go through manually checking for on-page optimisation
Carrying out a site audit would flag up broken links, duplicated content/metadata and much more besides. It’s all invaluable information that helps you to identify potential issues and resolve them. Doing so gives you an edge over your competitors and can make a huge difference in your organic growth journey.
Keeping an eye on the health of your website will enable you to identify errors today and provide your customers with a better experience tomorrow.
Our website audits with actionable insights, used for your own website or to spy on your competitors, covers 120 metrics. Find out more here.