You know that feeling, when everything works perfectly. You’ve got flow! You sit down. And. Work. Gets. Done.
Yes, it’s amazing. But my question for you is, does your website experience this? You log in, it gets things done. It loads fast, it ranks well, it performs best in class. Or a better question, do you check that your website is constantly doing all those things?
Well, if you think your website does, but never checked? It’s time for a website audit!
The word audit sounds serious. Like, put on a tie, sunglasses and your poker face, serious.
But no worries, this is a process that should become a routine as you manage your website. A well optimized, search engine & user-friendly website is vital to stay with or ahead of your competition in the search for traffic. To keep up with the latest developments in search marketing and technology and ensure your website meets these requirements, a website audit is the tool you need.
When you have an audit performed, an audit expert will check your website against a capability and performance checklist. Based on the assessment they will recommend what needs to be fixed or changed to increase the performance of the website, which will help in search engine results.
While there are many free and paid tools that can analyze your website, we recommend that at least initially, you find an SEO expert to help you review your website’s performance. Some will offer it as a free service, while others will charge a nominal fee. But the expert opinion can be valuable.
Why do you need a website performance audit?
Your website is a reflection of your business, online. Keeping this in mind, it is important to look after your website as carefully as you would look after your business.
Your website is a reflection of your business! Protect it! Click To TweetLike regular doctor checkups, your website needs checkups too to ensure it is functioning well.
Website audits are an important step to make sure your website does not end up being penalized by search engines. Penalties can be placed on a website if they violate search engine guidelines. When a penalty is assessed, it decreases the authority of your website, therefore drops the search ranking lower for keywords your site is targeting.
So an audit can serve to help identify those issues before you get the penalty assessed.
There is an added benefit. An audit can also identify reasons why your customers are not converting into sales leads.
So what exactly should you expect from an audit?
Firstly, an analysis report is created stating the current status of the website. It will include the areas in which the website is performing well, as well as opportunities to improve.
The performance of the website in both search engines and social media is checked. You should also receive a backlink report which will identify any low quality links, and how your website is cited elsewhere on the internet.
With this information, a list of action points will be given to you, and a plan to work on to improve your website and solve the issues in the report.
While many business owners personally inspect their websites, it is easy to misjudge the seriousness of certain website issues. Engaging an expert initially can help you focus on the most important issues.
When should you conduct an audit?
How often should you audit your website? As regularly as you can!
Now, it is highly dependent upon how your website is used, and how often it is being updated. If you are posting a lot of fresh content every day, or you are an ecommerce site, and you have a lot of customer interaction, you may need to do some level of audit every day to ensure that content is helping your website’s performance, and nothing is stopping customers from buying.
Alternatively, if your site is meant to share what your business does, and you only post occasional content, you could extend audits out to 2-4 times per year.
Finally, if you are making big changes to your website, you will also want to watch how those changes affect the site’s performance and perform more frequent audits.
Need to get your website reviewed?
If this is something you haven’t done in a while, consult a website expert for an audit. As mentioned before, there are experts that will do it for, at most, a nominal fee.
Here at Summation X, we would love to conduct an audit for you. All you need to do is contact us for a free strategy session in which we will do an initial audit and walk you through your website’s performance and document any issues. We can also help you implement what is required to fix whatever may be holding your website back.