Auditing your website can help to determine whether or not it’s best optimised to achieve your traffic goals, and can give you a sense of how you can improve it to reach these goals.

Audits are also often conducted after work on-site has been done. This helps to show progress, highlight under-appreciated areas and help to drive future online strategies.

Why are site audits important?

Site audits are important as they give a complete, detailed analysis into a website’s health, performance and speed.

Assessing these areas will give you full insight into the current effectiveness of your site. It will also show where you may be able to further optimise and/or improve your site, as well as identify issues that could be damaging to its health.

How different website audits are used

How a website audit is used for your own site will largely depend on your personal aims and objectives.

Here are the most common ways website audits are used:

Traffic analysis

With traffic analysis, we can look at where visitors are arriving from, where they came from, bounce back rates and other on-page engagement stats.

Based on the journey your visitors usually take, we can look at how your site’s design, content and functionality encourages conversion rates.

On-page optimisation

Your pages should be optimised with relevant and consistent keywords and your call-to-actions should be clear and compelling.

We will take a look at your content from a SEO perspective, looking for any potential unnecessary content or underdeveloped content to freshen up. Internal linking strategies may need to be formed to help users, and search engines, navigate your site efficiently.

Lead generation

We can audit your website to review the overall user experience and assess how well your website is optimised to generate leads. This involves taking a close look at lead generation mechanisms, such as call to actions and contact forms.

Here we will pinpoint obstacles your user faces when trying to engage with your site.

Social media

A social media audit involves looking at your organisation’s official social media accounts. This includes looking at the quality and quantity of your followers, who you’re following and the likes and shares of your most recent posts.

Taking a deeper look into your social media can help to define how your social presence impacts your website.

How do I know which audit I need for my website?

If you’re unsure which audit you need for your website, you should consider what goals you are looking to achieve by conducting an audit.

Consider:

What goals you are looking to achieve;
How many leads you are generating from your site currently and what you want to aim for;
Who your desired target audience is;
Current on-site and off-site issues, such as lack of call to actions, poor Core Web Vitals, struggling social platforms, underperforming content and so on.

From here, you should be able to have some sort of idea about the type of audit needed for your website.

If you’re still unsure, or you’re struggling to determine which audit is right for your site, an experienced search-marketing team, like us here at Tao Digital Marketing, will be able to help you. Our website auditing services are fully tailored to your website and needs.

Alternatively, get in touch with us if you think you’d benefit from some consultancy from our expert team.

Different types of website audits

A website audit is a full analysis of factors that impacts a site’s visibility on search engines, but a full website audit is not always necessary.

Listed below are some of the most common types of audits:

SEO Audit

An SEO audit is the process of outlining and analysing potential problems or issues on a site that impacts organic performance. These problems must be addressed, otherwise they can prevent your site from ranking highly on search engines like Google and Bing.

SEO audits include analysing components such as keywords, link profiles, image optimisation and goal conversions.

Technical Audit

A technical audit is simply just a type of SEO audit, but it focuses on the issues related to your website that happen behind the scenes.

Technical audits focus on the best practices for site visibility and ensuring all of the site meets all of the search engines requirements for crawling and indexing.

Content Audit

A content audit is the process of systematically assessing all of the content on your site. The main objective is to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your content strategy and adapt your current content plan to align with your marketing goals.

It also includes delivering strong insights into what messaging and tone of voice is converting and what isn’t.

We can offer advice as to what content needs to be updated, whether some pages are harmful and need to be removed, deleted or no-indexed.

Competitor Audit

A competitor audit is used to track your competitors, understand their approach and figure out what their brand is doing which yours isn’t.

The aim is to discover what techniques and methods are used for other companies within your industry and incorporate these into your own strategy in the right ways.

Audits like these highlight how many keywords competitors are ranking for, how much content they have in comparison to your site and where they place against you in terms of traffic.

Link Audit

A link audit is the process of analysing links pointing at your site to find potential problems or opportunities. You need to find the links, establish which ones are potentially harmful and which are good, and then develop the right strategy to deal with them.

Social Media Audit

A social media audit is the process of reviewing how well social media is working for your business. This audit is the process of reviewing certain metrics to analyse your current social media strategy.

These metrics can include information on demographics, engagement, locations, campaign performance and more. An audit like this can involve impressions, shares, likes, comments and other interactions.

Conversion Rate Audit

A conversion rate audit (CRO audit) is a full assessment of a customer’s journey on your site. The purpose of the audit is to identify the technical and usability-related problems that could be damaging your website’s conversion rate.

A typical CRO audit will focus on analysing the end-to-end customer experience, as well as digging deeper into a website’s analytics.

Why should your business invest in website auditing?

Investing in on-site audits can be highly beneficial to your ongoing business strategy. Knowing where you currently stand in the ever-expanding online market, and strategizing on how to best improve this, is where your business can stand out.

Have a chat with our team about website auditing and how insightful they can really be.