A website audit can help your business uncover website problems, ensure optimum web performance, and improve visibility in search engines. Think of a website audit like an annual physical. Visiting your doctor is the best way to gauge your overall well-being and determine if there are any underlying concerns preventing you from reaching optimal health and peak performance. Don’t put off your website audit—read on for more information about how to begin your audit and what factors to focus on.
Start with a Technical Website Audit
When was the last time you clicked through every page on your website? Has it been awhile? Are there any broken links? Do all of the images show up correctly? Do your contact forms function the way they should? Moz’s Link Explorer can help you find broken links, research competitor backlinks, and discover link-building opportunities. Next, check your site’s performance on different browsers and determine if there are any lag times in loading pages. Google’s PageSpeed Insights can help analyze URLs and offer suggestions to make pages run faster. Fast-loading websites rank higher in search engine results and lead to longer visitor duration on sites, lower bounce rates, and higher conversion rates.
Determine if Your Website is Mobile Friendly
Make sure that your website is fully accessible via mobile devices. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test identifies any mobile usability problems that affect users such as small font sizes and the use of Flash; and checks to ensure that your pages perform well on all devices.
Test Your SEO Performance
An SEO audit will help determine if your website is optimized to increase your site’s rankings. According to Moz, Google makes approximately 500 to 600 changes in its algorithm each year. While most of the changes are minor, some do have an impact on search. Therefore, what is ranking high now may rank lower in six months or a year. A full SEO website audit will establish if you are targeting the right keywords, if you have relevant and unique titles and descriptions for each page, if you’ve attached alternative text to all relevant images, if there are indexing problems, and more. The goal is to pinpoint weak areas in your SEO campaign that are damaging your website’s performance. From there, you can make an action plan to remedy those issues.
Audit for Content
An integral part of any website audit includes a content evaluation. Is your content information-rich? Useful? Current? Accurate? Relevant? Does it align with your marketing strategy? Does the content you provide satisfy your target audience? How does it differentiate from the content on your competitor’s websites? Determining what content is popular and effective—and what is not—will help you come up with fresh ideas and a good strategy to deploy in when creating new content.
Analyze Your Design and User Experience
Similar to the technical audit—but more focused on your audience—the design and user experience audit will give you an idea of how users are viewing and interacting with your website. User experience tools such as Google Analytics offer data about your website traffic such as demographics, conversion paths, and traffic trends. Visual assets are key to how your brand story is communicated. Ensure that your images and videos are high quality, your colors (including social media icons) match your overall theme, and your fonts remain consistent throughout your website.
A full website audit will fix any site errors, ensure consistency in your branding, improve overall user experience, and drive more visitors to your website. If you need help performing a website audit or analyzing any data you’ve gathered, give the website pros at Millennium Agency a call.
About Millennium Agency
Millennium Agency is a national award-winning digital creative, content/PR, and video marketing firm. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate our clients’ growth, while combining our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise to increase sales opportunities and drive brand success. From video advertising and web design to social media and PR, Millennium can guide your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to learn more.
Linda Fanaras is the President and Founder of Millennium Agency (www.mill.agency) located in Manchester, NH and Boston. She can be reached at 877-873-7445 or lfanaras@mill.agency.
