Web audit or web health checkup is something that tells how your website is. Technically speaking, it is a comprehensive evaluation of your website. With it, you can easily identify areas that need your attention to get better in terms of performance, user experience, search engine optimization, etc.
So, the main mission of this evaluation is to determine problematic issues that leave users disheartened or unhappy, which eventually brings down the flow of conversions and hence, ROI.
Challenges in Website Auditing
There are certain areas that disallow you to move further and see beyond the limit. Here, are a few common challenges:
1. Technical Expertise
The first obstacle is lacking technical knowledge of web design and digital marketing, especially search engine optimization. Being a technical area, a technically proficient person is required. Finding such an expert can be challenging.
2. Require Investment in Time and Resources
A website audit can be time-consuming and may require a significant investment of resources.
3. Complexity
Websites can be complex and have many different components, making it challenging to identify all potential issues.
How Can Web Auditing Help in Business?
It can help in several ways, which are given below:
- Identifying technical issues
Examining a website introduces you to technical issues that are affecting your web presence negatively. These can be slow loading time, broken links, or coding errors. With auditing, these problems come in limelight and hence, can be fixed.
- Improving user experience
There are some aspects that impact user experience, which be navigation, design, and content. As you examine them, discovering a way to better the design, or navigation becomes easier.
- Enhancing search engine optimization
Search engine optimization or SEO is key to attain visibility naturally and attract leads in digital marketing. Through audit, the flaws in optimization, like missing meta tag, broken links, wrong anchor texts, etc., can be highlighted, which are repaired quickly to ensure lead generation or conversions.
Tips or Steps of Web Auditing to Improve Conversions and Sales
To audit a website to improve conversions and sales, here are some steps to follow:
Step 1. Define your goals
Before starting with this web examination, SEO or digital marketing experts identify their goals and analyze expectations. It creates a mindset or way to introduce improvement in the area where it is required. Simply put, the picture of what you should do to optimize anything impacting conversion or sales on your website becomes clear.
Step 2. Analyze website traffic
Web checking paints the accurate picture of website traffic. It guides you to discover where the most traffic comes from and adds to conversions. Simultaneously, you come across the pages with a high bounce rate and low engagement. This evaluation ensures optimizing links, structure, pictures, or high-quality content to achieve more inquiries and sales.
Step 3. Evaluate website design and user experience
Sometimes, it’s the web design that shows flaws and hence, results in a bad user experience. If you consider Core Web Vitals, they also have interactivity as a main concern. This is mainly connected with the largest contentful paint, first input delay, and Google’s Cumulative Layout Shifts.
These all points help in evaluating user experience as Good, or Need Improvement, or Poor. Once discovered, their fixing helps in encouraging conversions.
Step 4. Check website functionality
Functionality is mainly connected with links, forms, mobile responsiveness, error messages or redirects, URLs, JS and CSS codes. Testing the functionality of the website makes it clear which part needs improvement so that the flow of conversion can be increased.
Step 5. Review SEO
Search engine optimization is also crucial, which is associated with product descriptions, anchor text, landing pages, robot.txt files, schema markups, XML sitemaps, canonical tags, etc. to ensure that they comply with the guidelines of search engines. It also ensures that they are engaging, informative, and persuasive.
Step 6. Evaluate conversion rate
The website performance testing provides an overview of how it performs. It covers page speed, mobile responsiveness, optimized Call-to-Action, landing pages, and marketing offers. Once tested, the optimized website increases conversions and sales.
Step 7. Make recommendations
Based on your audit findings, the SEO experts can make recommendations for improvements that can help enhance the website’s ability to drive conversions and sales.
By following these steps, you can conduct a comprehensive website audit to identify areas of improvement and make sales-oriented recommendations via digital marketing, which enhance your website’s ability to convert visitors into customers.
Popular Tools for Web Auditing
Being a technical part, website testing requires tools to make it quicker and easier. Thankfully, there are several free and reliable tools available for web auditing that can help identify areas for improvement and provide recommendations for enhancing website performance. Here are some popular options:
1. Google Analytics: Google Analytics is absolutely free web analytics tool that can provide valuable insights into website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates on integrated social media and website. By analyzing this data, businesses can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance website performance.
2. Google Search Console: This is also available free of cost that allows businesses to monitor their website’s performance in Google search results. By analyzing search data, businesses can identify opportunities to improve their search engine rankings and increase website traffic.
3. GTmetrix: This is a free tool that allows businesses to test website performance and identify areas for improvement. The tool provides detailed reports on website speed, page load times, and other performance metrics, along with recommendations for optimizing website performance.
4. Moz Pro: Moz Pro is a comprehensive SEO tool that provides insights into website performance, keyword rankings, and backlinks. While Moz Pro is a paid tool, it does offer a free 30-day trial that businesses can use to test the tool’s capabilities.
5. SEMrush: SEMrush is a powerful SEO tool that provides insights into website performance, keyword rankings, and backlinks. While SEMrush is a paid tool, it does offer a free version with limited capabilities that businesses can use to test the tool’s functionality.
Conclusion
Conducting a web audit can be challenging due to the technical expertise required, time and resource constraints, and the complexity of websites. However, it is crucial to identify technical issues, enhance user experience and search engine optimization, and improve conversions and sales. Some free and reliable tools that can be used for web auditing include Google Analytics, Google Search Console, GTmetrix, Moz Pro, and SEMrush. By using these tools, businesses can gain valuable insights into website performance and make data-driven decisions to enhance their online presence.