Does your website have all the elements to ensure the best user experience? Do you think your website’s SEO is effective? Does your website have sufficient traffic?
These are just a few questions one must ask when running a website. The digital world’s hustle and bustle are pivotal to give the audience prime quality applications. The websites’ that maintain their superiority in terms of quality and experience reap the most profits.
Search engine optimization involves the ranking of a website on the search portal and the traffic it gets. At the same time, user experience depends on the facilities a website offers its users. One can achieve excellence in both of these things if a website has valuable content, innovative strategy, and credible layout and SEO tools. But if the website is not attracting traffic and has a low ranking on the SERPs, then it’s a sign that there are some issues with the website.
But how to check the issues a website has?
In this scenario, a website audit is the best option. You can carry out an audit to find a website’s status, technical shortcomings, problems that users face, and SEO issues. Here are some significant steps to audit your site that can improve visitation and ranking of a website:
Inspect website design:
The first impression that the viewers get about the website is through the layout. So, the first step in a website audit can be inspecting your website design. With all honesty, you can sell an average product boxed in beautiful wrapping. However, it is challenging to sell a superior product in dull wrapping. Beauty attracts everyone; the same goes for acquiring visitors for the website. So check that the website design is appealing to the users and gets upgraded as per recent times. It is beneficial for a site’s SEO to change its site layout every 3 to 5 years. The color scheme should be in consideration of your brand. It must not be too distracting that the readers can’t pay much attention to the content. Try to select two or three colors for the website. Each heading should be of the same color, which goes for other variables on the site.
Check your website’s mobile compatibility:
With most of the population using mobile phones to conduct searches, your website must be mobile-friendly. In 2015, Google launched its search algorithm “Mobilegeddon,” through which Google started to allocate higher ranking to sites compatible with mobiles. So it has become essential for SEO of any website that it has a mobile-friendly version and its desktop one. It is simple enough to check if your site is mobile-friendly or not by typing your website on Google’s Mobile-friendly test. So, why wait? Go to the trial and see if your website is mobile-friendly.
Maintain high quality of content:
It’s the content that can get you maximum optimization. No one wants to read a long boring introduction. An introduction should be crisp, short, and interesting, appealing to the reader towards the content’s main body. The informative part, when divided into subheadings, becomes fascinating and easily understandable. Images, videos, and client testimonials are excess ornaments that can contribute significantly to enhancing UX. Website audits must regulate suitable changes to make sure all these factors are persistent in the content.
Scan website for Panda and Penguin algorithm:
Google has put into place some very advanced technology to avoid backlinks spam and to maintain content quality. Google Panda algorithm manifests that a website’s content has all the vital aspects for top ranking on the SERPs. So during a website audit, look at your website thoroughly to see if the banners exceed the content material. If yes, you need to limit the promotional banners to an amount that doesn’t obscure the site’s primary matter.
Similarly, the Penguin algorithm checks if the backlinks of a website are relevant and natural. A detailed inspection of a site’s backlinks is necessary to disavow the questionable links on the search console. It will diminish the websites’ connection with ill repute and irrelevant sites. Research shows that backlinks are fundamental in getting top rankings. The first result in Google had 3.8x backlinks than the second and third results. Thus, it would help if you gave high priority to an SEO audit’s quality and quantity.
Examining Tech SEO for any hindrance:
Does your website’s SEO tools are all working well? Are they all in good condition? If not, then your site is in danger of ranking the lowest on the search engine. All the technical SEO factors must be cohesively active and have no errors. These aspects, if not in order, can severely impact the success of a website. The technical SEO factors which must get examined in an audit are as follows:
- Canonical URLs: Go through the canonical element tab on the console for implying supremacy to the master copy of the content if it’s not already in place.
- No-index pages: Scrutinize all the pages to see that none are in the index category. Otherwise, the pages will not appear in Google crawl to present to the visitors.
- Broken links: A page with a search tag but is not emerging for visitation. It means it has a broken link. 404 errors come in this case, indicating deletion or change in URL of an essential page. Repairing all those links is a priority to fix this issue.
- Loading speed: By clearing your HTML code, running speed tests, and squeezing your images to a more suitable size can help in increasing the loading speed of the website. Users prefer those sites that load quickly for their inspection.
Focus on keywords:
SEO demands hefty and proper use of keywords in a website, without which it loses its charm of ranking high on SERPs. Website audit must warrant that targeted keywords are used multiple times on the main page. The title of the pages must have keywords. The subheading should have a variation of keywords, and LSI phrases are prominent in the entire content. Changing the keywords and long-tail phrases with occurring trends is a requirement for any website audit.
Wrap up:
Anything which doesn’t get constant care and alteration tends to lose its status and quality. The same goes for the websites. Their elements need a continuous upgrade to generate a top presence on the results page. Issues and technical problems further affect the credibility and standard of a website. Thus, adhering to these website audit steps, you can keep your website in top-notch error-free condition.