You might not give much thought to your website’s performance until something goes wrong or someone raises an issue with a specific page. However, shooting down issues as they arise is not an ideal way to properly manage and optimise your website.
Instead, I recommend regularly auditing your website to identify issues before they become significant problems.
What is a website audit?
A website audit systematically examines and evaluates your website’s performance, architecture, content, security, and other key elements. It aims to identify potential issues with the site that could affect its usability. By understanding how visitors interact with your website, you can optimise it to improve user experience (UX) and achieve desired goals like increased conversions or higher search engine rankings.
A website audit can also illuminate pre-existing performance issues and help you find solutions to improve. The process typically involves analytics tools and other forms of analysis to identify areas that need improvements, such as broken links, slow page loading times, outdated content, weak titles or meta descriptions, and more. Once you have identified the issues, the next step is to develop and implement a plan to fix them so that the website can perform better.
What are the benefits of a website audit?
A website audit can generate some key benefits for your organisation, including:
Optimised performance
An audit will examine the website’s structure, content and design to determine its performance. It can reveal any potential issues preventing the website from reaching its full potential. A website audit will create opportunities for you to discover UX issues and create a plan for resolving these. You will need to iron out issues such as slow page load times, confusing navigation, or glitches.
Enhanced SEO
A website audit is an excellent opportunity to find areas where you can improve your site for search engine optimisation (SEO). You can assess the rankings of your current pages and measure them against your competition. From there, you can develop a plan to improve the SEO on these pages and take advantage of any opportunities you have not found before. UX plays a significant role in boosting SEO. So, any hard-to-navigate pages that you improve will also contribute to improving your rankings.
Improved conversion rates
Conversion rates are an important statistic for any website. The higher the conversion rate, the more successful a website is in converting visitors into customers or leads. Improving conversion rates can lead to increased revenue, lower the cost of acquiring new customers, improve retention and enhance brand recognition.
You might look through a few different lenses…
If you are looking to optimise your website, there are a few different angles you can take to get started:
Benchmark your website against your competitors
A good place to start is by comparing your website with your competitors. Benchmarking gives you an accurate picture of the current state of your website, enabling you to make targeted improvements that will increase conversions and user engagement. It also allows you to detect potential threats from competitors looking to outpace or overtake your current position in the market.
When you understand how your website stacks up against your competition, you can gain valuable insights into what is working for them and find opportunities they have not leveraged that you can use to sharpen your competitive edge.
Examine the backlinks to your website
Backlinks are links from other websites to your own and can significantly influence how well your site ranks in search engine results pages (SERPs). Examining backlinks when auditing your website is essential in boosting your SEO efforts.
By analysing the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your website, you can gauge your site’s authority in search engines. Quality backlinks can help improve your rankings, while low-quality backlinks can have a negative impact on your website’s visibility. Backlinks often serve as important indicators of trustworthiness for potential customers and visitors to your website. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the websites linking to your website are reputable, trusted sources. An audit of your backlinks can help you identify any sources damaging your reputation and make changes accordingly.
Review your landing pages and forms
Reviewing the design, performance and UX of landing pages is crucial to understanding how to improve conversion rates. It can also identify usability issues that may slow down user engagement or lead to higher bounce rates. Ensure your CTAs are visible and ideally sit above the fold, check that any forms work correctly, and search for potential areas of frustration for users. Any glitches in these areas could be responsible for decreasing your conversion rate.
Resonate can audit and optimise your website
At Resonate, we are a full-stack B2B marketing firm. We specialise in the B2B sector as that is where our passions lie, which is what we are good at. If you would like to audit and optimise your website, please reach out to us. We are experts in optimising websites to drive leads and sales and believe in taking a strategic approach to getting the best results.
Please visit our Marketing page for more about our services.
