How To Conduct a Website Audit and Improve Your Online Presence

When was the last time you had a website audit?

Having a website is an integral part of every business. But just like a machine that needs maintenance and system check up, you need to make sure that your website is running smoothly and performing at a high level. That’s why you need a website audit.

Conducting a website audit is a vital step in improving your online presence, as it helps identify potential issues that may hinder your site’s performance. The audit involves comprehensive analysis of your content, design, technical aspects, and overall user experience.

In this blog post, we will explore the significance of conducting a website audit, the essential components to review, and actionable steps to improve your online presence. By the end of this post, you will have a clear understanding of how to conduct a successful website audit in order to improve your site’s performance, resulting in improved user experience for your online users.

Content Audit

Content is STILL king – driving traffic, establishing credibility, building brand awareness, enhancing user experience, and increasing conversions.?

Evaluating your content is an important part of a website audit, as it can help identify outdated or irrelevant information, optimise content for SEO, and create new material that meets your user’s needs and encourages user engagement. Furthermore, It also helps improve your website’s ranking on search engine results pages.

Steps to Content Audit

• Review the content on each page and assess its quality. Ask yourself if it is well-written, informative, and relevant to your target audience.
• Remove any outdated or irrelevant content from your website, ensuring that your website remains current and informative.
• Review the content on each page to ensure that it is optimised for search engines. Include relevant keywords, meta descriptions, and title tags.
• Analyse the engagement metrics for each page, such as time spent on the page, bounce rate, and click-through rate. Identify pages with low engagement and make improvements accordingly.

Design Audit

In just 0.05 seconds, people decide what they think about a website.?

If your website fails to captivate your audience, you might instantly lose their interest.?

A design audit will help improve your website’s look and feel, which in turn will enhance your user experience, strengthen your brand’s identity, and significantly boost the website's overall performance. Regular design audits can help make sure that your website stays relevant and competitive in an ever changing digital world.

Steps to Design Audit

• Review the visual appeal of your website design, including the colour scheme, typography, imagery, and overall layout. Determine if the design is visually appealing and consistent with your brand's identity.
• Ensure that your website design is consistent with your brand's visual identity, messaging, and values. Ensure that your website design elements such as logo, colour palette, and typography are consistent across all pages.
• Evaluate the functionality of your website design, including the performance of features such as forms, buttons, and links. Ensure that these features are easy to use and responsive.
• With the majority of website traffic coming from mobile devices, it's essential to ensure that your website is mobile-responsive. A design audit helps identify areas where your website design may fail to adapt to portable gadgets, enabling you to make improvements and provide a seamless user experience across all devices.

Technical Audit

Do you stick around when the website loads slowly? If not, your customers won’t either..?

If you want your website to be secure, mobile-friendly, and optimised for search engines, then you need to conduct a technical audit. Enhanced website performance, user experience, and online presence can result from frequent technical audits that may reveal and fix any underlying technical flaws.

Steps to Technical Audit

• Check your website speed - Use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to test your website's speed and identify any issues that may be slowing it down. Addressing these issues can help improve website performance.
• Identify broken links - Tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to find any broken links on your website helps a lot. Broken links can hurt the user experience and search engine optimisation (SEO).
• Ensure website security - Check that your website is secure by verifying that HTTPS is enabled, installing SSL certificates, and using strong passwords. You can also use tools such as Sucuri or Wordfence to identify any security vulnerabilities.
• Review your website analytics to identify any issues, such as high bounce rates or low conversion rates. Use this data to make informed decisions on how to improve website performance.

Analytics Audit

One of the most talked-about topics in modern marketing is analytics. In case you didn't know, it is the process of analysing data and extracting useful insights from it. Analytics is most typically used for website traffic, but it has many other applications as well, including marketing, logistics, sales optimisation, and more.

Steps to Analytics Audit

• Check the accuracy of your data by comparing it to other data sources, such as sales or lead generation data. You can also check the accuracy of your data by comparing it to historical data or industry benchmarks.
• Ensure that all tracking codes are correctly installed on your website and are functioning correctly. Use tools such as Google Tag Assistant or Tag Inspector to check the functionality of your tracking codes.
• Verify that your goals and conversions are set up correctly and are tracking accurately. Test your goals and conversions to ensure that they are capturing the right data.
• Review the filters and segments applied to your data to ensure that they are not skewing your data. Ensure that they are set up correctly and are not filtering out important data.
• Verify that your attribution models are set up correctly and are providing accurate data. Ensure that your attribution models are giving credit to the right channels for conversions.
• Review data privacy compliance: Ensure that your analytics data is compliant with data privacy regulations such as GDPR or CCPA. Review your data collection and storage processes to ensure that they are compliant.
• Analyse your data for insights that can help improve website performance. Look for trends or patterns in your data that can inform your decision-making process.

Conclusion

In conclusion, conducting a website audit is an essential process for improving your online presence and guaranteeing that your website is performing at its best. By reviewing your website's content, design, technical functionality, and analytics, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimise your website's performance.

However, conducting a comprehensive and extensive website audit can be a daunting task, especially if you're not familiar with the process. Which is why it's vital to work with an established agency such as Elephant in the Boardroom that is well versed in the audit process. Our team of experts can help you conduct a thorough website audit and provide recommendations to grow your online presence and your business's success.

Contact us today to schedule a website consultation and take the first step towards improving your online presence.?

With Elephant in the Boardroom, you can trust that your website is in good hands.