A Quick Website Audit Checklist

In 2019, the digital space has never been more competitive. It's estimated that more than 10,000 new websites are launched everyday. EVERY DAY.

If your company relies on its website to generate leads/sales, it is vital that you're making a consistent effort to get it in front of the right audience. If you don't, your competitors will and you will lose.

The first step in a successful website strategy is to audit your current efforts. This will give you a clear picture of anything that needs to be fixed, potential opportunities, and a plan for the future. Follow the steps below to get started!

What Are Your Goals?

Where most people go wrong with their digital marketing strategies is they don't focus on the long term. Before you do anything, you need to determine what you want your website to do.

Attract potential customers? Cater to existing ones? Be an industry reference for education and information? Answering these questions, along with setting SMART goals, will benefit you in the long run. This will also help determine the type of content you create, as well as how you promote on social media and other marketing platforms.

Keyword Research & Analysis

Use the Google Keyword Planner to see what your target audience is searching for. This tool will give you search volume for various industry keywords, their competitive rate, and for those of you who are running PPC campaigns, average cost-per-click prices.

Another super valuable tool that you can use to see what people are searching for is AnswerThePublic. Type in a keyword and it will give you all kinds of long-tail searches that people look for. For example, if you search for "marketing ideas," you'll get results like:

• marketing ideas for small businesses
• marketing ideas to promote events
• marketing ideas to announce a product launch

Use this tool to help craft your future blog posts!

Spying On Your Competitors

Its always important to know what your competitors are up to. Invest some time in searching for different keywords that you want to rank for on Google, and see who pops up.

Go through each organic listing on the 1st page and take notes on what they're doing related to design, content, and overall usability. Then see if any of these tactics could apply to your own efforts.

You can also use an extension like SEOQuake to see what phrases your competitors are targeting within their page titles, descriptions and content.

Technical Analysis

Google is putting more emphasis than ever on the technical aspects of your website when it comes to determining a hierarchy of search results. If your site isn't mobile friendly, has broken links, and contains duplicate content, you're most likely not going to receive a healthy score.

Use the following tools to determine whether your company's website needs any immediate assistance:

• Basic Technical Analysis: https://www.seoptimer.com/
• Page Speed: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

On-Page Content

For those of you who are creative, this is the fun part. The content you put in front of your visitors must be relevant and valuable, or you're going to lost people fast.

Use the keyword and competitive research from the above points to get started in determining what you need to give your readers. Figure out what major keywords you want to target, and place them in the appropriate areas (page titles, descriptions, headings, main body paragraphs). For you small/local businesses, make sure to also include the name of your city.

Next, what type of content is your audience looking for? Written? Video? Audio? This is crucial when creating your overall content strategy. It's also going to determine which social media platforms you use to promote it. Nail down a solid plan and get to work on creating something memorable.

Citation Audit

Google My Business, Bing Places For Business, Manta, Yelp-all of these are online citations that you can take advantage of. Claim your listing and make sure that your company information is accurate on each one. The more consistent you are with this, the more Google will trust you.

For those of you who sell locally, make sure you're making a consistent effort to acquire reviews and testimonials from your happy customers on your Google My Business listing. This will significantly increase both your organic and Maps rankings.

Backlink Analysis

One of the most important ranking factors in the eyes of Google are the number of times you're mentioned on other sites. If other industry sources are willing to link to your website, that means they see you as a trustworthy entity.

Along with acquiring positive backlinks, you'll also want to get rid of any toxic websites that are linking to you. If you're continually getting linked to destinations that are potentially harmful to your visitors, it'll most likely bring down the overall health of your website. Use the tool below to see what kind of external sources are linking to you:

Backlink audit tool: https://www.semrush.com/features/backlink-audit-tool/

Conclusion

Although these points contain mostly high-level information, it'll get you started in the right direction of getting your company's website optimized for both your visitors and search engines. Once you've covered the basics, start looking into more advanced SEO strategies and tactics to take your efforts to the next level!

Are there any SEO/website audit points that I missed?

Thanks for reading everyone!