Are you conducting a website audit? I spoke to SEO pros to help you get the most out of it

As a content marketer, a website audit is crucial to my work.

An analogy I like to use is that optimizing an existing website for search engines without conducting a thorough audit is like steering a boat without a rudder.

It is directionless and at the mercy of the wind and waves (or in this case, algorithm changes).

In this post, I’ll describe what a website audit is, what different types of audits there are, how to conduct an audit, and how you can use the information from an audit to improve your SEO and conversions.

I also spoke to some SEO consultants and specialists who shared actionable tips that you can find in the article.

Table of contents

Before I get into the things you should look out for, let me go over some of the different types of audits you can perform.

Types of Website Audits

Here are some common audits among marketers.

1. Competitive website audit

A competitive website audit tracks your competitors and their online strategies to help you identify what opportunities your brand may be missing out on.

Essentially, a competitive audit allows you to see what’s working for other companies in your market so you can incorporate those tactics into your own strategy.

Start by performing a SWOT analysis on a competitor’s website. A SWOT analysis is where you track the website’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

For example:

• A strength might be that their website is easier to navigate than yours.
• A weakness could be that their website page load times are slower.
• Opportunities could be elements or tools that are missing from the site that you can add to your site to give yourself an advantage.
• One danger could be that your website ranks higher than your own in search engine results pages (SERPs), causing your website to lose leads.

During this audit, also consider the tools and software they use to optimize their processes. This can help you find new ways to run your website more efficiently and make it more accessible to consumers.

2. SEO link audit

This type of audit processes the links pointing to your website to find potential problems or opportunities in your backlink profile. By evaluating your links, this audit helps optimize your website to rank for your target keywords.

Link audits consider the URL source, domain, and anchor text to see if value and value (called “link juice”) is being passed on to your site. This determines the extent to which a link helps or hurts your website’s visibility in the SERPs.

Links from reputable websites are much more valuable than links from smaller, lesser-known websites.

To conduct an SEO link audit, first collect all your link data. You can do this with Google Search Console by entering your domain and then clicking “Links to your site” under “Search Traffic.”

From there you can download the latest links and create a link audit spreadsheet. You then manually evaluate your links by looking at factors like anchor text, IP address, and page content.

You can also use tools like Ahrefs backlink checker to take the guesswork out of analyzing the value of the links you collect.

3. Lead conversion optimization audit

A lead conversion optimization audit analyzes a website’s conversion problems and opportunities. This audit requires you to analyze how traffic arrives on your website and where it comes from.

Google Analytics is an excellent tool for this step. Knowing where your traffic comes from allows you to better understand your audience’s behavior and adapt your website content to their needs.

Speaking of content, you also need to analyze the content of your website. Make sure the content is helpful, informative and timely.

Is the latest information about your company uploaded to the website and easily visible? Does your content contain keywords and phrases to improve its ranking in the SERPs?

Outdated or irrelevant content can hurt conversions and hurt your SERP rankings.

Other aspects of your website that you need to consider include:

• Forms. Do your forms collect enough information to contact a lead?
• CCheckout process. If you notice that your cart is being abandoned frequently, customers are probably having trouble checking out on your website.
• Design and layout. Are CTAs clear and visible? Is the copy too small and difficult to read? Is the website easy to navigate?
• Overall user experience. Are there reasons for frustration among your website visitors?

Pro tip: Veruska Anconitanoan international expansion consultant, recommends the following: “Use behavioral flow reports in Google Analytics to find bounce points. To see this, look at where users most often leave the flow or return to a previous page.

Once you find these areas, adjust your CTAs, page design, or content to eliminate friction. For example, if users frequently abandon a product page, consider simplifying the checkout process or adding more trust signals like reviews or guarantees to maintain loyalty.

This approach addresses both SEO and conversions by refining the user experience at critical stages.”

4. Social media audit

Your brand’s online performance can also be influenced by social media. If your social media presence isn’t driving more traffic to your website, it’s time to conduct a social media audit.

To begin your audit, make a list of all of your company’s social media accounts. Double-research to make sure you don’t miss any accounts you’re not familiar with, such as accounts created by other departments.

From there, go through each account to see if they all align with the company’s branding – using the same images, logo, tone of voice, etc.

You then need to evaluate the performance of each page. What type of content performs best and what type of content performs worst? Are these pages updated regularly?

Finally, use the information from the assessment to better understand your audience and optimize your social media to appeal to them. You can then update your social media strategy to further engage your audience and attract them to your website more effectively.

5. SEO website audit

While an SEO link audit analyzes the links associated with your website, an SEO website audit evaluates all the factors that may affect your website’s performance in the SERPs. This includes links, but also extends to other aspects such as keyword usage, content, metadata, page speed, user journey and video optimization.

It’s possible to conduct an SEO audit yourself, but hiring an agency will likely give you more detailed answers in less time.

To conduct an exam myself, I would first understand the purpose of the exam. Next, crawl and analyze your website using software. Here are some tools you can choose from when conducting an SEO site audit (you can combine these as needed):

Next, evaluate:

• Technical SEO. This includes, but is not limited to, insights into crawling, indexing, security, page speed, core web vitals, and site hierarchy.
• On-page SEO. This includes content (targeted review keywords, content quality/depth, search intent, heading structure, images, videos, CTAs) and user experience.
• Off-page SEO. This includes backlinks, domain authority and local SEO.

Pro tip: If this is your first site audit, I recommend starting with a free tool (or a free trial of a paid tool) along with Google Search Console to get some initial experience and keep costs down.

6. Data protection audit

A data protection audit checks whether you comply with applicable data protection laws and ensures that you create a safe area for website visitors. Search engines look for privacy-related pages when determining whether a website has high authority.

For example, Google’s main goal is to provide users with the best and most trustworthy content from reputable sources. Websites that comply with privacy requirements are most likely to be viewed as more trustworthy than sites that do not have these essential legal guidelines.

To conduct a privacy audit, determine what personal information your website collects from visitors, identify the laws you must follow, list all cookies your website uses, and create and publish website policies to comply with legal requirements are equivalent to.

Most websites require the following:

• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Consent banner
• General terms and conditions of business

While you can create these yourself, it’s much easier and more efficient to use managed solutions like one Privacy Policy Generator.

To eliminate the guesswork and hassle of privacy compliance, use a reputable generator that has been vetted by a legal team and privacy experts.

It should also contain clauses that meet the compliance requirements of the most common data protection laws.

Now that I’ve covered a few different audits you can perform to improve your website, let’s discuss the benefits of an audit.

The benefits of a website audit

1. You can compare your website with your competitors.
2. You can improve your SEO.
3. You optimize conversion rates.
4. You can optimize the performance of your website.
5. You can identify problems early.

1. You can compare your website with your competitors.

By conducting a website audit, you can compare your website with those of your competitors. You can analyze how well you perform for keywords compared to the competition and identify potential new revenue streams.

You can use tools such as: HubSpot’s website graderto conduct an audit of your competitors’ websites to gain further insights. You can learn how your competitors attract visitors and how they achieve conversions.

Ultimately, this will help you develop new tactics and strategies for your website.

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2. You can improve your SEO.

With a website audit, you will be able to identify any missed SEO opportunities and address any misguided or poorly implemented SEO pitfalls (e.g. keyword stuffing, exact match anchor text links, etc.) throughout your site’s content fix.

An audit also allows you to focus your SEO efforts on users first and search engines second. This protects you from constantly chasing changes to search ranking algorithms, meaning you don’t engage in misguided practices just to appear at the top of the SERPs.

Pro tip: A great tool that can help you organize your SEO details is HubSpot’s free on-page SEO template.

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3. You optimize conversion rates.

Website audits also allow you to re-evaluate the effectiveness of your website Lead generation and conversion.

This will enable you to spot previously overlooked opportunities to convert visitors into leads by adding relevant CTAs and identify deficiencies in your landing pages so you can optimize them to increase conversions.

Pro tip: Learn more about CTA selection to optimize CTAs on your website.

4. You can optimize your website performance.

Website audits typically evaluate a website in terms of its content and technical performance.

Therefore, an audit gives you the opportunity to check the robustness of your website’s technical framework and infrastructure.

It also evaluates how search engine friendly your website is and determines how easy it is for users to navigate your website to find the content they are looking for.

5. You can identify problems early.

Finally, a website audit finds issues that are hurting your SEO and conversions, such as: E.g. broken links, hidden content and long page loading times. By identifying these issues, you can troubleshoot issues that are redirecting traffic.

Evaluating both the content and technical aspects of your website opens up opportunities to dramatically improve the traffic and conversions your website generates.

Now that I’ve discussed what a website audit is and why you should do one, let’s take a look at how to do one.

How to conduct a website audit

1. Run the website URL through a site audit tool.
2. Find technical errors.
3. Analyze design and UX.
4. Rate website content.
5. Create a website audit report.

1. Run the website URL through a site audit tool.

I would start with a website audit tool to analyze my website’s performance. This can help test various important aspects of a website and then make specific recommendations.

2. Find technical errors.

Technical errors, such as those related to performance, SEO, mobile, and security, can negatively impact the customer experience on your website. If I notice that visitors aren’t staying on a website for long or I’m seeing a lot of abandoned carts, a website audit is a good way to find out why.

3. Analyze design and UX.

How does website design work for visitors and customers? Some software programs have heatmaps that show which parts of a website design get the most attention. This type of analysis helps communicate how the overall design and user experience impacts visitors.

Pro tip: Raquel GonzalezSEO consultant and CEO/founder at MintyConnectrecommends doing some hands-on work too: “While auditing tools are valuable, they may miss critical UX elements. Complete your analysis by personally navigating the entire site. This hands-on approach uncovers non-functional elements and user journey issues that automated tools may miss, ensuring a more thorough site assessment.”

4. Rate website content.

An audit also helps me evaluate website content such as blogs, landing pages, product/service pages, and others.

During an audit, I want to know how current pages are performing, identify opportunities for improvement, and ensure the content is engaging readers at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

To go deeper, I would also look at meta descriptions and check image alt text. I would also ask, “Is my content ranking well in search engines?” and “Does my on-page SEO and performance match my traffic numbers?”

5. Create a website audit report.

If you have the right tools, it’s a simple task to create a website audit report that clearly communicates the website problems found (and what to do about them).

There are a number of possibilities, and HubSpot’s website grader is one of the most user-friendly. It quickly and automatically generates a report after entering the web address to be crawled along with an email address.

For those with more technical experience: Semrsh’s site audit tool is a very in-depth reporting option, but to get started for free you have to jump through a few hurdles.

You would need to create an account, answer a few questions about yourself, and choose to skip a trial to get the free review report.

Your detailed report can seem overwhelming unless you come up with a few technical tricks.

Whatever reporting product you choose, it should provide a clear representation of key website categories – such as SEO performance and the effectiveness of your security measures – and then list individual issues along with recommended fixes.

When you have a complete website audit report, you can start making improvements yourself or efficiently send the information to the appropriate teams within your organization.

Pro tip: Preeti GuptaB2B SaaS SEO Consultant and Founder of Packedgives the following advice: “When submitting an audit report, I believe it is important to prioritize the recommendations based on the input you have collected. The way I do this is to assign a priority to each task based on the resources it will require, the impact it will have, and more.”

Assessments to make when auditing your website

First, enter your website HubSpot’s website grader – This will give you a general overview of your site’s strengths so you can gauge your focus on each review in this article.

Check out HubSpot’s Website Grader

How have you been? Do you have an idea of ​​which website audit benefits you need most? Let’s go!

1. Website performance evaluation

In the first part of your website audit, I would focus on how users navigate your website – from your homepage to blog posts to landing pages and all the related content in between.

Make a list of your website’s pages and ask yourself the following questions to evaluate them for optimization opportunities:

Is your website optimized for maximum usability?

The more visitors you can attract to your website, the more opportunities you have to generate leads and ultimately customers. But only if your website performs well.

Only have A website does not guarantee results. As part of determining the overall effectiveness of your website, the audit should ensure that your website is designed with your visitors in mind.

Your website’s design and general navigability should match what a person would search for on the website, e.g. Such as further information on a business-related topic, resources, product/pricing information, testimonials, etc. This largely depends on your individual business.

The main goal is to make it easier for people to access the information they are looking for. As a result, you’ll likely find conversion rates improving on their own.

To evaluate your website for usability, consider the following questions:

• Are all of our company’s key value propositions easily accessible through our main navigation/menu items?
• Do we have a simple yet intuitive website design and page layout? Make sure the pages aren’t too cluttered. littered with ads, CTAs or links; or contain no internal links at all.
• Are your conversion paths and/or shopping cart or checkout processes intuitive? Are there a lot of distractions along the way that could cause tension for your website visitors?

Consider conducting some user testing with members of your audience to ensure that you are effectively displaying the content they are looking for and that they can easily navigate to the parts of your site that they are interested in.

What is the overall speed of your website?

Are there page sizes that are too large or long page loading and server response times? Does your website go down frequently? Website speed may be affected if image files are too large or HTML and CSS need to be cleaned up.

Ultimately, fast-loading and optimized pages lead to higher visitor engagement, retention, and conversions. To quickly check the loading time of a web page, download MozBara toolbar from Moz that you can attach to your browser for easy page analysis every time you visit a website.

2. SEO evaluation

Optimize your website performance is crucial to retaining visitors, but the questions above aren’t the only ones I would ask.

It’s also important to review the content you publish to make sure it actually solves your visitors’ problems.

Is your website content high quality?

When assessing the quality of your content, think about it from your audience’s perspective:

• Did this information satisfy me?
• Did it answer all my questions?
• Does it offer me all the resources relevant to this topic?
• Do I know what to do next?

Remember, high-quality content should address the interests, needs, and problems of your buyer personas. Present them with interesting and well-written content. Always try to provide the reader with immediately actionable next steps, such as calls to action or links to resources.

Is your website search engine optimized?

Make sure all your websites follow On-page SEO best practices. To check your content for on-page SEO, conduct keyword analysis by doing the following:

• Contact your Analytics to check keyword performance. Which keywords give you the biggest increases in traffic and leads?
• Evaluate how well you are incorporating keyword performance into your content strategy. How much relevant content are you adding to your website to target these keywords?
• Check basic on-page SEO elements like URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, and copy. Make sure to include keywords where they are relevant.

Pro tip: To help you conduct an on-page SEO audit of your content, check out this blog. You can also download ours for free On-page SEO template.

3. Conversion rate evaluation

While high-quality, search engine optimized content is a great way to increase your traffic numbers, what really matters is what happens once those visitors are on your website.

Optimization has been made here Calls to action (CTAs), marketing offers and landing pages play a huge role in the performance of your website.

Not only do they give you the opportunity to capture visitor information to follow up on leads, but they also keep your visitors engaged with your content and brand.

To evaluate your website for maximum conversion potential, I would ask the following questions:

• How many marketing offers do I have in my content arsenal to serve behind landing pages?
• Do I have diverse marketing offerings that appeal to all of my different buyer personas?
• Do I even have landing pages/conversion forms on my website?
• How optimized are these landing pages??
• Do I have conversion opportunities for visitors at different stages of the funnel?
• Am I using CTAs effectively? Am I missing opportunities to include CTAs on different pages on my website?

Pro tip: Erica Ylimäkigrowth marketer Trustworthyrecommends the following: “Check if there are opportunities to mass optimize for conversions… Some examples include aiming for an easier conversion (e.g. getting visitors to sign up for a newsletter rather than getting them to sign up for your software to register) or try out a new CTA placement (exit intent popups, above the fold, below the fold). In our case, adding a hero CTA to blog posts was particularly effective.”

4. Technical assessment

Once you’ve addressed the three main goals of a website audit, it’s time to bring in a developer or someone from your IT department for a technical assessment. You can also hire an outside agency – just do your homework first.

Keep in mind that there may be some overlap from the three scores above – site performance, SEO and conversion rate. However, the technical assessment addresses all three to maximize the user experience (UX).

Here’s what I would look for in the technical assessment phase of your website audit.

Is your website design responsive?

Does your website have a responsive design? That is, is it a mobile-friendly website?

Smartphone usage worldwide has grown exponentiallyand it is important that websites are compatible with increasing demand.

Is your website error message free?

Are you seeing response code errors everywhere on your website where there shouldn’t be any? Calling level 302, 404 and 500 response codes may be useful for telling users that something is wrong.

However, this is also an indication that someone is not cleaning up broken links, thereby leading users down dead ends. Find these error messages and clean up your broken links.

Are your website URLs optimized?

Does your website contain URLs that are too long due to keyword stuffing? Do they contain session IDs and/or do they contain lots of dynamic parameters? In some cases, these URLs are difficult for search engines to index, resulting in lower click-through rates in search results.

Does your website have too much Flash or JavaScript?

Identify areas of your navigation that are entirely Flash or JavaScript. Search engines have difficulty reading and accessing it, which can result in your website not being indexed.

These elements also pose problems from a usability perspective. Visitors are often looking for specific information when visiting your website. If they have to wait for a 10-second visual introduction before they can find out your opening hours, you’re going to have a pretty frustrated visitor on your hands.

Is your site structure optimized for search engines?

We’ve already talked about site structure in terms of content access and ease of use for users, but it’s also important to ensure that your site structure is optimal for search engines. If pages on your site are not internally linked to other pages on your site, those pages are less likely to be indexed.

Define how your web pages are crawled and indexed by search engines?

This can be done through various methods, including everything from robots.txt files to sitemaps. These tools can help guide search engines to the most useful content on your website.

Robot meta Tags or robots.txt files

The Robots meta tag allows you to use a granular, page-specific approach to control how an individual page should be indexed and displayed to users in search results. These tags should sit in the

Section of a specific page.

The robots.txt file, on the other hand, is a text file that you can use to specify how your website should be crawled. Before crawling a website, search engine crawlers generally request the robots.txt file from a server.

In the robots.txt file, you can include sections for specific (or all) crawlers with instructions (“Instructions”) telling them which parts to crawl and which not.

Public and XML sitemaps

Your website should also have public and XML sitemap files. The public sitemap is a sitemap that users can access to review your website’s pages, similar to the index of a book.

XML Sitemap allows search engines to review pages added to your website in one place. The usual location of a sitemap.xml file is www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml.

The XML sitemap should be present on every website. It provides the ability to tell Google and the other search engines which pages on your website to crawl and index.

Although search engines can’t guarantee that they’ll stick to your sitemap, anecdotal evidence has proven time and time again that XML sitemaps help ensure your pages are found, and faster – especially if your sitemap(s) is your new web dynamically update pages.

Define content canonicalization?

The Canonization The content of your website is your last major technical consideration. To gain more control over how your URLs appear in search results – and to minimize issues related to duplicate content – you must select a canonical (preferred) URL as the preferred version of the page.

You can tell Google your preference in various ways. One such option is to insert the canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) into an HTTP header of a page.

Make sure someone checks that the canonical tag is properly implemented sitewide. When doing this, make sure that it points to the correct page and that not every page points to the home page.

Website audit checklist

Before I begin, I would use this basic website audit checklist to check certain necessary elements of a website’s performance.

Example of a website audit

To put all of this together, I decided to do a website audit on one of my favorite bloggers, Christina Galbato.

Check out the image below. This website is doing well. SEO and mobile are very popular. The main areas for improvement to this website would be performance and security.

But, “What does that mean?” Well, let me delve a little deeper. In each section, the website grader tells me what I (or in this case Christina) do well and what could be improved.

The reviewer then makes recommendations to improve the overall website.

Next, there is a table that helps compare the current website with the recommendations.

Completing the website audit

At the beginning of the auditing process, I asked the important questions: “How am I doing?” and “How does my website compare to my competitors?”

Now that I’ve completed the audit, I know the answers to these questions – and I have actionable steps to improve my website and make it more competitive.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in April 2018 and has been updated for completeness.