Does your website have an aesthetic design with all the functionalities?
Do you plan to market it and generate leads for your business?
Before planning to invest in marketing your website, there is one more thing you need to make sure of, and that is to check if your website is up to the standards prescribed by the search engines.
All the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., work based on complex algorithms that function on specific criteria, and the websites that fall within these criteria rank first among the search engine results.
So how to know whether your website ticks the prescribed checklist of the search engines? One word Site audit! In this post, we bring to you what is a site audit, key features of a site audit, and much more.
What is a site audit?
The search engines decide website ranking factors based on the user experience. A site audit is a detailed website analysis of your website’s performance against these factors.
Search engines have automated search agents known as search engine bots. These bots crawl the websites, analyze the content, and store it in their databases. When a user enters a search query, these bots then search their database and retrieve the results that are most relevant to the user’s query and serve them on their search engine results page (SERP’s)
So by doing a site audit, you will come to know in which areas your website is falling behind in these factors, which are essential for the search engines to rank it first in its SERP’s.
Key Factors To Consider While Performing Site Audit
1. Page speed: Page speed is one of the key factors most search engines consider while ranking web pages in their SERPs. Hence it is necessary to find out whether your website has all it takes to load quickly than your competitors. Through site audit, you can find critical points that are affecting your page load time.
2. On-page SEO: On the page, SEO helps in easy identification of the page by the search engine bots while performing a site audit, the following must be checked.
- Each page must have a unique topic
- Each page must have a primary keyword included in its page title, related meta descriptions. Check the images, anchor texts.
- Check the H1 and H2 headings, redirections, duplicate pages
- Also, check the page crawl errors and indexation errors
- Check for page not found and server errors
- Have SEO friendly URL’s for all the pages
- Activate bread crumb and have structured data inserted
3. Mobile-friendliness: Mobile compatibility will increase your page rankings and will give you an edge over the competitors. While performing site audit make sure you cover the following aspects
- The site must have a responsive design
- Youtube video links must be embedded
- All the images must be compressed
4. Check the robots.txt file: If all you realized that all the pages on your website are not being indexed, then the first place to look at is the robots.txt file. Sometimes, a few pages are blocked, which prevents Google from indexing those pages so while performing a site audit search if there any page has been ‘disallowed.’
5. Check for broken links: Broken links lead to bad user experiences and, therefore, low site rankings, so always check for broken links on your website and fix them.
6. Check your website’s XML sitemap: The XML page of your website serves as a guide for the search engine bots to crawl and index the pages of your website. Hence it is essential to make sure the XML file is in the correct format and follows the XML sitemap protocol. All your website pages must be updated on the site map, and the sitemap must be submitted to all the search engines.
7. Social media: Another channel for lead generation channel is social media, so it is necessary to make sure your website is connected to your social media channels. Check if you have included the social media icons on every page, ensure you have social media share buttons where users can share your content on social media, place your social media icons on the header for easy access for the users.
8. Image SEO: Images SEO also plays a significant role in improving your page ranking, check for the following
- Make sure the image file names match the image, you can also use keywords in the filenames
- Check if the Alt tags are defined for all the images
- If you are using many images, consider using a content delivery network
9. Check for user-friendliness: The ultimate goal is to attract traffic to your website, but what if you can get traffic onto your website, and are leaving abruptly? To ensure the users stay on your webpage, check for the user-friendliness of your website. Here is how you can do it
- Check if the users can find what they are looking for within 3 clicks.
- Track the user journey through the search engine console and see where the dropouts are occurring.
- Check if you have clear navigation in place and have a 404 error page.
- Ensure your site has the contact us, about us and privacy policy in place
- Maintain consistent interface throughout the website
These are some of the aspects you need to look for while performing a site audit, however, a site audit is not a simple task, there are many aspects to take care of, and manually checking every detail might require lots of time as well as technical knowledge.
Do you know? You can check on all the SEO mentioned above Parameters through popular SEO Checker tools like RoboAuditor.
How RoboAuditor Makes Site Auditing Easy?
RoboAuditor does a detailed website analysis of any given website on 70+ parameters and gives you an SEO Report in less than 60 seconds.