Why does your website need an audit?

Ever wondered why your website is not generating enough traffic despite spending thousands. Why do big giants attract more traffic and conversion rate, yes, they are well-known names, but that does not help if their website is not high-performing.

Like finance, big or small, you need an audit to find discrepancies; similarly, you need to audit your website to understand the discrepancies. That’s right, ‘Website Audit’.

What Is A Website Audit?

The website audit is complete scrutiny of all the elements that influence your website’s visibility on a search engine. Any parts which are out of place or not up to the mark can affect your website and conversion rate which needs immediate rectification.

Why Is Website Audit Important?

Website audit helps to monitor your performance regularly, which helps identify any problems with your website so that you can rectify them. If you do not perform website audits regularly not only you are giving your competitor an edge but all your hard work involved in marketing can go down the drain.

A detailed website audit helps to answer the following questions –

• Why is there no traffic or not enough traffic on your website?
• Is there any factor that is throwing the visitors away?
• Why are your sales not improving?
• Are there any technical issues that need immediate attention?

Answering the questions is the first step in a website audit. It just does not end there. Website audit also includes fixing the glitches.

How do fixing these glitches help?

Enhances website performance – imagine a website taking forever to load. You, as a user, will try once or twice and then move on to another website. Similarly, if your website takes ages to load, no one will wait with thousand options available at a touch. Remember, even a one-second drop-in loading the page can cost your business thousands of rupees loss.

Research shows that more than 45 percent of people will leave the website if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds. Those websites which give a user-friendly experience will attract visitors multiple times. A website audit –

• Checks how easy it is to navigate the website.
• Checks for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
• Checks website infrastructure and support.

You can fix these glitches for a high-performing website.

Enhances SEO – to enhance user experience and convenience, practice good SEO. Website audit helps in finding your issues with SEO or missed out opportunities and improve your website’s visibility. The most common problems are –

• Wrong content
• Missing out due to lack of good backlinks
• Wrong keywords
• Overuse of keywords
• Plagiarism
• Lack of title tags and meta descriptions
• Website Audit helps to enhance your SEO

Enhance conversion rate – the whole motive of any eCommerce website is to convert the visitors into customers or subscribe to your newsletters. In today’s digital world, where the entire business economy is shifting online, something is wrong if you cannot convert the visitor. Visitors are likely to convert or interact with-in your site if it’s well-optimized, has high execution, and has easy navigation. A website audit will help you make the required modifications to increase the performance of your website.

For optimal performance, the website audit should include the following areas –

Security audit – everyone is concentrating on other aspects of the site and missing out on security. Website security is an important area as you can be vulnerable to cyber-attacks or breaches. Often newspapers report about tech biggie’s security being breached. It’s a little setback for them, but for small businesses, it is a big issue. Many times small businesses need to shut down their online businesses in a short time due to cyber-attack. You do not want that, and hence a security audit is a must.

Health audit – a thorough analysis of the planning and practicality of your website that helps you to pick out problems

• Linking of your website – internal and external
• Load time of the page
• Website construction
• Titles appearing on the page
• Meta Description

Conversion rate audit – helps you analyze

• How visitors are moving through the site
• Steps taken by them
• Reasons for non-conversion
• Issues in creating the account

A conversion rate audit helps to know where and how to enhance your site.

Competition audit – be it any business, you should know your competitors. It helps you to understand their competitive edge and helps you understand your areas of improvement, missed opportunities, and if need be change your online marketing strategy.

Content audit – if you want the search engine to pick up your site, content has to be good with absolutely no plagiarism, no alt tags or meta descriptions, or overuse of keywords. The search engine can get confused if your content is not up to mark, and your ranking can get affected. Your content should be engaging, enlightening, and different, enticing visitors to visit the site and stay for more than 30 seconds and keep visiting.

Improvement audit – improvement audit helps you figure out ways to recover from negative ranking, if any, and how to heal and improve your website.

Interactive audit – make sure your website is easy to navigate and high performance to convert the audience. An audit helps you to fix all the glitches.

How often to audit your website –

Big Companies – do their website audits three to four times a year.

Small Companies – smaller companies can audit once every six months. But in case you are constantly updating your website with new content, it is wise to do a website audit once in three months.

Remember to have a clear game plan in place and rectify all the glitches as soon as possible.

Think of the website audit as the yearly compulsory health checkup. In the case of your website auditing ensures your efforts pay off. There are several tools available online to help you with your website audits. In case it is too much for you, hire a professional to do the right job. Do not miss out on the health checkup of your website.