What Does a Website Audit Tell Us?
Posted on 24th October 2024 at 15:46
On the face of it, a website audit sounds pretty vague. For all you know, when a marketing agency offers a website audit, they are going to have one of their team sit and trawl through your pages looking for spelling errors.
There are several different aspects that determine the success of a website, it’s not all subjective opinions and grammar. Here are some of the things that a website audit tells us.
How well your pages rank in search engine results
Writing a website without thinking about Google is a pointless endeavour. It might look good; it might tell a great story. Ultimately, though, nobody is going to appreciate it if they search for it and find 103 of your competitors ranking higher than you.
A website audit will detail which keywords you are ranking for, and their position in Google search engine. With this information we can deduce how effective your content is. It might mean that there hasn’t been too much focus on important search terms or whether the original writer has stuffed too many keywords in a page.
SEO technical issues
It isn’t just the stuffing or omission of certain keywords that can effect your rankings. There may be a lot of technical reasons that your content is slipping down the rankings. It could be as simple as hosting images without alt-tags or even using the wrong header sizes on your pages.
A website audit will pick these out for us, detailing where the issues are so that they can be addressed.
404 Not Found: Broken links on your website
You may not know it, but there could be lots of broken links on your website. If you have refurbished your website, removed some pages, or changed your domain names, this can cause broken links.
These seriously hamper the user-experience and they make you look unprofessional. Whilst you might notice them on your website they can damage your credibility as a trusted business. Also, they can affect your Google rankings. Our website audit will find them so you can redirect them.
Beating that 8 second attention span
We joke about people not having a long attention span on the internet. But the truth is, humans with a laptop or a phone in their hand are not the most patient of creatures. If your website has slow pages, they probably know of a competitor whose website will work at the speed of light. Slow pages mean a high bounce rate.
The website audit will look through your website and pick out those pages that are slowing you down. This will help you know what to work on.
Image sizes are a bigger issue than you know
When building a website, you might just be downloading images from your chosen stock library and placing them in your website. It looks great, but unless your content management system has flagged it up, you might be hosting an image the size of a small country. It doesn’t matter if the quality is good though, right?
Well actually, the reason a website audit targets those images that you could wrap yourself in to keep warm is that hosting them will slow your website down. This will also stop you from ranking well.
Ask for a website audit
Websites are probably the most important marketing tool you have. One that doesn’t rank well might as well be like a high street shop that is pushed down some obscure back alley. You want visitors, but if they can’t find you, they don’t know that you sell the best products in the town. You need to try and get your website on the first page.
Since most of it is centred around Google and how well you are performing, we can also audit your Google Business Profile as well as your website.
To take advantage of a free website audit, contact us on 01604 698 948 to arrange a coffee and a chat, or email hello@tj-marketing.co.uk with any questions or enquiries.
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