More than 80% of all the published websites struggle with severe technical SEO problems. Typically, these include broken links, absent meta tags or sluggish page speeds that damage the site’s user experience and search rankings.
What’s even more surprising is that about 33% of all the websites fulfill the Core Web Vitals benchmarks.
The stats clearly prove how there is a huge need for in-depth website and seo audits.
That’s exactly what we’ll be discussing in today’s post: the dire need and importance of website and seo audits.
Website Audit: What & Why?
Website audit refers to the detailed assessment of a website’s structure, functionality and performance to figure out the improvement areas.
During a website audit, you analyze its different content, SEO and technical factors to make sure the site offers good user experience, and is optimized for Google (and of course other search engines.)
A website audit improves the website’s practicality and visibility. Plus, it also ensures the site adheres to the advanced web standards. Let’s dig deeper into the importance of a website audit.
Why is Website Audit Important?
Website audits when done right can lift your website’s value for users as well as search engines. These audits start fixing the many issues your website is struggling with. As soon as those complications resolve, your website starts performing better.
Evaluates Website’s Overall Health
Website audits comprehensively analyze your website’s usability, functionality and complete performance. Going far beyond the site’s SEO, a detailed website audit makes certain the site is user-friendly, responsive and appealing.
Improves User Experience
User experience plays a monumental role in converting visitors into paying customers. 88% website users are not likely to return to a particular website after going through a poor experience with it.
A website audit helps figure out the site’s pain points such as confusing navigating, poor mobile-responsiveness, and slow website loading.
Once you identify these snags, you work on improving them. Consequently, the user experience improves which encourages visitors to spend more time on your website, and explore more of its offerings.
Increases Conversion Rates
With a website audit, you can better evaluate different site elements such as checkout processes, form designs and CTA (call-to-action) buttons.
Comprehensive and minute assessment identifies little to big issues negatively influencing the conversion rate. Even the tiniest of tweaks identified with a thorough audit often lead to substantial improvements that increase your conversion rates.
Strengthens Compliance and Security
Extensive website audits are quite useful in detecting different vulnerabilities in the website. Generally, these include missing SSL certificates, weak passwords and obsolete plugins.
Once you effectively address these concerns, your site’s compliance with the security standards and protocols improves. Hence, your site better earns the users’ trust, and gains more value in search engines, particularly Google.
Aligns Branding and Designing
Design trends are always evolving. Branding strategies have, too, undergone various changes with time.
How your website will appear 5 years from now is going to be quite different from its current appearance. In case your website’s appearance and overall design stays the same over the years, it means you are struggling to update it with time.
With a website audit, you can effectively revamp your website on a regular basis. As a result, it reflects the important and relevant industry trends. Plus, it also effectively draws in users, and communicates your brand story to them.
Quite often, a website audit is confused with an SEO audit. The two are indeed different. Let’s discuss the latter now.
SEO Audit: What & Why?
SEO audit involves a website’s evaluation to check its compliance with the fundamental SEO principles, and best practices.
The main objective of an SEO audit is to figure out the on-page, off-page and technical issues hindering the site’s search engine ranking and performance.
Why is SEO Audit Important?
For your site to rank on search engines, its SEO must be top-notch. An SEO audit helps you identify the snags in your site’s SEO that prevent it from climbing up on the SERPs (search engine result pages.)
Let’s take a look at the different ways through which an elaborate SEO audit increases your site’s organic traffic, rankings, and overall online growth.
Diagnoses Challenges in Ranking
Did you know that meta titles that aren’t optimized result in very low CTRs (click-through rates) even when that page’s content ranks on the first page?
If your website is fighting an uphill battle with ranking higher on search engines, it is likely there exist some snags in its SEO.
In such scenarios, a solid SEO audit highlights all its key and even minute issues that cause obstruction in its growth. Usually, these issues include duplicate and plagiarized content, absence of meta descriptions and broken links.
Revamps Content Strategy
Keyword analysis and research is a critical component of SEO audit.
Once the keyword analysis is complete, you identify relevant and high-performing keywords that you can have more content on, and target strategically. Additionally, you figure out gaps that exist in the content along with the opportunities to further optimize the existing content.
Your site’s overall content and structure starts to better align with the search queries your users are looking for.
Optimizes the Site’s Technical Functionality
A popular study carried out by Google shows that 53% mobile users tend to abandon slow-loading websites, and those that take over 3 seconds to load.
SEO audits come in super-handy to check a site’s mobile-friendliness, crawlability of pages, and the loading speed of pages.
As soon as these issues improve, the site’s user experience elevates which naturally improves its search engine ranking.
Provides Valuable Competitor Insights
Knowing how well your competitor sites are ranking is crucial to analyze your positioning, and figure out a detailed competitor analysis.
A thorough SEO audit helps you compare your website and its performance against that of your competitors. The comparison helps you uncover strategies that improve their ranking, so you too can fine-tune your strategy.
Monitor and Stay Updated with Advanced Algorithm Changes
Search engines have constantly-evolving algorithms. Keeping pace with those algorithm changes is crucial to keep your website relevant and compliant to those protocols.
Professional SEO audits uplift your website, keeping it 100% compliant with the cutting-edge practices. You circumvent penalties, and your site continues to grow better.
Both website and SEO audits are incredibly important for a website’s online success. But how are the two different?
What is the Difference Between SEO and Website Audit?
Website and SEO audits often overlap in numerous areas. That said, they aren’t the same thing. They do share a mutual goal of improving a website’s functionality and performance. But at the same time, their emphasis is on diverse aspects of that website.
Scope of Website and SEO Audit
- Website Audit: The scope of a website audit is quite broad as it analyzes all aspects of its performance. Website audits cover user experience, technical performance, security issues and design consistency.
- SEO Audit: On the other hand, the scope of an SEO audit is narrower. It concentrates primarily on different factors that influence a site’s search engine discoverability. Typically, SEO audits entail backlink profiles, keyword optimization, compliance with search engine guidelines and addition of meta tags.
Focus Areas of Website and SEO Audit
The focus areas of a website audit usually include:
- Usability and design
- Loading speed
- Performance metrics
- Mobile-responsiveness
- Error pages
- Broken links
- Security including SSL and HTTPS implementation
Inversely, the core aspects of an SEO audit generally involve:
- On-page SEO aspects such as meta tags, keyword usage and content quality
- Off-page SEO including domain authority and backlink addition
- Technical SEO that includes XML sitemaps, indexing and crawlability
- Compliance with latest algorithm updates
- Competitor analysis
Goals of Website and SEO Audit
Generally, the goal of website audits is to optimize the website as such that it fulfills the technical standards, and provides a user-friendly, secure and smooth visitor experience.
On the contrary, the primary aim of SEO audits is to improve the search engine rankings, elevate visibility, and also fuel targeted traffic towards the site.
Core Tools
- Website Audit: Key tools that are mostly used for website audits include GTmetrix, HubSpot’s Website Grader and Google PageSpeed Insights.
- SEO Audit: Most SEO experts use Google Search Console, Ahrefs and SEMrush to conduct SEO audits.
The Need of SEO and Website Audit
- Website Audit: Website audits are excellent for businesses when they face severe user engagement problems on their website. Moreover, when a business intends to rebrand and redesign its identity and website, a website audit proves to be quite helpful.
- SEO Audit: SEO audits are ideal for all the businesses that are treading water when it comes to organic visibility and search engine rankings. Any business that wants to have an excellent digital presence must have a website, and pay attention to its SEO.
The fact of the matter is: you need both website and SEO audit for your business and website to scale higher, and enjoy more sales. Together, they drive traffic, engage visitors and convert leads into clients.
Conclusion: Invest in Timely SEO and Website Audits
Investing in detailed and professional SEO and website audits should be made mandatory for every website. No, don’t worry, this isn’t a strict order by search engines yet. Having said that, you cannot deny their importance.
If you are committed to your business, and genuinely wish for it to improve, ensure to have recurring website and SEO audits. Make certain you only bring in an expert agency such as ITechSole to handle those tasks to get unmatched online success.
Need a detailed audit of your website? Get in touch with us and our SEO experts will provide you with a FREE audit report.
FAQs
- Who needs a website audit?
If you have a website with poor engagement, it is important to conduct a website audit. Moreover, if you want to better brand your business or website, a website audit will be helpful for you.
- When do you need an SEO audit?
You can have an SEO audit any time of the year. However, make sure to have it once every three months especially when there are major algorithm changes, decline in rankings or traffic, and when you revamp your website’s design and structure.
- What is the difference between on-page and on-site SEO?
On-site SEO refers to improving the website’s overall structure which includes its internal linking, mobile-responsiveness, security and loading speed. On-page SEO, on the other hand, refers to optimizing the site’s individual pages with title tags, quality content, keywords, meta descriptions, image alt text and header tags.
- What is the key difference between site inspection and site audit?
On quite high levels, inspections are basically referred to as ‘do’, and audits are referred to as ‘checks.’ Typically, a site audit is what a website is supposed to do according to a compliance rule. Inversely, a site audit is a process wherein you check if all the compliance obligations are fulfilled.
