What Is A Website Audit?

Date First Published: 19th February 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 4/10

Learn more about what a website audit is in this article.

A website audit is the process of analysing the security, search engine friendliness, speed, social media presence, and other factors of a website. Although a website audit often focuses on factors that can affect the search engine visibility and rankings of a website, it is not limited to this and can be used to analyse other factors that have no effect on SEO, but will affect the user experience. The main goal of a website audit is to detect issues that can affect SEO, website traffic, and the overall user experience.

Types Of Website Audits

There are several types of website audits, which include:

• Website health audit. This analyses the overall health of a website. The factors that are assessed include the usability and architecture of a website, which can include internal links, external links, page speed, SEO, meta descriptions, page titles, broken links, site structure, page URLs, and more. Once the audit has finished, all issues will be revealed and the audit may come with a health score, which could be a number that ranges from 1 to 100 based on the total number of issues and warnings.
• Security audit. This assesses a site for security issues and vulnerabilities, including cross-site scripting, viruses, worms, malware, phishing, insecure HTTP, and more. Once the security audit has finished, a report will display with all security issues and the severity of them.
• Competitive website audit. This analyses the main competitors of a website to track where they are and what increases their online visibility. In other words, a competitive website audit allows site owners to see what is working for their competitors so that they can use those techniques in their own strategy. An example of a strength that a competitor has is a faster page loading time.
• SEO link audit. This analyses the inbound links pointing to a website to identify any issues or opportunities in a backlink profile. In other words, an SEO link audit is an evaluation of all inbound links pointing to a website. It may evaluate how good they are for a website, whether they have any risk, and the authority that is passed onto other pages.
• Social media audit. A social media audit is the process of identifying any issues, strengths, or opportunities in the use of social media. The online visibility of a website is affected by social media and a social media audit will give a full analysis of how social media is working for a website. A social media audit may consider how much traffic is being generated to a website, which type of content performs the best, and ways that the social media strategy can be improved.
• SEO website audit. An SEO website audit analyses all factors that will affect the performance of a website in the SERPs. It is different from a link audit as that only focuses on one aspect of SEO, which is backlinks. Factors that an SEO website audit may analyse include the links, keyword density, keyword prominence, page speed, image optimisation, video optimisation, mobile optimisation, metadata, URLs, quality of content, and more.
• Lead conversion optimisation audit. This type of audit analyses issues that can have an impact on conversion rates and leads. These include the user experience, CTA buttons, navigation, design and layout, compatibility, and more.
• Technical SEO audits. These analyse factors that can have an impact on the way that search engine crawlers find, crawl, render, and index sites. This audit involves crawling pages of a site and assessing the crawlability of it. After the audit has finished, it will reveal any issues and ways that the website can be made more understandable and crawlable for search engine crawlers.
• Content audit. This is used to analyse any issues with content and identify any changes that can be made to improve the performance and user experience of the website. The factors that a content audit may consider include whether it is well-written, informative, free of spelling and grammatical errors, not a duplicate of a page that already exists, skimmable, of sufficient length, and easily understandable.
• HTML validation audit. This type of website audit validates HTML markup for errors, such as missing closing tags, and deprecated elements. Once the HTML validation has finished, it will return with a list of errors and warnings. Sometimes, an error in a HTML document can cascade and cause more errors further down the document, making the validator report even more errors.

Benefits Of A Website Audit

Overall, carrying out a website audit comes with a lot of benefits including:

• Improved SEO. With an SEO audit, site owners will be able to identify any SEO opportunities that they have missed and use them. It can also help to identify any SEO issues that will affect the performance of a website in SERPs or lead to penalties by search engines, such as keyword stuffing, thin content, unnatural links, hidden text, cloaked images and text, and user-generated spam. This will allow site owners to identify these issues early and fix them before they harm their SEO performance.
• Site owners can compare their websites to competitors. This can be used to analyse how well sites are ranking against competitors and what competitors do so that site owners can use those techniques in their own strategy. They can also find out how competitors are generating website traffic and how often.
• Improved conversion rates. Lead conversion optimisation audits will allow site owners to spot opportunities to convert more website visitors into leads, such as adding CTAs, improving user experience, adding a simplified navigation, improving the page loading time, etc. It will also provide information about any issues in pages so that they can be optimised to increase conversion rates.
• Improved security. With a security audit, site owners can help make their websites more secure, such as using HTTPS and fixing any vulnerabilities. This will increase the trust of visitors, increase website traffic, and keep visitor's information secure.
• Improved overall user experience. A website audit will improve the overall user experience of a website, which will help keep visitors on the site, increase website traffic, and improve the general performance of a website.

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