A website audit allows you and your SEO team to better plan for the long-term health and success of your website. In this post I’d like to examine some commonly asked questions about site audits and explain the myriad of benefits of the process.

What is a Website Audit?

Simply put, an audit is a series of tests that allows you to see how various aspects of your site are performing and where improvements can be made.

Why is it Important?

The correct on-page SEO of each page of your website is the foundation of any marketing strategy. In order to increase a website’s online presence you not only need to know which pages need improvement, but you need to understand how those improvements should be made. This could include everything from updating and/or implementing title tags and meta descriptions to capturing conversion opportunities by discovering how users interact with your site.

What Insight Will My Audit Give Me?

Your audit will be tailored to the desired functions of your website. For example, an e-commerce site (a company that sells blue widgets solely online) has very different functions than a service-industry based website (a local garden design company). Regardless, a comprehensive audit should cover everything from a review of technical problems and site architecture to keyword and social media marketing review.

That said, below is a list of just five elements that a site audit will examine:

  • Page Load Time: When ranking pages, Google incorporates website speed, and page load time as a factor in their algorithm.
  • URL Structure: Google looks at the full level of each page, and tends to rank pages that are closer to the root of a website higher in the search results.
  • Website XML Sitemaps: Without a XML Sitemap you are unable to track the ongoing health of your website through Google Webmaster Tools.
  • Website Crawl Errors: Determining status codes allows your SEO professional to see any errors. When a URL returns a status of 404, the incoming equity to the website is no longer attributed to the website, and is temporarily not counted for the website.
  • Rich Snippets: For some types of content, there is a markup format which can be utilized to help Google and other search engine correctly recognize those types of content and display them accordingly in the search results.

Should you decide that your company could benefit from a website audit, remember that the best auditing will do more than just tell you what is wrong with the site. You want to get recommendations for improvement as well.

Learn More: Mad Fish Technical Web Site Audits