How To Perform A Quick Website Audit

You don’t have to be a website guru in order to perform an audit on your website. All you really need to know is what to look for. A website audit can be used to sniff out a few problems, but typically focuses on the overall content, security, and performance of your site. Auditing your small business website can determine whether or not your site is functioning to the best of its ability, and if not, how it can be improved. If you haven’t taken a good long look at your website in the past few months (or years), now’s the time.

Five Things to Look For During a Website Audit

When performing your audit, keep an eye out for the following five things:

1) Internal Link Structure

The internal link structure of your website is important for a variety of reasons. First, it helps enhance the usability of your site by providing visitors with intuitive paths between pages on your site. Second, internal links help increase your search engine ranking abilities, especially if the anchor text of your link includes keywords. For example, if you click on a link titled “Website Design in Chatham-Kent“, the page that you’re directed to should be optimized for the keyword phrase “Chatham website design”. There are probably dozens of great linking opportunities on your site already – all you need to do is take the time to find them and implement the link. Remember to check for any inactive or broken links as well. Dead links frustrate your website visitors as well as search engine bots.

2) Updating Your Sitemap

First, stop and make sure your website has a functioning sitemap. While some websites include stylized sitemaps, a simply HTML file will suffice in most cases. You don’t even have to make the sitemap visible to your website visitors. The main function of a sitemap is to help search engine robots find and understand the content that is on your site. A sitemap will also help enhance some of those internal links we were talking about earlier, which will help with your SEO rankings again.

3) Analyze Your Copy

A website audit isn’t complete until you’ve spent some time reviewing your website content. At this time, you’ll want to look for things like duplicate, out-dated, or irrelevant copy. Keep an eye out for spelling and grammar errors too – you’d be surprised how many periods and apostrophes slip past an initial content review.

4) Redirect Review

It isn’t uncommon for a website auditor to suggest or implement changes to a website’s structure. If this is something that you plan to do during your review, remember to create proper, search engine friendly redirects to ensure that your webpages retain their optimized rankings after the move. Say, for example, that you move a page from www.mywebsite.com/about/ to www.mywebsite.com/aboutus/. In order to capture any visitors that mistakenly land on the first, no longer active page, you must create what is called a 301 redirect. If you’re not familiar with coding redirects, ask an expert for help.

5) Design Features

That cool animated GIF that you added 10 years ago could be making your website look old and dated. When auditing your site, make note of design features that you’d like to scrap or update. A few quick tweaks could make a world of difference to your website’s appearance, and thus, to your brand image.

What features do you look for when auditing your website? Let us know!