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How To DIY Your Website Audit

Your website is a living, breathing thing. Not literally, of course, at least not until the AI uprising. But in a figurative sense? Absolutely. A website morphs and grows and matures.

But it can also get sick. So, like other living, breathing things, your website needs regular checkups. The website development industry refers to this checkup as a “website audit.” Without a website audit, you could be the owner of an unhealthy website right now and not even know it! 

Website audits help you determine and improve the health of your website. You’ll know the specific problems you face and how to fix them.

If you’ve never audited your website before or it’s been a while since you have, this article will be your go-to. We’ll discuss what is involved in a website audit, why it’s essential, and how you can do it yourself. (Plus, some bonus tips at the end of the article on auditing tools!)

What Is A Website Audit?

A website audit is an examination of your website to determine whether or not it’s optimized to help you achieve your goals and improve performance. While website audits are essential to SEO agencies like Uyo Digital Marketing, this audit is not limited to search engine optimization. 

It’s also important to analyze your technical errors, user experience (UX), site design, and lead generation process.

Benefits of a website audit

The goal of a website audit is not to nitpick; it’s to find opportunities to help you reach your goals, like outperforming a competitor, increasing sales, or improving brand awareness. But you also stand to gain many other benefits by conducting regular audits on your website.

1. Improved User Experience (UX)

Simply put, user experience, or UX, is how well your website accommodates the people who visit it. Does your website allow users to navigate easily and quickly find information? A website audit will give you the answer.

Once you know how your website fares in the UX department, you’ll see the issues to be fixed and the opportunities to improve. For example, a better user experience means users will stay on your website longer, visit more often, and take the actions you want them to take, like scheduling an appointment or purchasing your product. Improving UX also builds brand loyalty since users will trust you more.

2. Improved SEO

The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to make it easier for people to find you online. Therefore, your website needs to give search engines the information they need so that you can appear in the top results when someone is searching for services or products you provide.

Improving SEO is one of the best things you can do for your business. According to Business Insider, 23.6% of eCommerce orders occurred from organic searches. Additionally, 53% of consumers say that they research products with a search engine before purchasing, so even if they don’t buy from you the first time, they’ll likely come back later if your website is on point.

You need to identify precisely what SEO opportunities you’re missing and remedy any pitfalls to improve your SEO. A website audit allows you to do just that. Without one, however, you might as well be throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks.

3. Improved Conversion Rates

At the end of the day, your business needs to make money. Your website might be doing well due to UX and SEO improvements – but might fall short in lead generation and conversion.

A thorough website audit can show you why people are not converting and how you can better encourage them to take action on your website. Website audits = improved conversion rates. Improved conversion rates = $$$. Need we say more?

How to conduct your own website audit

Now that we know why your website needs a checkup, let’s learn how to give one.
 
Unlike checkups for other living, breathing things, you don’t need to go to medical school to conduct a website audit. You just need access to some free tools and some guidance from Uyo Digital Marketing experts. (Of course, if you don’t want to DIY your website audit, we’re also happy to do it for you.)

Step 1 - Find and Identify Technical Errors

First, you’ll need to audit your website for any technical errors. Then, ask yourself the following questions:
 
  • Is my website mobile-friendly? Does it look and function as intended across all devices?
  • Is my website error message free? Are there pages with 404- and 500-level response codes that need addressing?
  • Is my website’s URL structure optimized for search engines? Or are they excessively long or stuffed full of keywords?
  • Is the principal content on my website indexable?
  • Does my website have a sitemap? Are all significant pages included on the sitemap?
  • Are redirects set up on 404 pages? Do all redirects function correctly, or are there loops and chains causing problems?
 
The fastest way to find these errors is to put your website through an auditing tool like Google Search Console. (We’ll discuss auditing tools later on in this article.) But you can also find these errors by manually inspecting your website on various devices.

Step 2 - Find and Identify SEO Problems

After you’ve identified any technical issues, you’ll need to find any SEO issues. Some questions to ask are:
 
 
Again, you can find these SEO issues by utilizing a good audit tool, but you will also need a working knowledge of SEO best practices. Fortunately, Uyo Digital Marketing offers an Intensive Program to help you learn the SEO essentials required to improve your website. So why not check it out today?

Step 3 - Analyze Design and UX

Next, you’ll need to determine what kind of user experience your website provides to your visitors. To analyze UX, you need to get into the mind of your users and understand what they are looking to get from your website. We help our clients do this during our Discovery sessions, and it’s also advantageous during a website audit. Ask yourself the following questions:
 
  • How is my website’s overall speed? Does my website crash frequently? Do all pages take less than 3 seconds to load across all devices? 
  • Is the navigation on my website intuitive and easy to use?
  • Is all the paramount information about my business, like contact information, easily accessible?
  • Is my website design simple and not cluttered with ads, calls-to-action (CTAs), or links?
  • Is my website accessibility-friendly?
  • If my website has a shopping cart or checkout process, is it easy to use?

Step 4 - Analyze Content

As we say in the industry, content is king. Unique, engaging, and relevant content can significantly impact your website’s performance in search engine results. While SEO and content work hand in hand together, we’re making content its own category in your website audit because it’s just that important. Here’s what you should be asking about your content:
 
  • Does my website implement content pillars that align with my services?
  • Is the content on my website engaging? Does it answer people’s questions? Do people care about topics that I discuss?
  • Is the content on my website relevant, or does it need to be updated?
  • Am I posting new content on my website frequently and on schedule?
  • Does the content on my website have spelling or grammatical mistakes?
  • Is my content of a higher quality than my competitors?

Step 5 - Find and Identify Conversion Optimization Opportunities

Other points of this audit have focused on drawing people to your website and keeping them engaged. Now it’s time to see how well your website is at closing the deal.
 
Finding opportunities to improve your conversion optimization during your website audit can directly impact your business’s success. This type of optimization allows you to lower your customer acquisition costs, increase revenue per visitor, and acquire more business. Pretty nice, right?
 
To audit your site for maximum conversion potential, ask yourself these questions:
 
  • What marketing offers do I currently have on my website? Do these offers appeal to all my different buyer personas?
  • Does my content mention my marketing offers and link to them?
  • Do I have landing pages and conversion forms on my website? Are they optimized?
  • Are my CTAs in prominent places on my website? Are they enticing to my visitors?
  • Are my marketing funnels simple and easy to use?

Step 6 - Generate a Checklist of All Issues and Recommendations

Lastly, as you go through your website audit, it’s valuable to have a place to collect all of your findings. We prefer to use Airtable, but an excel spreadsheet or Google sheet works just as well. List out all issues, recommended fixes, and who is responsible for fixing the problem.

Conducting regular website audits

Just like other living, breathing things, one checkup is never enough. No, your website needs regular maintenance and website audits to ensure that it continues to perform at its best. So, either quarterly or semi-annually, audit your website for technical issues, SEO problems, and UX and content strategy opportunities. By doing so, you’ll soon find that your website performs better than you ever thought it could.
 
Of course, once you’ve completed your website audit, it’s time to dig in and capitalize on the opportunities you’ve found. Uyo Digital Marketing’s Website Intensive Program will help you learn the essentials to turn your website into a money-making machine. This program is perfect for solopreneurs or anyone who wants a professional website but doesn’t know where to start.

Free + paid audit tools (bonus tips!)

As mentioned earlier, auditing a website is much easier when you have the right tools to help. For example, doctors use tools during checkups, and so can you!
 
Some of these tools are completely free, while others require a subscription. Either way, let’s discuss some great auditing tools and how you can use them for your website audit.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is in every marketer’s arsenal. It tells you so much valuable information about your website for absolutely no cost. Once you connect this tool with your website, you’ll be able to fix and submit sitemaps, find response code errors on webpages, and even find content topics interesting to your visitors.

Broken Link Checker

Another free tool, this Chrome plugin, allows you to quickly check for broken pages and links. Broken Link Checker is a convenient way to fix these types of issues without having to wade through every page of your website manually. For those who have websites with a lot of content, this is a lifesaver.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog offers a comprehensive auditing tool for a reasonable price. For only $209 a year, you can find technical and security issues, SEO recommendations, and indexation issues in one place. If your website has less than 500 pages, you can also use the free version of their crawler, which gives you all the same features at no cost.

SEMrush

Granted, SEMrush comes with a steeper price tag than Screaming Frog, but if you’re planning to create content on your website, it’s worth the investment. Their keyword research tools allow you to check out what your competition is writing about and offers content marketing suggestions to help you create content that can outrank your competitors.
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