A website now isn’t just a virtual storefront—it’s the cornerstone of your online presence and business success. However, simply having a website isn’t enough; ensuring it performs optimally is crucial for attracting visitors, engaging them effectively, and ultimately converting them into loyal customers.
This is where a comprehensive website audit becomes indispensable. By delving into every facet of your website—from technical functionality and SEO performance to user experience and content relevance—a thorough audit reveals opportunities for enhancement and identifies potential pitfalls.
Auditing your website’s content is not as intimidating as you may think. It is a fairly straightforward process that does not require a skilled professional. If you have never done a content audit before, you will find that it won’t take long before you get the hang of things. Join us as we explore how to perform website audits, uncovering the way this systematic examination can propel your online strategy to new heights of success.
Ready? Let’s crack on!
Website Audit
A website audit is a comprehensive analysis of various factors that impact a website’s visibility and performance in search engines. It involves evaluating the technical infrastructure, on-page elements, content quality, and overall user experience of a website.
The goal of a website audit is to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement in order to enhance the website’s performance, increase traffic, and achieve business objectives. This process typically involves using specialized tools and expertise to assess metrics such as site speed, mobile responsiveness, SEO effectiveness, and usability.
In other words, conducting a content audit helps your website come out stronger than it was before.
Goals of a Website Audit
That being said, and before you begin to audit your website’s content, you will need to establish what data and information you would like to get out of it. Maybe your website has too much overlapping data that has become redundant. Or perhaps you just want to keep your content fresh by updating the old content you come across and gaining new ideas for future content.
Conducting a website audit is, in fact, all about setting goals.
In essence, you should be able to relate the goals of your content audit to an underlying business problem. For example, you might want to:
Increase audience acquisition
Improve average lifetime values
Encourage email signups
Gain referrals
Increase average order values
Score backlinks
Improve conversion rates
In this regard, you should always follow the SMART framework when setting out content goals. It is important to know what you’re looking for in a content audit and what you hope to achieve from it. Otherwise, you will be faced with overwhelming information that you won’t know what to do with.
Struggling websites need content audits the most. Determine why your website is struggling and conduct a content audit to strengthen it and resolve any issues.
KPIs of a Website Audit
Once you’ve established why you want or need to have a content audit, you must create a spreadsheet of all the content you will be reviewing.
Content audit spreadsheets vary by who is conducting them and what content assets they want to review. Every page on a website should contain solid keywords and inbound links. Knowing which pages or posts receive the most traffic and shares is also helpful.
You will likely notice a trend that certain content does better and re-strategize to publish more of the performing content. Every bit of the collected data in a website audit spreadsheet is valuable and offers helpful insight.
Website Audit Checklist
Now that you have decided what you’d like to achieve through your content audit, it’s time to dive into the data. We’ve already touched on the fact that a content audit isn’t a particularly difficult process.
Once you have every article on your site organised in a systematic spreadsheet, you can start drawing out insights on what is working and what isn’t. Obviously, this should be done concerning your KPIs.
For example, if you’re trying to attract more organic traffic, you should figure out what the articles that perform best on SERPs have in common. Perhaps they have similar word counts or target the same search intent.
These kinds of patterns are important for informing your future content strategy.
Stage 2: Technical SEO
Alongside your content audit, it’s also important to analyze your technical SEO. In essence, this is because underlying technical issues can do so much to harm your content performance.
1. Technical Audit
Run the site through Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix. Fix any page bloat, lack of compression, or server issues.
Check mobile optimization with the Google Mobile-Friendly Test. Confirm that the site is responsive on all devices.
Verify proper indexing by searching site pages on Google. Fix any crawler access issues.
Review web server security provisions like SSL, HTTP/2, and CORS settings.
2. On-Page Optimization Audit
Check title tags—unique, SEO optimized, under 60 chars.
Review meta descriptions—include keywords, compelling copy, 160 chars or less.
Validate image alt text—all images have keywords in alt text and captions.
Assess content—keyword optimized, good formatting, multimedia used.
Test site search—ensure users can easily find relevant pages/content.
Monitor rankings weekly and troubleshoot dips – fix technical issues.
Check local pack rankings and optimization.
8. Analytics Review
Review traffic channels – optimize top performers. Identify promising channels.
Analyze visitor acquisition and behaviour flow – lower bounce rates.
Check conversions by source/medium – optimize better converting channels.
9. Fix Identified Issues
Prioritize quick wins and critical fixes first – low-hanging fruit.
Create an issue backlog and tackle it in priority order based on impact.
Implement on-page optimizations, security fixes, and technical improvements.
Build out content backlinks as needed.
Stage 3: On-Page SEO
Finally, you should audit all of your content for on-page issues. This can include problems with the content, like poor word counts or low readability standards. It might even simply be that your articles aren’t interesting enough.
Equally, you should carefully consider whether and to what extent the metadata across your site is optimized. Again, several automated tools will analyze this for you and generate recommendations for improvements.
What’s Next?
After finally completing your website’s content audit, it is time to develop a strategy to improve your website. You’re off to a great start if you have already set an action after each item on the spreadsheet. If not, start that process.
It’s best to take an organized approach to strategize and improve your content. You will also need to set a firm deadline for completing and implementing all actions on your content audit. Organizing your strategies is up to you and should suit you best.
You can treat the spreadsheet of information like a list you work through in starting order or group content assets to be worked on simultaneously. You may also choose to organize what you will work on by order of priority and importance.
Consider the changes you intend to make before jumping right in. For example, if you decide to fix all grammatical errors in your content, make sure you have removed all unnecessary or redundant content first to prevent wasting time.
Last, don’t let yourself become overwhelmed and paralyzed from acting to improve your content. A content audit is only worthwhile if the data collected is appropriately utilised. Here is some of our most popular content around taking time to audit your website:
Performing a thorough website audit requires attention to detail and a structured approach. Here are some expert tips to conduct an effective website audit:
Focus first on optimizing page speed. Improving load time provides one of the biggest immediate payoffs for performance.
Don’t just look at surface symptoms of issues. Investigate why problems like high bounce rates or thin content are happening in the first place.
Set macro goals first, like increasing lead gen or lowering bounce rate that will guide what to analyze. Tailor audit to those goals.
Combine quantitative data from analytics with qualitative UX assessments. The user perspective gives insight into numbers alone.
Document the issues uncovered from the audit, the problems fixed or optimizations implemented, and the tangible resulting lifts in key performance indicators (KPIs).
Track KPIs such as increased organic traffic, higher rankings for target keywords, lower bounce rates, improved time on site, higher conversions, and increased revenue.
Multiply the measured performance gains by their revenue value to quantify the monetary ROI generated, which helps demonstrate audit value.
Conclusion
Conducting a website audit is not just a task but a strategic investment in the success of your online presence. By meticulously examining technical performance, content quality, SEO effectiveness, and user experience, businesses can uncover hidden opportunities for growth and improvement. A well-executed audit enhances search engine visibility and fosters better user engagement and conversions.
Regular audits ensure your website remains competitive in a dynamic digital landscape, allowing you to adapt and thrive over time. Embrace the insights gained from audits as a pathway to continuously refine and optimize your online strategy, ensuring long-term success and relevance in the digital realm.
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