Website audits can help your brand in more ways than one. It doesn’t matter if you’re web development in Detroit or a small-scale entrepreneur elsewhere. If your business or company has a website, then you need to check up on it regularly.
That being said, website audits can be tedious, especially if it’s your first time. So to make your life a bit easier, here’s a list of tasks you should focus on. That way, you can make the entire process more manageable.
Gathering baseline data will help you know your website’s current performance. Doing so will also provide a benchmark that you can use to review your website once the audit is done.
Google Analytics is a great tool if you want to get baseline data. To get started, you need to take the following steps:
Believe it or not, Google prefers it if your website has fewer pages to index. When a website has a large volume of low-quality pages indexed in search engines, it can lead to index bloating.
Low-quality pages won’t increase your rankings even if Google does index them. So better remove them from Google’s radar as soon as you can. Some of the pages you need to take down include:
Removing these and other kinds of pages can increase your website traffic, as well as lessens your workload. So best include it in your regular website audits.
With more and more people going online through mobile devices, ensuring your site’s mobile friendliness is more important than ever. Doing so will help make your SEO content more enjoyable. This will eventually lead to increased traffic and higher rankings.
One of the simplest ways to test your website for mobile-friendliness is through this tool Google provided. Simply enter your URL and wait for the results. Aside from pointing out any website issues, it will also give suggestions on how you can fix them.
Other ways to make your website more mobile-friendly include the following:
Having more than one version of your website indexed on search engines isn’t exactly uncommon. Still, this is an issue you shouldn’t leave unaddressed. Say there are four different versions of your websites for example:
To humans, they all look the same. But for Google, it looks like four different URLs. And that could spell disaster for your website’s performance.
To avoid this issue, you need to adjust your website settings and redirect rules so all these URLs will lead to the same page. You’ll need to install an SSL certificate and pick one URL where all the others will redirect to.
Additionally, you need to set up a 301 redirect to that one URL version you picked. That way, the other URL versions will redirect to the main one even without the SSL certificate.
If you’ve invested in keyword research as part of your website’s SEO strategy, then you might as well set up a keyword position tracking system, too. That way, you can check how well your positions are performing on Google’s SERPs.
Now there are many tools to help you oversee a keyword position tracking system. However, only a few of them can compare with SEMrush’s Position Tracking tool. Aside from showing the average position, it will also display estimated traffic, rankings distribution, and other essential data.
To get started with SEMrush’s Position Tracking tool, you need to take the following steps:
Other things to do with SEMrush’s Position Tracking tool include identifying pages using the same keyword, tracking keywords across different locations and devices, and checking which pages are performing better.
Through regular website audits, you can ensure your website performs its best. That will help you maximize it and use it to attract more customers to your brand. So best include the five tasks in your audits, and watch the sparks fly!
