What Is The Purpose Of A Website Audit?

Students ask me - what is the purpose of a website audit? It's a great question with a butt ton of answers, so I'll give you a few purposes for doing an SEO audit of your website.

First, if you've inherited a site through some means - you take on a client, or you've bought a business with an existing site, then you want to do an audit to get the "big picture" of what the site currently is doing in terms of:

• Keyword rankings
• Conversion rate
• Length of visits to the site
• Number of pages viewed on the site
• Technical issues that are hindering user experience (UX) and better search engine visibility

And much, much more.

Second, if you've never done an audit on your own site, now is a great time! It's highly likely you'll discover the need to do some content cleaning and/or updating. You'll probably find technical issues that once they are fixed, will result in your site being crawled by Googlebots more often and improved keyword rankings.

Third, if your site has developed issues with rankings dropping like flies, or - perish the thought - it's been penalized with an algorithm update or a manual penalty - the best way to tackle the issues are to do a thorough site audit and see what all needs to be fixed to get your rankings back.

What's The Purpose Of A Website Audit Report?

Now that the audit's been complete, you'll get a report. A good report will have these sections:

• Executive summary - a few paragraphs that describe website issues at a high level
• In-depth issue findings - each problem will have an in-depth explanation of what is wrong
• Recommended actions - every issue should have a comprehensive action plan outlined in detail to provide a blueprint for fixing problems
• Priorities - the report should prioritize issues from highest to lowest, and state why these priorities were set up

Finally, a website audit will provide you with lessons learned. Perhaps your outsourced marketing agency previously engaged in some questionable link building practices or keyword stuffed your title and description tags. As painful as it can be to review the report, you can learn from it and ensure that future optimization efforts are those recommended by Google and best practices as done by reputable marketing companies.

If you want to know more about doing website audits, take an SEO training class with Invenio SEO. You'll learn all about on and off-page SEO that can help your site rank better in search results.

Would you prefer to learn basic SEO online? We have it now!

Until we meet next time, keep it safely between the ditches.

All the best to you,

Nancy McDonald