Getting a professional website audit done is a great way to kickstart the creation or improve the performance of your website. A website audit can provide you with knowledge on topics varying from Search Engine Optimization, User Experience (UX) improvements, graphic design, technical issues, security matters, and content in general. From our experience we can say that by optimising your online presence you will simultaneously improve the traffic, usability, and efficiency of your website. Which in return will likely bring in more customers and revenue. Let’s look into the components of a website audit.
SEO technical audit: improve your traffic, efficiency, and visibility
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of optimizing your online presence on search engines such as Google. There are four pillars that are looked at when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. These pillars are Content, Authority, Technical, and Experience. Let’s see how the improvement of these four pillars can optimize your SEO performance.
1. Content
Your website most likely contains a lot of text, and the good thing is you can use this text to improve your SEO. How? By using clever keywords that you have researched and by looking into the search intent of your viewer. Once you’ve figured that out, you want to investigate if the content that you are placing online is actually relevant to your audience. Researching content will help you to create a website that aligns with your target audience. The more you are aligned with them, the better results you will get with your SEO strategy.
2. Authority
To improve your SEO, you want to generate backlinks and social links. Backlinks are links from another website towards your own website. A social link is where you have been mentioned on someone else’s social platform. Generating both types of links is important since it is a signal to Google that other pages find your content interesting. You can actively search and approach other websites and social media platforms to help promote you through these links – this process is called outreach.
3. Technical
In order for your website to function optimally on a technical SEO level, there are a couple of things that you have to pay close attention to. You want to make sure that all your pages on your website work (if they do not work they will give a 404-error). Try to delete or improve any of such links. Then you want to focus on crawlability. This means that all internal links on your website aren’t broken and link to the right page and that your user can navigate through your website easily. There are more aspects of the technical analysis such as mobile usability, page interaction, loading performance, URLS structure, and robots.txt improvement.
4. Experience
The experience of your website is how people perceive its content and design. You can read more about the importance of content at the bottom of this blog. To improve the experience of your website you first want to make sure that the loading speed is quick. You also want to minimize the bounce rate of your website and increase the time that people spend on it by creating content that aligns with the viewer. To get to know what your viewer would like to see we would recommend to do a thorough research on who they are and what they search for.
Let’s look at your website
Our free video audit will take a look at your website and the UX-design of your website. We will send you a short video with an analysis from one of our talented team-members.
How can SEO help improve traffic, efficiency, and visibility
By improving the four pillars named above and by implementing the strategies and techniques of these pillars, you can create a website that scores well. A website built for success is a website that is built efficiently, which makes people stay on it longer. It will also create more traffic because of the optimization. An SEO audit can help pinpoint what is already great and what steps need to be taken to improve.
User Experience Audit: Identifying a website’s core issues and improving usability
UX Design is short for User Experience Design, which is how the viewer will experience and interact with your website. To improve the UX Design, you can work on and implement all sorts of things. The world of UX is ever-evolving. However, there are some basic principles that will help improve the overall UX Design of your website. Let’s look into this.
What are the core principles of a good UX Design?
When it comes to UX Design there are many aspects that you can take into consideration. We believe that it is important to always investigate what your audience is interested in. You can do this by learning the user’s behavior, through observing it, for example. Then, when you’ve analysed the behavior of your target audience you can pinpoint their attitude, needs, and desires. After this analysis it is time to write down various hypotheses.
One crucial step in this process is to always test which hypothesis is right and which one is not. In other words: involve your audience in the research process. Besides the investigation and testing of your audience’s behaviors and attitudes there are 3 other components that you can implement in the UX design of your website. We will discuss them below.
1. It’s all about the user
As UX (User Experience) implies: it is all about the user. In order to make your website better, you will have to find out who looks at it and what kind of information they want to get out of it. Therefore, researching the intent of your customer is extremely valuable before you are going to change anything on your website. Decisions you make can often be based on assumptions about your customers, it is often based on what you think the users do, instead of what they actually do. Let’s keep this in mind when forming an UX strategy.
2. Context is everything
When (re)designing a website you want to step into the shoes of the viewer. This is especially important when it comes to context. When designing a website you constantly have to ask yourself whether the message is clear or not. You can do so by thinking about the context of a message. Do people already know the context or should it briefly be explained? Sometimes a few words can go a long way when it comes to creating context.
3. Let’s talk about language
When it comes to language, UX copywriting is often focused on ‘simple language’. This means the usage of short sentences, understandable phrases, and giving context to a piece of text. The design of your website will be more user-friendly once the copy presented on it is easy to understand. This will eventually result in people staying on your website longer and understanding the message you want to communicate more clearly.
How can UX help identify your website’s core issues and help improve usability?
After researching and implementing UX design techniques your website will be more user-friendly. This means that your website is easier to navigate through, which improves its usability. UX Design looks closely at the core issues that your website might have. Some might seem obvious but the accumulation of all UX implementations make for a smoothly operating website that will eventually attract more customers. Do you want to learn more about conversion rate optimization, we wrote a blog about it before, you can read it here.
Security Audit: how safe is your website and why do you need a SEO security audit to improve your vulnerabilities
Talking about the security of your website might not be your favourite topic. Honestly, we get that! However, the security of your website is one of the most important topics to talk about. So, let’s look into it and see how and why a security audit (and SEO security audit) might be essential for the (re)designing of your website.
What does a security audit entail?
There are multiple things to think about when it comes to the safety of your website. Is your CMS secure? And how about the plugins? Security audits are there to protect important data, see where your website is not properly secured, provide necessary new implementations, and track the effectiveness of the security strategy. On top of that, a security audit can outline how employees can operate in a way that keeps your website safe.
How can a SEO security audit improve your website’s vulnerabilities
With a SEO audit you can investigate your website’s vulnerabilities. SEO and website security are connected to each other and start with the validity of the SSL certificate, which makes online transactions safe. An (SEO) security audit looks at how your HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) might be sabotaged due to spam and/or malicious bots that are scraping and stealing your data. On top of that, during an audit we will look if your website is outdated or not because an outdated website can create malware security breaches.
A security audit will search for bugs, which are an open door to any sabotage on your website. Your website security will directly affect your ranking in Google, which makes it an important reason to look at and improve it. Not only will a website security audit create a safe online space for your customers to roam on your website. A safe website also creates a healthy foundation for your SEO strategy.
Content Audit: what is the tone of voice, story you tell, and message you provide
A content audit will look into various topics such as the tone of voice, story, and message that you are sending out from your website. This has everything to do with the branding of your company, read more about branding here. What kind of brand image do you have and what kind of effect does this have on your viewers? Which components are looked at during a content audit? We will discuss them below.
Which core principles are looked at during a content audit?
A content audit will look at all aspects of your company’s content strategy. This can vary from the text on your website, other copy that is used online, and even the messages that are sent out through your social media channels. All content that is sent out towards your target audience helps build your brand image. It is your brand image that leaves your (potential) clients/customers with a feeling and a connotation that they link to your brand.
This feeling often (subconsciously) influences them to either buy or not buy your product and/or services. Even more reason to see if your content is coherent, consistent, and the message that you are sending out resonates with your viewer. Let’s look at three components of a content audit that will help you see and understand what your company is doing and where there is room for improvement.
1. Tone of Voice
The tone of voice of your company has everything to do with the words you use. Is the tone of voice consistent on every piece of text that you are communicating? What is your company’s ideal tone of voice and is this ideal currently met? Does this tone of voice resonate with your target audience? These are all questions that we look at during a content audit.
2. Storytelling
When you have established the right tone of voice and you know which language you want to use, you can look at the story that you are telling. Is the story of your brand inspirational? Or is it casual? Or do you want to tell a story about success? A story can be told in many different ways. During a content audit we can look at which platform is best to portray the story of your company.
3. Message
You now know the tone of voice you want to portray as well as the story you want to tell. But what is the underlying message? What are the core values that your brand stands for? What is the reason that you, and your business partners, have started this business? Why are you still in it today? The message is the powerful and emotional driver of both your story and tone of voice. Once you have figured this one out, the communication outwards will be based on a core belief that will inspire many others.
Let’s look at your website
Our free video audit will take a look at your website and the UX-design of your website. We will send you a short video with an analysis from one of our talented team-members.
A website audit focused on SEO, UX, and Content
To conclude: a website is more than just a landing page for people to get information. Your website can be a first impression to many of your (future) clients/customers. This first impression is based on the usability and overall satisfaction of your website. A website audit often provides valuable knowledge on how your website performs in Google and how the viewers perceive it. The knowledge acquired from a video audit can set your website up for success which will lead to happier (and more) customers.
Grab your free video audit here!
Have you always wanted to get more insights on how well your website is functioning? Request a free video audit today and we will get back to you with a free of charge video audit on your website. You can find more information here. If you have any questions or if you would like to have further information before requesting the free video audit, you can send an email to info@bemowgli.com. We are happy to help!
