Website Audits

A website audit examines your website’s performance, design, content, user experience, SEO, and accessibility. The results will identify issues affecting your website, and so help you to fix issues that may be affecting your site’s visibility, usability, and conversions.

Fixing issues identified in a website audit can help you boost your search engine rankings, improve your user experience, and increase your sales & traffic conversions. If you have an existing website, auditing your website is an essential part of formulating your Digital Marketing Strategy to make sure you address any user experience and search engine optimisation issues. 

You definitely want your website visitors to have a good user experience and you certainly want your website pages to rank in search engines, so getting a website audit is a must. 

How frequently you should audit your website depends on your goals, particular industry, and competition. A general rule of thumb is to audit your website at least once a year, or whenever you make significant changes to your site. Doing this annually, or even every 6 months, will assist in ensuring that your website is up-to-date, relevant, and optimized for your target audience.

There are many benefits to having a professional website audit done. Some of main advantages are to:

• Boost search engine visibility: By auditing your website, you can increase your chances of ranking higher on search engines like Google and Bing. Depending on the type of audit done, you can also discover new keywords and phrases that your potential customers are searching for and optimize your site accordingly, as part of your Search Engine Optimisation.
• Identify critical performance issues: A website audit can help you detect and resolve any technical problems that may be slowing down your site, affecting its functionality or user experience, or causing errors. You can also check your site’s security and compatibility with different browsers and devices.
• Improve website design: A design specific website audit can help you evaluate your site’s layout, navigation, colors, fonts, images, and other design elements. You can also get feedback on how to make your site more attractive, engaging, and user-friendly.
• Enhance content quality: By auditing your website, you can assess the quality, relevance, and originality of your site’s content. It may also identify any gaps or opportunities to create more valuable and informative content for your visitors. This can often be useful if looking at professional copywriting for your website. 
• Increase conversions: A website audit can also help you improve your site’s ability to convert visitors into customers. Your site’s calls to action can be analysed, as well as landing pages, forms, and other conversion elements.

This differs according to the person doing the audit and the tools they use, but there are 6 main categories a Website Audit will fall into:

1. The light website audit: This is a quick overview of your website’s performance, design, content, and SEO. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights to get some basic data and insights.
2. The SEO content audit: This is a detailed analysis of your website’s content quality, relevance, and optimization. Various tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz Pro, or Screaming Frog may be used to check your keywords, titles, meta descriptions, headings, images, and links or those your competitors are using or ranking for.
3. The technical SEO audit: This is a thorough examination of the technical aspects of your website as far as they affect its crawlability, indexability, and ranking. As well as purpose-built audit software, other tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, GTMetrix, or PageSpeed Insights, can be used to check your site speed, sitemap, robots.txt, canonical tags, redirects, errors, and security.
4. The design/UX audit: UX is ‘website speak’ for User Experience. This type of audit is an evaluation of your website’s layout, navigation, colors, fonts, images, and other design elements. You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Mobile-Friendly Test, Hotjar, or Microsoft Clarity to check your site’s usability, responsiveness, and user behavior.
5. The accessibility audit: This is an assessment of your website’s compliance with web accessibility guidelines and standards. You can use tools like WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool or AChecker to check your site’s contrast ratio, alt text, captions, keyboard accessibility, and screen reader compatibility.
6. The conversion rate optimization audit: This is an optimization of your website’s ability to convert visitors into customers. You may be able to use tools like Google Analytics (if you have set tags to your CTA’s) or Optimizely, to check your site’s calls to action, landing pages, forms, and other conversion elements.

This audit addresses the main factors across all 6 types of audits, and so will uncover the issues most affecting your Website and how well it is performing for you.

How long a website audit will take depends on the size and complexity of your website, the scope and depth of the audit, and the tools and methods used. It can vary from hours, to days, to weeks.

How much a website audit will cost will vary depending on the type and level of the audit you need. A basic website audit can be done for free using online tools and resources. Website Developers often have specialised software they have purchased or subscribed to, to assist them in doing an Audit. A professional website audit can range from hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars, depending on the expertise and experience of the auditor. Sometimes a Website designer or developer may offer to do an Audit for you to help build trust with you, so that you may use them in the future for services, or refer others to them. This is normally a brief site audit rather than a comprehensive site audit.