“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there” – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

If your company’s website has not been audited in the last two years, you will be in for a lot of surprises, and I’m afraid not good ones. A website audit will tell you where you are and put you on the right track for success!

Much has changed with the way Google and other search engines analyze and rank the pages on your website. You will need to know where your problems are and fix them now.

One of the areas that you should be very concerned about is the user experience / user interfaces that your website provides. Combine this with a simple element like not having a secure website with an SSL certificate; Either one will kill your chances of getting a high ranking, regardless of your diligence in creating good content. If your website is not mobile friendly, Google will not consider your website to be compliant with the latest standards.

Today, you need to dig deep into a website and identify the issues that will greatly affect your website ranking for keywords and phrases and how your website compares to your competition.

How deep should a website audit be? The answer is really deep from the first to the last page and checking each and every page for all the elements that are used to create the site. This means all the coding, not just looking at Meta, ALT, Header, and other tags.

Here’s what a deep audit examines:

Global performance information

World Position

Country rank

Category Rank

Classification audit

Keyword ranking status

UI and UX

Call to action

Compatible with mobile devices?

Readability

Content summary (on page)

Keyword focus

URL structure

Title tags

Meta description

OG tags (open graphic)

Header Tags (H1 – H6)

Content (word count, etc.)

Internal links and anchor tags (link structure)

Image names and ALT tags

Optimization analysis

Exclusions page (robots.txt)

Inclusions page (sitemap.xml)

Redirect URLs (301, 302, www / non-www)

Duplicate content

Broken links

Validation code

Page speed (CSS, JS, caching, image sizes)

SSL configuration (http vs https)

Linkage Analysis Summary (Off-Page)

Inbound links followed

Root domain linking

Authority and trust

Social media metrics

Competitive link comparison

Visibility and reach of social networks

Here are some details of what an audit is all about.

Global performance information

These are indicators to show the health, reach, and awareness of your websites compared to the rest of the websites globally, nationally, and within a given industry.

Classification audit

A ranking audit is an analysis of how your website ranks for keywords and phrases. This audit can be expanded by doing a competitive ranking audit that includes an audit of your competitors’ rankings. Another element of audit can analyze how many keywords and phrases on a given website rank in the top 5 search positions compared to the next 20 or 50 positions. This will help find greater optimization potential for rankings> 10.

UI and UX

UI = User interface and UX = User experience. This is not an analysis by numbers directly, but having a good user interface and good looks can lead to a good user experience. The good UI elements that drive a good user experience are clear. Calls to action, good text readability, and the website is mobile friendly, just to name a few examples. This is important as search engines can measure user signals. If a visitor after searching for a keyword or phrase is satisfied with a certain website due to good user interface and user experience, they will not return to the search engine. They will most likely take action on the website, such as buying a product. This generates revenue for the website owner more often than a website with a poor user interface and user experience. Websites with positive user signals will rank higher.

Content summary (on page)

Content analysis is a big and important part of a complete website analysis. This touches everything visible on your website.

Keyword Focus Audit looks at how well you’ve identified and targeted the keywords people are using to find your page.

However, the good content doesn’t stop here. It is also used to determine the quality of the content by measuring the appropriate word count of the text, applying the correct information to the META information (not visible) such as META descriptions, image ALT tags, internal links, etc. Finally, is this page ready to be properly linked to any social network like Facebook and Twitter?

Indexing overview

Technical analysis such as the indexing status of a website is important because if search engines cannot index the website correctly, they cannot understand the content and meaning of the website.

Indexing begins with choosing the correct pages to be indexed and the ones not to be indexed. The Google search robot takes very little time to index a website. Google Bot simply indexes a specific number of pages on a site. The analysis digs into your website to help determine which pages to index and which pages to exclude from the index.

Analysis of possible broken links is important to prevent people from accessing an error page. Getting to an error page by clicking on a broken link can cause user dissatisfaction and frustration. If the user returns to the search engine results page and performs another search, Google will judge this behavior as a bad user signal.

Linkage Analysis Summary (Off-Page)

The Internet is a “web”! It is a huge network of links that point from one web page to another. But linking is a double-edged sword. It is important that two linked resources have a contextual meaning to each other. In this case, it provides a higher value for the user and the search engine, as well as for the determination of the ranking.

An analysis will check all incoming links for their contextual value to the web page and their possible level of toxicity. This identifies the transfer of authority and trust to the given page. If the links are created to rank higher, they may be considered spam by search engines.

A complete and in-depth audit will provide all the information about your website in the form of a detailed report. This report will be your roadmap for the process of making the necessary corrections to your website for higher rankings.

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