For 91% of marketers, their most important goal is lead generation. One surefire way of ensuring leads is through a content strategy for your channels. At times you may have a plan in place but are unsure about its efficacy. A website audit helps take away those doubts.
Let’s find out how a website audit works.
What Is a Website Audit?
A website audit is a comprehensive review and analysis of a website to identify any issues or opportunities for improvement. It involves evaluating various aspects of the website, including its
- design,
- user experience,
- content,
- technical performance, and
- search engine optimization.
A website audit aims to help the website perform better and achieve its goals. Businesses can identify any issues or challenges hindering the success of their website and take steps to address them.
Benefits of Website Audit
Improved website performance
A website audit can identify technical issues impacting the speed and performance of the website and provide appropriate recommendations, resulting in a better user experience and higher search engine rankings.
Enhanced website usability
An audit detects usability issues preventing users from effectively navigating the website and finding the right information. By addressing these issues, businesses can improve the overall usability of their website.
Increased search engine visibility
It determines issues negatively impacting the website’s search engine rankings, such as broken links, duplicate content, or poor keyword usage. By addressing these issues, you can improve their search engine visibility and attract more qualified traffic to their website.
Improved lead generation
It helps businesses identify opportunities to optimize their website for lead generation, such as by adding calls-to-action or creating landing pages designed to convert visitors into leads.
Enhanced website security
It can discover potential security vulnerabilities and recommend steps for improving your website’s security. Better website security helps protect businesses and their users from cyber threats and data breaches.
When your website audit is aimed at analyzing your strategy for lead generation, you need to follow these steps.
Performing Website Audit for Lead Generation
Step One: Define Website Audit Goals
Before you begin the audit, be clear about what you hope to achieve. For example, are you looking to improve the overall performance of your website? Are you trying to generate more leads or increase conversions? Clearly defining your goals will help guide your audit and ensure you focus on the most critical areas.
Your goal for this audit is lead generation through content strategy. So, you will focus on content and its following aspects when you begin:
Perform a complete inventory of your content
It is important to understand the content available across all company channels, not just the website. This includes training materials, customer service scripts, social media posts, and in-store materials. It is crucial to have an omnichannel perspective and ensure your messages are clear and accurate across all channels.
By conducting an inventory and audit of this information, you can ensure that customers receive consistent messaging and information regardless of their channel.
Catalog your content
Depending on your content management system, you may list each item or its summary. If, for example, your content is well organized and consistently tagged with crucial metadata, a summary is the way to go.
Define your inventory/audit facets
You need to identify the different types of data you will be collecting in your inventory and create columns for them in your spreadsheet or other tools. It could be anything from URL, headline, media files, index number, etc.
Once you have a fair idea of the content in different touchpoints, you have another step to perform before deep diving into content: a technical audit.
Step Two: Conduct a Technical Audit
After you have gathered and organized the content for your website audit, assess the technical performance of your website. Sometimes, these technical issues impact your website content, which in turn, affects user experience and lead generation potential of your website.
Some common technical issues that surface during a website audit include:
Broken links
These links lead to pages that are no longer active or have been removed from the website. These can create a negative user experience and make it harder for search engines to crawl and index the website.
Slow loading time
A slow-loading website can frustrate users and lead to higher bounce rates. This can also negatively impact search engine rankings.
Mobile responsiveness
With more and more users accessing the internet on their mobile devices, optimize your websites for mobile. A website audit can identify any issues with the mobile version of the website.
Missing or duplicate content
Having multiple versions of the same content or missing content can confuse users and search engines. A website audit can identify any issues with duplicate or missing content.
Security vulnerabilities
A website audit can identify any vulnerabilities in the website’s security, such as outdated software or weak passwords, which can put the website at risk of being hacked.
Accessibility issues
A website audit can identify problems that may make it difficult for users with disabilities to access and use the website, such as small text or lack of alternative text for images.
Once you have recognized the technical issues affecting your content, it is time to analyze the content of your website.
Step Three: Analyze Your Content
When you examine the content during a website audit, you review it to see if your existing content is working or not, as well as identify any gaps in your content strategy. Look for areas where you can improve the quality of your content and areas where you can create new, relevant content.
There are several areas of improvement that a website audit can identify for content on a website. Here are a few examples:
Keyword optimization
Check whether the website’s content uses relevant keywords in the right places (e.g., title tags, headings, etc.) to improve its visibility in search engine results.
Readability
Examine if the website’s content is easy to read and understand, and suggest ways to improve it (e.g., using shorter sentences, bullet points, etc.).
Tone and style
As a business, be consistent in how you present your content across all your channels, especially when it comes to tone and style. If you discover that gap during the audit, find ways to improve and address it (e.g., by using more active voice, imagery, etc.).
Relevance
Check if the website’s content is relevant to its target audience, and suggest ways to make it more engaging (e.g., by using more interactive elements, such as quizzes or polls).
Structure
A website audit can identify whether the website’s content is structured in a logical and easy-to-follow way and suggest ways to improve it (e.g., by using headings, subheadings, and bullet points).
Overall, a website audit can help identify areas of improvement for your content and create a strategy to find ways to increase leads.
Step Four: Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
One of the key goals of a website audit is to improve your search engine rankings. Do this by optimizing your website for relevant keywords and improving the website’s overall structure and organization.
Several tools are available for keyword optimization in addition to Google Search Console.
Some popular options include:
Ahrefs: This comprehensive SEO tool offers keyword research, backlink analysis, and content optimization features.
SEMrush: This is another all-in-one SEO tool that offers keyword research, site audit, and content optimization features.
KWFinder: This dedicated keyword research tool allows users to find and analyze long-tail keywords.
MOZ: This comprehensive SEO tool offers keyword research, site audit, and content optimization features.
Keywordtool.io: This is a free keyword research tool that generates a list of long-tail keywords based on a seed keyword.
Ubersuggest: This is a free keyword research tool that generates a list of long-tail keywords based on a seed keyword and provides an overview of the keyword’s search volume, difficulty, and cost-per-click (CPC).
Step Five: Evaluate Your Website’s Performance
After you’ve completed your website audit, it’s essential to track and measure your progress. This can help you identify what’s working and what’s not and make any necessary adjustments to your strategy.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking the performance of your website and its content. One way to do this is to monitor specific metrics related to your goals and objectives, like organic traffic, bounce rate, shares, and ROI.
You can also track the number of form submissions, phone calls, and email inquiries you receive. You can also monitor the conversion rate of your website, which is the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action (such as filling out a form or making a purchase). Tracking these metrics over time lets you see if your website audit results in improved performance and increased lead generation.
Apart from Google Analytics, several other tools can help you monitor the performance of your website audit, including SEMrush, Ahrefs, HubSpot, Moz, and Crazy Egg.
Conclusion
A website audit is an essential step in the process of generating leads for your business. By thoroughly analyzing your website’s technical issues, content gaps, and performance, you can identify areas for improvement and create a targeted content strategy that attracts and converts potential customers.
Utilizing tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics can help you track the effectiveness of your website audit and make informed decisions about your lead generation efforts. A thorough website audit can set the foundation for a successful and sustainable lead generation strategy.
So what are you waiting for? Growth Natives can help in your next website audit. Get in touch with us at info@growthnatives.com and see how easy it is to get started.