If you have recently been working on implementing search engine optimization into your website or designing your website from the ground up, you’ll likely want to know how well your website is doing. The only way to be certain about the effectiveness of your SEO or design efforts is by auditing your website, which is a comprehensive process that looks at every factor of your website and its design.
There are many benefits that come with auditing your website. For one, an audit will provide you with the opportunity to look at the strength of the infrastructure and technical framework of your website. It will also help you determine how well your site is performing with search engines while also identifying how easy navigation is for users. With a site audit, you can ascertain whether or not users are able to properly navigate from one page to another while also finding the content that they entered your site to find.
Assessing the technical and content components of your website should provide you with the ability to increase site traffic and bolster the customer conversions that your website is able to produce. Keep in mind that there’s always room for improvement with your website, which is why there’s no downside to obtaining an audit. Being aware of the areas where you can improve is much better than not having a clue about the types of changes you should be making to your website.
When you attempt to improve the design and performance of your website, there are several things that you should focus on. For one, it’s important that your website is always easy to use. While many internet users enjoy websites that are interactive and have appealing imagery, the layout of your site should never be confusing. Your entire website should also be completely optimized for search engines, which is essential if you want to bring in new site visitors.
Successful websites should load quickly as well. In fact, around 40 percent of all internet users will choose to abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. The first impression that you make with site visitors is important, which means slow loading can be damaging. To increase chances for success with your website, make sure that you remain up-to-date with the latest design trends that are aesthetically pleasing to users while also better representing your brand.
This article will go into detail about website audits and how they can benefit your website and overall brand.
How is Your Website’s Usability?
When you’re trying to improve the amount of site traffic you receive as well as customer conversions, it’s important to focus on the usability of the website, which is typically referred to as UX.
The user experience is important because the modern customer expects the best when browsing any website. When most visitors enter a website, they expect to be able to get from one page to another with practically no load times and in a sensible manner. For instance, if the user doesn’t understand how to get from your home page to a product page, they will likely become frustrated and end up leaving your site for a competitor’s site. As such, the conversion paths on your website should always be clear and easy to understand.
The modern customer also wants simplicity, which means that the pages on your website shouldn’t be weighed down by meaningless content that the user is never going to read. Cluttered web pages are never going to be appealing and will likely do harm to your overall brand. The right user experience can drive customer engagement and conversions by providing users with what they want. When a site visitor finds your website through a search engine or by clicking a link on another website, a good user experience may push the visitor to engage more with the website and eventually become a customer. Make sure that the purpose of your website is relevant to the needs of your core audience, which can be displayed through the services that you provide as well as your mission statement.
When attempting to improve the user experience of your website, you should also create landing pages that reduce the steps it takes for your users to take advantage of the services or products that you provide. These landing pages should allow customers to reach a product or service page in just one click.
Another key element of a good user experience is to use effective CTAs throughout your web pages. A call-to-action should be prominent and should lead users to taking an action on your website. Above all, make things easy. Site users don’t want to be met with frustration. They want to browse a website without any slowdown or difficult navigation, which is why your primary focus when designing a website should be to provide your users with a fantastic experience.
Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
A critical aspect of the success of any website is search engine optimization, which involves making sure that your website ranks well on search engines like Google. There are several different components of search engine optimization, which include:
- Improving the performance of your website
- Adding keywords to your site content
- Making sure that your website is responsive
- Outfitting your site pages and blog articles with metadata
To reduce the amount of money you spend on marketing campaigns, it’s highly recommended that you focus on organic search, which refers to search results that aren’t paid for. If you can get your website to rank highly in search results for relevant keywords, you can increase site traffic without spending a significant sum of money on ads. Once you’ve implemented search engine optimization into your website, it’s important to audit your efforts, which will allow you to identify the amount of traffic that reaches your website, the keywords that are bringing in the most traffic, and the rankings for each keyword you use.
When search engine optimization is done properly, it can drive conversions and customer engagement by sending more users to your website. If these users are then provided with a good experience, you should begin to see higher conversion rates. More traffic to your site invariably leads to a higher number of conversions. Keep in mind that you should focus on white-hat techniques when optimizing your website. The goal of these techniques is to focus on the human audience when performing optimization. Some of the top white-hat SEO techniques include link building, adding keywords, and backlinking, the latter of which involves a user being sent to your website from another website by clicking a link.
It’s important to understand that low-quality links can cause harm to your rankings on search engines, which is why it’s important that you know where the backlinks to your website are coming from. An audit for backlinks will allow you to better understand what types of changes need to be made with your linking strategy. Review all links that are being sent to your website to identify which ones aren’t relevant and are being sent from sites that are possibly toxic. Keep in mind that toxic sites are non-reputable or low-ranking websites that will only drag your website down.
You should also spend some time checking out the competition. The report that you receive from your audit should be directly compared to your competition. The best and most extensive audits will include full audits of competitors as well that allow you to easily compare your website to similar ones.
The top SEO audit tools include:
While each of these tools will provide you with assistance, they might not identify every aspect of your website that should be optimized, which is why you should consider hiring a company that focuses on web growth and development.
Your Website Design
The design that you create for your website is just as important as the user experience that you provide to site visitors. While visitors mainly want fast loading and easy navigation when entering a website, they also want to use sites that are aesthetically appealing. The fundamentals of web design are easy to understand if you’re getting ready to start designing your website. The layout of your site pages as well as the content you place on these pages are important aspects of keeping visitors satisfied, which may help push these visitors to convert into return customers.
It’s important to understand that design trends regularly go in and out of style, which makes it likely that the visual elements on your website will start looking stale after some time. By obtaining a design audit, you should be able to determine which visual aspects of your website should be upgraded. While it’s always important to stick to the trends when designing a website, it’s also highly recommended that your design elements are wholly consistent with the brand that you’ve been building. Make sure that your brand logo is consistent across every page of your website. If it isn’t, make changes where necessary.
There are also several outdated trends that you should stay away from when designing your website. For instance, stock photos should be used only occasionally and should always be high quality. In fact, site visitors shouldn’t automatically know what you’re using a stock photo when viewing your site content. It’s also important that you don’t add too many widgets to your web pages, which is easy to do with WordPress. This issue can cause your website to be cluttered and may turn visitors away.
When using background images on your site, these images should have a similar style, which will help with the transition from one page to another. If you find some images on your website that don’t fit within your brand image, make sure that you change them. The icons on your site should also have a similar style, which means that any differing icons should be replaced with ones that fit. With these tips in mind, you should be able to design a website that your customers enjoy visiting.
Focus On Users First
Whether you are creating content for your website or are looking to make site navigation easier for current and prospective visitors, it’s important that you put users first and focus on SEO second. Many websites make the mistake of focusing almost entirely on SEO, which can lead to the website seeming artificial to anyone who visits. While you can try to use every trick in the book to rank highly with SEO, you won’t be able to rank highly if your website isn’t relevant to a large audience in the first place. Once you identify who your main audience is and what kind of content they want, you should be able to create a website that obtains long-term success.
The work that you do when designing and building your website is important if you want your website to strengthen your company and overall brand. Even if you think that you are implementing SEO correctly or are placing the right content on your website, you can’t be certain unless you perform a site audit that tells you everything you need to know about your website and its current performance. Once you complete this site audit, you should consider hiring a web growth and development company to make sure that any changes are 100 percent mistake-free.
