Your website is a place to interact with your audience, it’s a virtual storefront, an expert resource, and a place where most people go to find out more about your organization. If it’s the first and maybe only interaction you have with potential customers or users, make it count.
Just having a website isn’t enough, it has to be a functional, well-designed, happy, healthy site all around. Our solution? Website audits!!! We loooove a good website audit here at AOR. It’s a chance for our specialists to get under the hood, analyze the site, and provide our expertise to make sure your site is working to its fullest.
For many of our new clients, this is the first thing we suggest. They say, “Our website isn’t working for us.’ We say, “Let us take a look and we’ll tell you why.”
So let’s dig into how we can tell why:
First, what is a website audit? Think of it like your yearly physical. You get all your vitals checked, your blood drawn, and your body poked and prodded. We are essentially doing the same thing to your website — checking its health and functionality. An audit is a truly thorough examination and , often times, the first step before a larger website improvement or redesign project. At this stage, we’ll determine if your website should be optimized to achieve your goals.
During a website audit, we will:
Within the umbrella of the overall ‘Website Audit,’ there are different categories and steps to ensure we are seeing the whole picture.
SEO Audit
If you’re interested in being seen, which we hope you are, SEO is your best friend. It’s essential for increasing your website visibility and ranking on Google and other search engines. We’ll look to see if you already have SEO elements on your site, and if you don’t we’ll suggest ways we can improve. We’ll look at all your meta details, keywords, URL structure, content quality, and off-page elements like backlinks and domain authority.
Content Audit
Users go to your website to find out the answers to their questions, and you need content for them to be successful in their search. We’ll take a look at all the content on your site to figure out if it answers the most pressing questions, is appropriate for your industry, is full of quality keywords and other SEO aspects, utilizes UX best practices, and of course is unique and consistent with your brand tone and voice.
Health Audit
This is where we’ll look into the technical aspects of your site such as page load speed, server response time, and mobile responsiveness. We’ll be able to pick up on issues such as broken links, website security issues or weaknesses, and other errors that may show on the site.
User Experience & Design Audit
This is where we will start to think about user experience. Is your website easy on the eyes? Is the layout purposeful and does it make sense? Can users easily navigate through your site? We’ll look at features that might prevent your customers or users from performing desired actions on the site.
Accessibility Audit
Accessibility is crucial. We talk a lot about accessibility in some of our previous insights, so if you want to learn more, dig into them. You want all your users and all types of people who may be interacting with your site to enjoy their experience and be able to take in all the information you are giving them. We’ll take a deep look at your site to make sure it is complying with necessary accessibility laws and standards.
Performance Audit
How many people are looking at your site? How long are they staying? Are they engaging with you further? This is the point in our audit when we’ll look at website traffic, bounce rates, conversion rates, user engagement, and any other metrics that may help us understand the effectiveness of your site as it stands and where there may be areas for improvement.
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The benefits are endless, after all, your website is the most vulnerable, outward-facing part of your brand. It’s where everyone goes to find out more about you and to judge your legitimacy — make sure it works hard for you!
Enhances User Experience (UX)
UX is one of the most important aspects of any website, hands down. By identifying and addressing any issues in your UX, we can ensure that users who visit your site have a smooth and engaging experience. Good UX has a direct impact on engagement, conversation rates, and other important metrics that determine the health and legitimacy of your website.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Website audits help improve your SEO performance. We’ll make sure your meta tags look great, keywords are being used, and backlinks are all working correctly. Anything to ensure your site is visible on search engines and generates plenty of organic traffic.
Increased Content Quality
Content is what people go to your website to see. A website audit will help ensure your content is of high quality, relevant, and effective. We can look into ways to update or expand on what you already have, improve your SEO rankings, as well as include new content that you may be missing.
Identifies and Resolves Issues Early
It’s better to stay on top of potential technical and performance issues before they become an even bigger issue. Website audits will help you avoid slow loading times, broken links, server errors, mobile response issues, etc. Many of these errors go unnoticed, and may be affecting your search performance, but catching and fixing these issues helps improve user experience and has a huge impact on your rankings on Google and other search engines.
You’ll Stay Competitive
You are in a competitive space. With millions of websites out there, how will you stand out? By having a working, healthy, informative site. Regular website audits will help you stay ahead of your competitors, identify trends and best practices, and adapt and innovate to maintain your position ahead of the competition.
Compliance
By performing a website audit you’ll maintain the proper compliance with any legal requirements or accessibility requirements, avoiding fines or penalties, and avoiding isolating anyone in your audience.
Maximizes Your Return on Investment (ROI)
Regular audits will help make sure you are making the most of your investment. You’ll increase traffic, engagement, and conversions, which will result in sales and leads.
We analyze your website in the context of all the types of audits we listed above. We comb through every corner of your site, even the forgotten closets piled with giveaway bags, we’ll weed through it all and make the most robust assessment of your site that we can.
We run your site through various tools and software we have at our disposal, run reports, find technical errors, and analyze accessibility. We’ll identify SEO problems, look at design and UX, assess your website content, and put it all together in one buttoned-up report.
We’ll present our findings and deliver a comprehensive report with all of our findings as well as near-term and long-term recommendations.
Your website is the first point of contact your audiences will have with you. It is essential to continue making sure you are achieving your online goals and making a lasting impact on your audiences. Audits help identify those issues that may be glaringly obvious or hidden in the depths of your site. It’s up to us to help you navigate through it all.
Give us a call, we’d love to dig through your site and help you improve it so it’s ready to start working for you.