What Is a Website Audit, and Do You Need One?

Your website needs to keep up with changes that impact how users respond when interacting with your pages. A website audit helps you achieve that. What is a website audit, you ask? We cover all the important details you need to know here.

What Is a Website Audit?

A website audit is essentially an SEO health check. It’s an evaluation of existing content across your brand’s site to determine where you can improve performance and where it’s already optimized. This assessment typically covers your home page, blog, and products or services pages.

At BKA, we know SEO! Our business depends on it, and so does yours. We can take care of your website audit to help you understand what works, what needs tweaking, and what requires an overhaul (don’t worry, our SEO service plans can help with that part, too).

Elements of a Site Audit

To answer the question, what is a website audit, you must be familiar with the multiple elements critical to your site’s optimization:

• Keyword research: Before conducting an SEO website audit, you need to know how consumers seek information and what they want it for. Keyword research involves understanding the words people use to search and why. Keep in mind that Google’s ever-changing algorithms increasingly emphasize helpful content and prioritize content that matches search intent rather than that which simply contains the right keywords.
• Content assessment: Once you have a handle on ranking keywords, you can assess your existing pages to determine whether they contain relevant search terms and meet the criteria for helpful content. In this audit, you should review existing blog posts, as optimized posts can boost traffic to your page and position you as a thought leader in your industry. You’ll want to sort posts and pages by those that are up to date with SEO, that are relevant but need refreshing, or that you should toss in the trash or completely rework.
• Technical SEO evaluation: A website audit should give insight into the technical elements of your website. For example, Google factors page load times in its algorithms. The bounce rate increases the longer your page takes to load, with a 32% increase between a one-second load time and a three-second one. Other technicalities adversely impacting SEO performance include broken links, lack of internal and external links, and inadequate anchor text usage.
• Backlinking opportunities: Backlinks are links to your website from other websites. When other sites provide a link to a page on your website, Google sees it as a vote of confidence, with other websites validating your site’s value and relevance. When BKA conducts a website audit for our customers, we look for ways to boost your backlinks.
• Competitor website evaluation: Researching top-ranking sites provides insight into how you can improve your SEO performance. Evaluate their keyword strategies and how they address consumer pain points, answer customers’ most pressing questions, and speak to searchers’ interests and understandings. Once you understand the competition, you can craft content that does what they do, only better.

Why Do You Need a Website Audit?

Now that you know the answer to “What is a website audit?”, it’s clearer why you need one. Organic search dominates as the primary traffic source, garnering an average of 53.3% of all website traffic across industries. However, though 28.5% of searchers click on the first link in Google’s organic search engine results pages, only 2.5% click on the 10th result. SEO is critical to boosting organic traffic, and an audit helps you understand how you’re doing.

If you’ve never evaluated your site, we recommend an audit as soon as possible. However, even if you have conducted one in the past, regular audits help you stay on top of your SEO game. Plus, the more you do them, the faster they’ll go and the better your page will perform.

Benefits of an Audit for SMBs

What good is a website audit for small businesses? In fact, an audit is probably more crucial for small to medium-sized businesses, offering numerous benefits:

• Driving more traffic without spending more money on paid advertising
• Staying abreast of the ever-evolving SEO landscape
• Helping you establish yourself as an industry thought leader
• Giving you an advantage over your competition in the SERP
• Boosting conversion rates
• Identifying website issues before they bog you down too far

A site assessment is also an excellent way to find new content opportunities. For instance, evaluating your blogs can reveal new topics to cover or older topics that you can expand upon. It can also highlight saturated subjects and redundant or duplicate topics.

Can You Perform Your Own Audit?

If you know what a website audit is, can you perform one in house? As we tell our clients, you certainly can — but it’s often more efficient to have someone else do it.

Performing a complete audit isn’t easy; doing it yourself requires an investment of resources. You’ll need to dedicate staff, time, and money to gaining the necessary knowledge to conduct an audit and perform the assessment. Turning the job over to professionals with the required skills and knowledge is often more efficient and effective, and can even save you money as well as time in the long run.

BKA’s team is a little obsessed with SEO because we find the process and its evolution fascinating. We also like tackling challenges, and keeping up with Google’s changing algorithms to ensure our customers continue to have the same positive content experience they expect is undoubtedly one of those challenges. We have over a decade of experience with SEO and website audits and offer them as one of our many services to assist businesses with their content needs.

Let BKA Help Answer the Question “What Is a Website Audit?”

While understanding the basics of what a website audit is isn’t difficult, actually completing an audit entails a strong grasp of nuances based on a business’s unique offerings, goals, and site structure. At BKA, we offer personalized services, performing site audits tailored to fit your needs. Get in touch to learn how we can help you with a website audit.