Your website is the online hub of your business, but just how well is it performing? Getting a website audit is a great way to see exactly what’s working, what’s not, and how to improve your site’s performance and the ROI you receive from it.

To help give you a clear understanding of exactly how much a website audit can benefit your business, we’re sharing a case study from one of our own awesome clients. We started working with BluVida Precision Health And Wellness last year as they prepared to launch their new high-tech treatment centre. They had an existing website, but wanted copy creating for it as well as ongoing SEO work and advice. We ran an audit of their existing site at the start of our work together and highlighted a number of areas that needed improvement. We then built and launched a new site for them which addressed the existing issues with the original site, and gave us a platform we could consistently build on to improve their rankings on SERPS. The comparison between the audit run on the original website in October and following the November launch of their new site speaks for itself.

Here’s how to overhaul your website for maximum results with an audit (hint: stick around to the end, we’re offering FREE website audits for a limited time!!)…

An Overview Of Your Website’s Performance

Any website audit will provide you with a huge amount of data on your site which can be very confusing. To help give you a snapshot overview, your audit should give you a few quick pieces of information that give you a bird’s eye view of the most important things you need to be concerned about. Here’s the comparison of BluVida’s snapshots from October to December:

Crawled pages quite simply tells you how many pages there are on your site that bots were able to crawl. Important fixes are big problems that are seriously hindering your site’s SEO performance. Semi-important fixes are problems, but ones that aren’t causing huge issues.

An Audit Of Your Website’s SEO Health

Once you’ve got the basics out of the way you can expect an SEO audit to dig a little deeper into the health of your website and whether or not it (literally) ticks all the boxes search engines are looking at when determining your site’s ranking. It’s very easy for some (or even all) of these things to got missed when a site is being built, particularly if search optimisation isn’t the reason you’re building the site. A lot of clients come to us and say they don’t care about SEO, and there are a lot of agencies out there who will take that as permission to just not bother optimising a site at all while it’s being built.

Even if your website ticked all the boxes when it was first constructed, how long ago was that? The boxes in question change regularly as search algorithms are constantly evolving. Not only that, what was complete/working when the site was first built may not stay that way forever if it isn’t updated frequently.

Your audit will very clearly show you which boxes you’re ticking and which you’re not, allowing you to resolve everything and ensure you’re checking every single box.

And just to prove we really do mean that literally, here’s the comparison of BluVida’s audits before and after the new site build to show you:

Checking The Speed Of Your Website

The load time of your website is absolutely crucial – a slow site will put people off. If your page takes too long to load your hard-won traffic isn’t going to wait around. They will simply click back to their search results and find someone else to look at – someone whose page won’t keep them hanging around waiting.

The modern world of technology is a marvelous thing but it has given rise to a population with zero patience and a desperate need for instant gratification.

Which means your site needs to be as fast as it can possibly be.

Your audit will tell you exactly how well the site performs, and allow you to speed things up if needed so you can keep hold of all that precious traffic. Take a look at the before and after for BluVida’s website speed, and you’ll see the difference made when you implement changes based on good audit!

An Analysis Of The Metadata At Work On Your Site

Metadata is so crucial to the SEO on your website but it is also incredibly easy to overlook. If your site builders aren’t properly constructing your pages with SEO in mind there won’t be any metadata on them at all. If it hasn’t been manually set to properly optimised copy and options it will automatically be generated from a page’s content. While a lot of people assume this is fine as it’s not ‘missing’ it’s actually a huge problem. For starters, there’s nothing to say your keywords are appearing in the snippets automatically pulled. Beyond that, your titles may be too long or short, and there may be elements missing on the page entirely that are essential for search engines to determine exactly what your page is about and what you can rank for.

As you can see from BluVida’s audit, their original site was riddled with issues, from 22 pages having duplicate titles to 24 pages having missing or empty descriptions. The audit flagged all of these problems, and when the new site was built every page and post was properly optimised with bespoke metadata.

The Links At Work On Your Site

The links on your website are absolutely vital for two reasons: user experience, as they allow for easy navigation and longer visits, and the thorough mapping of your site by search engine bots. When you don’t have an effective link strategy in place it’s very difficult for the search engines to see the full extent of your site, and pages they can’t see can’t rank. It’s also tricky for your users to find what they need easily, and means there’s no incentive for them to stay on your page as you’re not showing them more information they will find of interest to keep them there.

An Audit Of Your Content’s SEO Performance

Last but by absolutely no means least is your website’s content.

When it comes to marketing (and SEO in particular) content really is king. Your content is what will get you ranking. Ensuring it’s properly optimised for search is essential. Yet it’s not only the copy itself, or even the metadata that needs optimising, it’s the format of your content that can make a huge difference to your ranking.

Check out the before and after shot below to see what we mean – the original audit flagged 9 pages with duplicate content. This is a HUGE no-no and will automatically tank your ability to rank. Pages with little or no copy on and incorrect headers that are either missing or too long are likewise problematic. 

Does A Website Audit Mean I Need To Build A New Site?

Although the example we’ve used here led to a new site being built, getting an SEO audit (or any kind of website audit, for example, an audit of your user experience, which is very different) doesn’t mean you should automatically be thinking of rebuilding. If there are serious structural issues in your site’s construction that are making it difficult for the site to rank, then yes, a rebuild (or at least a refresh) may be needed. This usually happens on websites that were built several years ago, prior to major changes in the search algorithms that have rendered the original construction obsolete and problematic. If you have a modern, well-constructed website, there shouldn’t be any need to rebuild it in order to improve its ranking.

In fact, an SEO audit is something we do on an ongoing basis for our retained clients. All clients on one of our comprehensive SEO packages receive a new audit of their site either monthly or quarterly, depending on the level of work they have done. This is vital because your site is a constantly evolving entity, more so if you’re regularly posting new content (and you should be!).

Running an audit shows you areas that need fixing and gives you a roadmap to follow to achieve better results. Yet the algorithms that determine where your site ranks are constantly evolving, and as a result, the content and structure of your site needs to constantly evolve to keep up.

A regular audit of your site is the perfect way of doing this, and while the first one is usually the biggest and most time consuming to fix, it’s well worth the investment as it makes it very easy to stay on top of your game (and the SERPs) in future.

Get Your FREE Website Audit Now…

We are so confident in the value of our audits that we’re offering you a FREE video SEO audit of your site. We’ll run look at everything currently going on, tell you what’s working, what’s not, and exactly how you can improve your website to rank more highly, drive more traffic and land more business. Signup below…

Author Profile

Hazel Butler

Our Head of Marketing, Hazel Butler, is an award-winning author, copywriter, and editor. Part ghostwriter, part blogger, part videographer, and part strategist, when she’s not endlessly penning content for our clients Hazel’s happily concocting the perfect marketing plans to propel their businesses forward.
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