How often do you or have your website audited? We offer website audit services. There are many ways and different reasons for auditing a website. The purpose of website audit we perform is to uncover and rectify those areas of your website that hinder it from being the best marketing tool for your business in your arsenal.

We address this question;

What is website audit and why it is important?…

There are many different answers to the above question and depending on a website audit company the answer will depend on the objective and tools used to perform the audit.

We offer the following website audit services to local businesses and online marketers;

Our in-depth Website Audit Service will help you know and understand…

What Is Website Audit And Why It Is Important

A website audit is more like a medical checkup – where a person walks into a doctor’s office for a medical checkup. In the same way that a medical checkup will check, diagnose and recommend certain things about the health of the person, a website audit will also check, locate and the website auditor will recommend remedial actions.

The type of a website audit will vary the same way medical checkups vary. A normal checkup of blood pressure and temperature will not be enough on a patient suffering from kidneys. Or an athlete’s medical checkup will not be the same as that one of a 50 year old male who is concerned that he might have prostrate cancer. These two are medical checkups but influenced differently.

One is to see if they are fit for running and whether or not there is doping involved while for the elderly man is to check if there is any onset of cancer. A website audit is the same.In other words the objective of the audit will influence the severity or the extent to which the audit is carried out as well as the factors being looked at.

The importance of a website audit should not be undermined because a website that is well optimized for both audience and search engines is the ideal desired situation. A website that is healthy as far as the search engines are concerned coupled with good user experience would definitely require a far fewer tweaks and improvements than a site that has a lot of issues SEO-wise.

Some digital companies will tell you to buy links and a website will rank. That is like recommending a painkiller to someone complaining of a headache. True, the headache might dissipate after using the painkiller but what was the cause of the headache, did the pill address the cause? That is what backlinks can do, they might be a temporary solution and at times not necessary, if ever.

At VirincSolutions we do not buy nor encourage purchase of backlinks like using PBNs and the like. If there are any backlinks that come your way let them come organically. With proper SEO that includes good content and internal backlinking it is normally enough to enjoy good rankings and increasing website traffic.

So an SEO Audit is important because it will identify those areas that need attention and corrective actions. At the same time it can also uncover opportunities not optimally used. e.g. you may discover that a page with very good content is not indexed or does not have meta description yet when you check on Google Console report it is ranking on Page 2 for a particular keyword.

In such a case it is likely that simply adding a meta description with the keyword to the page would move the page to Page 1 of the SERPs. A content audit may uncover thin content that can be beefed up just a little to bump it up the rankings. There are endless ways a website audit can be used to have a well performing website.

SEO Audit Factors

Depending on the type and reason for a site audit there are some factors that are common, but not always present, when a conducting website audit. These factors can also be considered as problems that need fixing after such an exercise.

To uncover and address each of the above we carry out the following audit steps;

Website Design Audit

A website design can affect the website’s performance in many ways including user-friendliness to human audience and search engine bots. By design in this context is not really about aesthetics of a website but about how easy it is for an end-user to navigate the website. It is about how your audience interacts with the website and how you communicate with them.

When referring to search engine bots we are referring to the crawl-ability of your website. Is it easy for a search engine spider to read or identify your content, be it text, video, image, etc. Can the spider move from one page to the other, what is the crawl budget of the website, etc.

Further, can the spiders tell the nature of your content e.g. is this a food recipe?, is this an article?, is this page about an apartment?, service?, product?, etc. In other words do the individual pages and the website as a whole use Schema structured data to communicate in the right way with the search engines

Technical SEO Audit

The main purpose of our website audit is to identify those errors that affect your business website from ranking higher or being noticed by Google among other search engines. Some of these errors are technical in nature and can only be picked by website auditing tools. Also some technical errors may make the website or certain sections of the website dysfunctional or broken.

The following issues are technical and when not fixed will affect the performance of the website both for ranking purposes and good end-user experience;

By this audit we determine if the site is mobile friendly, does it have any crawl errors where some pages are not crawl-able though should be, site and page load speed, are there any broken links and image links. Does the site have an XML sitemap for images, videos as well as for pages.

Internal Website Audit

An internal website audit is more about SEO best practices. When SEO guidelines are followed as to what to add and do, this makes a website search engine friendly and will communicate well. When these are not done, the website will not be broken or dysfunctional but rather it will lacking in essentials needed from a properly SEO’d site.

This audit looks at individual pages in depth to see if there are any issues like duplicate, short, long, or missing keywords, tags, title tags, meta descriptions, etc. Do the images have alt-text and SEO friendly names? Do the individual pages have H tags?

Website Performance Audit

A website performance audit touches on both the technical and internal audits. When technical errors are fixed and other SEO best practices are implemented, you would have a well oiled machine that needs just a little touch here and there. This is not to say the desired ranking of the website is guaranteed, NO! It just means you can play in the league games, you do not belong to the second division anymore, you can have a better shot at the trophy.

If you are in second division you have no way let alone chance to compete for the league cup. However, if you have done the SEO and other necessary things on the website you can take on your highest competitor especially in a local business. Who knows you might become the one being chased, businesses fighting for or eyeing the succulent spots you occupy.

Keywords and desirable positions will still be as competitive the only difference is before your website didn’t stand the slightest chance because ill-SEO. But after uncovering all the ills through a website audit, chances of beating your competition would have improved.

Website Structure Audit

A website structure is one of the factors that need to be paid attention to. A website should adopt a structure that will improve search engine rankings. By structure we mean how a website is setup in relation to individual pages, how they relate to each other, their hierarchy, how they link to each other, etc.

A website with a cobweb-like structure is not user-friendly. It makes it difficult for search engines bots to crawl it. A website must maintain a well defined structure that is easy to navigate and makes it easy to create a navigation menu for the end user.

What to bear in mind is that a website, a wordpress site, is structured by pages and subpages, categories and subcategories, tags and archive or other taxonomy pages. E.g. you may have a real estate website where you create a new type post for properties such that you will have 3 types of webpages – pages, posts and properties. At the same time how the permalink structure is customized also impacts on the site structure.

With a very good website auditor, the structure of a website can be determined easily and fixed if need be.

Keyword Audit

A keyword audit is simply to see if the webpages are targeting and optimized any keywords. This is important because website content objective as a marketing tool should provide information that is relevant to what people are searching for. The only way to be relevant is to know how people search for what you provide.

If you are a local company installing air conditioners it may not help your business much if you write college type articles that would appeal only to a final year student. While someone else on the other hand wants to know which air conditioner to buy between LG and Panasonic. Rather have articles on your website that will appeal to the latter because that is likely a customer. The former would likely be doing a research for their final year paper.

So it is important to know what search terms your potential customers use to find services and products in your line of business. A Keyword audit would show if your content contains such search terms.

Website Content Audit

A website content audit is along the same lines as a keyword audit. While the latter looks at individual search terms, the former looks at the content as a whole. Is the content on the website shallow or thin. Is it informative or does it serve its purpose well. Not all content is the same. Some content is on a site as an anchor to another page, while some content is there to really draw potential customers closer.

Auditing content is a bit intense but when done write, it can skyrocket traffic to the website. Thin content pages and un-indexed pages can be weaned off while some could be beefed up a little bit.

SEO Audit

An SEO audit digs deeper than keyword and content audits. With SEO audit more is looked at such as internal linking, canonical urls, etc. This is combining all aspects discussed above and making them work in sync.

SEO audit entails all elements of Technical SEO Audit, Keyword and Content Audit, Web Structure audit and more.

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