What happens when a visitor to your website clicks on a link and it doesn’t go anywhere? What does that say about your company? What kind of an impression does it make for your brand?
When things don’t work the way they should, people get frustrated, and when they get frustrated with technology, they tend to either click to a different website or just shut the whole thing off (despite many repeated threats to throw various devices across rooms and/or out windows, very few people have actually done so).
Those people who gave up on your website in frustration are leads that could have become customers if only your website had worked the way it was supposed to, but how can you fix something you don’t know is broken?
Chances are those frustrated website visitors won’t make the effort to reach out to you and alert you to any problems they experienced with your website – they’ll just assume it’s evidence you don’t really care and they’ll click away, leaving you none the wiser.
This is why conducting audits of your website on a regular basis is so important. You need to know if you have links on your site that are no longer working; if your website is taking too long to load; if you have content that’s weak or too similar to other content you have on your website; and any other technical and/or SEO-related issues that haven’t been brought to your attention.
Ideally, conducting audits of your website is already something you do on a regular basis – at least once a year, if not twice a year, or even quarterly. But auditing a website takes time, and the more content you have, the longer it can take to audit. As a result, too many small business owners don’t bother to audit their website on a regular basis, if ever.
Well, now that most of us are stuck at home trying to avoid COVID-19, we have plenty of time to audit our websites. If you’ve never done a website audit, here’s everything you need to know:
Table of Contents
1) Find the Right Tool
Manually looking at all the content and meta tags and clicking on every single link on your website would take forever. Fortunately, there’s a better way.
There are several different tools available to help you audit your website. Screaming Frog is probably the most well-known SEO audit tool available, but SEMrush, Ahrefs, Sitebulb and Raven Tools all have their own tools you can choose from.
Some of these tools are available for free, while others require payment, and although the choice is always yours, we feel the need to point out that some things are worth paying for. While using a free tool to audit your website might be better than nothing, and will certainly alert you to some problems, the increased accuracy and reliability of the paid tools is not to be underestimated. So, unless you want to manually double check the work of your audit tool, it’s best to pay for it.
2) Getting Started
Any website audit tool you choose should start by prompting you to enter your website’s URL. The tool will then start crawling your website to look for potential vulnerabilities from an SEO standpoint, as well as the user experience perspective (which can also affect your SEO).
Depending on the size of your website, this can take hours to complete, so make sure you have something else you can do while your website audit tool is doing its thing.
3) Analyzing the Data
Different website audit tools will have different ways of breaking down the information for you. If you choose to use Screaming Frog for example, you’ll probably want to put together a spreadsheet that lists the different SEO issues for each page of your website and address each issue one by one.
Raven Tools, on the other hand, organizes each issue by urgency, with the most urgent problems listed at the top, followed by the moderately severe issues, and ending with the ones that need to be addressed at some point, but not necessarily right away.
4) How to Fix Your Website
Now that you know all the issues affecting your website’s ability to show up in searches, it’s time to start fixing what’s broken. Some issues you can fix on your own, while others will require some help. Let’s start with some of the more pressing issues and what you can do about them.
1) Page Errors
Page errors can create serious problems for your website if people are looking for something specific on your website, but when they try to click on a link, all they get is a “page error”. This error is the surest way to get people to leave your website when you want them to look for more information or reach out to you to buy your products/services. Whether people are trying to click on that link from another page on your website or from one of your social media profiles, an unavailable link can lead to countless opportunities to lose leads that could have become clients.
There are a variety of things that could be causing a page error. Some of them might be easy enough for you to fix on your own if it’s something simple: maybe you deleted the page and forgot to delete the links leading to it; or you updated the slug for the link and forgot to update the slug on links leading back to it from other pages. Depending on your knowledge of HTML, this might be something you can fix on your own. Otherwise, you’ll want to reach out to your web developer for help.
2) Broken Links
Broken links, or redirects, are links to other websites you’ve included in your content that may or may not still go where you want them to go. If those links lead to something that says “page error” instead of valuable content, you’ll want to do a quick Google search to see what other content you can link to in place of the broken link.
Despite the fact that you’re not the one responsible for breaking the link, it still reflects badly on your company and your brand because you’re the one leading website visitors to a web page that no longer exists. So if your SEO audit alerts you to any broken links, whether internal or external, be sure to replace them ASAP.
3) Website Load Speed
Having a website that loads quickly on both desktop and mobile devices is critical. Not only does Google prefer websites that load in less than three seconds, but real people are also more likely to click away if a website takes too long to load. We have become used to instant gratification, and when we don’t get what we want right away, we simply click away until we do find what we’re looking for.
There are a few possible causes for slow website speed. If you notice only certain pages on your website take a long time to load, and they happen to have a lot of images and/or long videos, reducing the number and/or size of those images or videos could clear up the problem.
If the servers used by your website’s host are located in another country from the people who tend to visit your website, that could also be causing your website to take longer to load, in which case you’ll want to ask your host if there’s something they can do on their end to address the issue. If not, it might be time to consider getting a new host for your website, but there are a lot of factors that go into that decision.
Finally, a problem with your web design could be weighing down your load speed. Flashy graphics and pretty slide shows might look nice, but if they take too long to load, no one will ever notice how nice they look because they’ll have already clicked back to Google or another website.
When it comes to load speed, be sure to check your website’s results on both desktop and mobile. While a significant portion of the population still uses their desktops and laptops to explore the internet, more and more people are relying on their mobile devices for their internet use, so making sure your website is mobile friendly is of the utmost importance when it comes to both SEO and the user experience of your website.
4) Page Title Length
Your title is everything. It determines whether people will click on the link to your web page or keep scrolling. In a world where the urge to keep scrolling can be all too strong, your headline has to be just right. If it’s too short, it could be too vague to pique the interest of your target audience and/or it could be missing keywords that would help it show up in searches.
On the other hand, if your title is too long, viewers are unlikely to be able to see the entire title before clicking on it, which reduces the likelihood that they’ll click on it.
5) Meta Description
The meta description is what shows up underneath the title of your web page in Google before anyone clicks on the link. It’s the most important part of your content after the title because it’s the second thing users will look at when deciding whether they should click through to your website. If your meta description isn’t compelling enough, they’ll keep scrolling until they find what they’re looking for.
Not only does your meta description need to contain the target keyword of that particular piece of content, but it also has to be the right length: too short and you risk being too vague; too long and viewers won’t be able to see the end of it. Both scenarios mean users are more likely to keep scrolling than to visit your website, and every time that happens, you’ve lost the opportunity to convert another lead into a customer.
Finally, you need to make sure the meta description of each web page and blog post is unique. Duplicate meta descriptions can lead to different websites and/or blog posts on your site competing for the same keywords and searches, and when that happens, it can end up reducing both their chances of showing up in relevant searches, so you’ll want to address any duplicate meta descriptions on your website right away.
6) Low Word Count
This isn’t the most important aspect of your SEO, especially if you have everything else you need to show up in searches: relevant keywords, consistent blogging schedule, proper use of images and meta tags, etc.
That said, word count does matter. It provides more content for Google to index your site, giving Google a better idea of what your website is all about and in which searches your website should appear. Longer content also gives you an opportunity to use more keywords throughout your website without stuffing your content full of keywords.
Although you should never prioritize writing long content over valuable content, there is something to be said for the fact that longer content (at least 1,500 words, if not 2,00 words per piece) has a higher chance of showing up on Google’s first page, regardless of keyword or industry.
5) Conclusion
Every website audit tool works a little bit differently and you might have to play around with a few to see which ones work best for you. Of course there’s more to showing up in online searches than the six elements we’ve listed here, but these are some of the most pressing issues, and also some of the easiest to fix (except maybe for the load speed).
If you have any other questions about SEO or content marketing, feel free to reach out. We’re here to help.
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If you’d rather have someone else handle an SEO audit of your website for you while you focus on serving your customers, we can help.
