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What to Look for When Auditing your Website

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Website Auditing

Properly optimizing your website for SEO, traffic, visitors and conversions is an ongoing task. It is important to go back and “re-access” your site from time-to-time to uncover new opportunities and fine tuning. Gone are the days of static brochure like websites that never change. Today’s websites are living and ever-evolving. With all this being said, what do you look for when you audit your website?

Below are 6 things you should look at when reviewing your website.

1- Calls-to-Action

One of the best places to start is to review your current calls-to-actions, or in some cases, lack thereof. Why is this one of the best places to start? Well, I’m sure your website is there to make you money right, proper CTA’s are one of the best ways to increase your conversion rate and your overall bottom line. That is of course assuming you get enough traffic.

A couple things to look for are the various ways visitors can contact you. Some best practices are to prominently feature your telephone number and either a form or a graphic that links to a form. Both should be featured on every page of your website. You never know when your visitor will feel compelled to reach out to you. Don’t make them hunt your contact information down because many people will bail instead.

This may sound obvious, but you would be surprised at how many sites I visit where I can’t find the telephone number.

A/B testing works well too. Your CTA could be on the right side of the page and working fine, but how do you know that is the BEST place if you don’t try other positions and test? You might be pleasantly surprised to see the statistics behind trying out different positions. It actually does make a difference in many cases.

2- Copy Enhancements

Web content is often added when the website is designed. Many times it is added with “I’ll go back in later and polish this up.” You may only have a couple paragraphs of content on each page when you know that an extra 400 words would really help out your SEO. We all know search engines love content, so why not go ahead and add some. Be sure to keep your pages keywords in mind when writing as well. By no means am I saying to keyword stuff, but do try to squeeze in your main keyword a few times as long as it reads ok.

Well written sales copy can do wonders for your conversion too. Try not to rush through your content. Either put some solid effort into it or hire a professional to help.

3- Design Improvements

If your website is still sporting the design from 3 years ago, it might be a good time for a makeover. SEO is great and all, but if your site is ugly, don’t expect too much from it.

4- Duplicate Content?

This is a huge issue that many ignore. I have seen many websites become penalized from Google for duplicate content. This could be repeating the same content on several pages on your website as well as having your exact content on other sites. Scan your site to ensure you have original content on each page. Also, do some research to see if your content is out on the web somewhere. There are many tools out there to help you find potential duplicate content. It is a solid preventative maintenance practice to check this every so often.

5- URL Structure

Check how your url’s read. Do your subpage links read like a foreign language? If they do, it’s time for a change. You may have heard the phrase “SEO friendly urls.” Well, they are important and definitely help your cause if you can get some of your keywords in the url structure. Clean urls also help if you have to send a link out.

6- 301 Redirecting

Do you have a http:// and a http://www. version of your site?

If so, you need to 301 redirect one to the other and sync those puppies up. Having two versions is bad for all kind of reasons that I would be better off explaining in another post. Takeaway from this = do the 301!

There are far more than 6 things to look at when auditing your website, but these are some of the things that can have the biggest impact. Get these basics straightened out and you will be well on your way to internet greatness! What are some other ideas you have for folks auditing their website?

About

Zack Hanebrink is an online marketing professional who works for RhinoSEO, a leading online marketing services company in beautiful Charleston, SC. Try our online marketing tools for free!

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{ 28 Responses }

  1. James says:
    Further to the duplicate content issue Google states that duplicate content won't directly harm your ranking. The pages with the duplicate content will just not rank on the duplicate content, it will be almost ignored but will not harm the total pagerank of your site.
  2. BigJohn says:
    Good points, Zackrh, I would add to this check your site in multiple browsers to make sure it is not broken and displays the way you want it, and check all the widgets are working, as something very common I see is different widgets loading different versions of javascript libraries such as jquery or mootools, when only one version need be downloaded. By going through and checking what javascripts are being downloaded using something like firebug, you can very often eliminate scripts that do not need to be loaded, dramatically decreasing your load time.
  3. satrap says:
    Hesham, I agree with all the points you have made. However, I don't think having duplicate content on other sites is an issue at all. According to Google (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html), duplicate content will only hurt you if you have on two different pages of your site. But having the same article on other sites, doesn't harm you at all. Look at all the high ranking and successful article directories, most of them have the same articles published on their sites.
    • satrap says:
      Sorry Zack, I meant to say Zack, but out of habit I wrote Hesham.
  4. Joe MmacMillan says:
    You hit the nail on the head. Don't cut your content short. I once thought that 400 words was enough until I ran across one of the most successful sites on the net. The writer often had 1,200 to 1,600 words on a subject. He explained that he didn't care as he wanted to make sure we readers understood what he was saying. I changed my habit and my visitors increased significantly.
  5. TJ McDowell says:
    One thing that I'd look for is consistency. If your website looks different on different pages, you lose the continuity that your whole website should have.
  6. Jasmine says:
    Talking about clean and seo friendly urls. Most of my sites are running on WordPress so they are basically taken care off.
  7. Usama says:
    #1 CTA Nothing comes close to best communication then calling. Though social media is also a preferable option. Thanks for sharing.
  8. Peter says:
    Great advice. I think that the number one thing that bloggers you look after is content. If the content is really good than the rest will follow. Usually we are so bogged down with a difference technical stuff that we forget about the main purpose of blogging - deliver value to other people.
  9. Henway says:
    Call to actions are very important. I once added call to actions to all my pages, and my CTR increased 150% and conversions increased by 10%. Sometimes people just need to be told what to do.
  10. Tinh says:
    #1 is new to me and I need to focus on this, the other factors have been considered already . Thanks
  11. Isabel Rodrigues - Pro Blogger Journey says:
    Hi Zackrh, I was planning this week how can I improve on my blog. Design improvements was definitely in my mind. I also wanted to make sure I have proper interlinks to my older posts. I also quiet like your Point 6 Thanks for sharing
  12. Michele says:
    Hi Zackrh, All great points listed. SEO is still a key factor when structuring your site. I've managed to get on page 1 of Google for a fairly competitive keyword and it was all SEO driven since at the time I have very few quality backlinks. Also, redirects are so important too! Nothing worse than getting 'duplicate content' notices in your Google webmasters account b/c you didn't know to redirect your non-www urls to your www urls (or vice versa). Big lesson to learn. =) Thanks for sharing this great article!
    • Dan says:
      And a lesson better learned from others' mistakes than your own :)
  13. Murlu says:
    This is crazy parallel with what I have planned for this week Zackrh. Literally sitting in front of me is a list of things I want to do and right at the top is basically "optimize older blog posts" - I want to go back and work on interlinking and fixing up older ideas to reflect how they've evolved over time so when people do land on those older pages there wouldn't be a huge disconnect between content then and now.
  14. Ryan Biddulph says:
    Hi Zack, Super tips here. Revising your call to action is a biggie. You'll know when to revise your CTA: no bites! Make it enticing, yet inviting. Powerful, yet not forceful. I try to take inventory of my blog frequently. Of course you don't want to undergo a major overhaul each week but small tweaks here and there on a consistent basis make all the difference. Thanks for sharing your insight! Ryan
  15. Rahul says:
    yeah , i think revising and checking new features for websites is a great idea and will get many advantages for the blog/site . your points were sort of essential , i'm not that good dealing with some remarks but reading more about it did help so thank you for the post , the 1st point is excellent by the way as well as the rest surely :p :)) !
    • ZK says:
      These kind of list should apply once in a month so that you can check whether everything is moving according to prescribed pattern or not.
  16. David Shaw says:
    This is a very handy article.. I am very good at going back over old blog posts. I like to study my analytics and find ways to boost SE traffic by tweak old posts.
    • ZK says:
      Yes if you know how to handle tweeking your old posts than this one is really beneficial and fruitful.
  17. Vernon says:
    Nice article, Zack. One question that pops up in my mind is, what about the case where some content is duplicated for good reason. For example, I have a tutorial on my site, and have a page by page version and a one page version for people who want to print it out. If you look at many of the old Linux resources they are done the same way, and they have been around for some time. Same goes for a simple blog. I've got a list page with a few paragraphs of the first five blog posts, and then a detail page for each blog. That's a great deal of duplicate content, but virtually every blog does it. If those are okay, how would choose some duplicate content within your site as bad? I'm just thinking. I haven't seen anything like that before. I also agree with you about the urls, but for people who don't code their own blogs, it is hard to have much control on the url.
    • Zackrh says:
      Thanks Vernon. For blogs, I think having some paragraph summaries carry over is fine. Search engines understand how blogs work. I see what you mean with your tutorial. Most of the time, Google is looking for identical pages, content or mirror sites/pages. You should be ok, but they could penalize you. Maybe you could offer the printed version as a downloadable pdf that you could put behind a short form?
      • Vernon says:
        Thanks for that thought, Zack. I'm not that worried about the tutorial, I wrote it because people asked me how I coded my blog. For the main search terms "django blog engine" I get a lot of traffic. I'm actually embarrassed, because I'm not a pro. I'm just thinking of others who may be doing the same thing. I do actually have a pdf as well. I'm trying to re-write it at the moment, but I'll keep it as separate pages, one full page and the pdf once I'm done.
    • Alex says:
      Hello Vernon, This is when the nofollow, robots.txt or the meta tag noindex. If you have 2 versions of a page is best to link to the second version with a nofollow tag, or supply a meta tag with the noindex option within that duplicate page. By the way, the duplicate content problem is not all that critical this days, unless you are copying content from other website. Google stated that if you have more versions of a certain page they will only rank one version of that page, that they consider the most important, for this you can use canonical urls to choose the right page google that google will display in results :) If you want seo friendly urls for wordpress you can install some plugins that will do that for you automatically without needing to have any programming skills. But if you have a normal website you can outsource creating seo friendly urls for a low sum of money.
  18. Mani Viswanathan says:
    You've mentioned a very imp point at last. Many bloggers don't know about the duplication of domain. i.e. with www & without www. So the first thing a blogger should do is do a manual 301 redirect from the hosting panel & keep only one version of the domain i.e. Either with www or without it.