Have you had this thought before, “How do I turn more of my website visitors into loyal customers?” In the fast-paced digital realm of marketing, optimization is necessary for growth. With that, today I’m thrilled to share a couple of tips with you with a (bonus points!) free website audit checklist. 

💅🏼 Here’s the scoop: website audits are like the secret ingredients to a converting marketing strategy. They help you uncover hidden gems and polish up your website to maximize conversions. By conducting regular audits of your website, you can uncover critical issues that may negatively impact your search engine optimization (SEO) and conversion rates. By fine-tuning your website through audits, you’re creating the ultimate user experience that turns visitors into loyal customers faster. 

1. Preparing for the Website Audit

Before we jump headfirst into the website audit checklist, we must plan. A wise person once said, that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. It’s all about defining those goals and objectives first. Getting clear on your business objectives and gathering the necessary tools is half the battle won. 

Define Your Goals 

First up, understand those business objectives – this is your digital compass. Whether it’s boosting sales, increasing brand awareness, or visibility, get crystal clear on what you want to achieve.

This involves setting clear targets, outlining the desired outcomes, and aligning your team’s efforts towards achieving these objectives. By gaining a deep understanding of your business objectives, you can make informed decisions, prioritize initiatives, and steer the company toward growth and success. 

Gathering Necessary Tools 

Now that you have a plan, it’s time to put it into action. We made it easy for you here by listing some resources for conducting in-depth website audits.

1. Google Analytics: A powerful web analytics tool that provides valuable insights into website traffic, user behavior, conversions, and more. Google Analytics helps you understand how users interact with your website, enabling you to make data-driven decisions to improve your website’s performance.
2. Ahrefs: A comprehensive SEO toolset that enables you to analyze website performance, conduct keyword research, track backlinks, and explore competitor strategies. Ahrefs provides insights to improve SEO, monitor website health, and identify content opportunities.
3. SEMrush: An all-in-one SEO tool that offers features such as keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink analysis, site audits, and rank tracking. SEMrush helps identify opportunities to optimize your website’s SEO, improve rankings, and track your performance against competitors.
4. Screaming Frog: A website crawling tool that examines URLs and provides insights on various technical aspects. It crawls your website to uncover issues like broken links, duplicate content, missing metadata, and more. Screaming Frog helps identify technical issues that impact SEO and user experience.
5. Hotjar: This tool provides an audit suite that includes heat maps, session recordings, surveys, and form analysis, that help businesses better understand user behavior, identify where visitors encounter issues, and improve website performance.

🪩 Here’s the 411: Ultimately, when it comes to choosing which tool is best, the choice would depend on your specific objectives. Are you more focused on overall website performance and user behavior, SEO, or technical aspects of website optimization?

But, if you had to choose 1 or 2 of the above, these are the non-negotiables: 

1. Google Analytics:  It’s non-negotiable because it provides insights into website traffic, user behavior, and conversions. This data is essential for making informed, data-driven decisions to improve website performance and user experience.

2.  SEMrush: The  SEO analysis and optimization are impeccable. SEMrush provides vital features such as keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink tracking, and site audit capabilities, which are indispensable for improving website visibility, rankings, and overall SEO performance.

2. Technical SEO Website Audit

This part of the audit focuses on the backend elements of a website rather than its content or design. This technical SEO part of the website audit checklist ensures that a website is structured, coded, and configured in a way that is optimal for search engines to crawl, index, and rank its content effectively. 

Let’s Take a Deeper Look: 

Website Speed and Performance

Checking your website’s speed and performance ties into your user experience. Visitors expect fast-loading websites and a slow site can lead to high bounce rates and loss of potential customers. Faster loading times improve user satisfaction and increase the chances of conversions and engagement.

Also, site speed is a ranking factor in search engines’ algorithms, as faster websites offer a better user experience. Faster sites may have an advantage in search engine rankings, leading to increased organic traffic.

Tools to Check Site Speed:

1. Google PageSpeed Insights: This tool analyzes your website and provides insights on performance across both desktop and mobile devices. PageSpeed Insights generates optimization suggestions, highlighting areas to improve.
2. GTmetrix: GTmetrix assesses your website’s speed and performance by measuring page load times and offering suggestions to optimize your site. It provides detailed reports with key metrics and recommendations for improvement.

3 Tips to Improve Loading Times:

• Optimize Images: Compress and resize images to reduce their file size without compromising quality. Use image formats like JPEG, PNG, or WebP for greater efficiency.
• Minify CSS and JavaScript: Minimizing CSS and JavaScript files can reduce file sizes, leading to faster loading times. Remove unnecessary code, whitespace, and comments to streamline your code.
• Enable Browser Caching: Configure server settings to specify how long visitors can cache static resources. This reduces the number of requests made to the server, resulting in quicker page loading for returning visitors.

Mobile-Friendliness

Mobile traffic continues to grow globally, with a significant portion of internet users browsing and shopping on mobile devices. An optimized mobile-friendly website will reach and engage with a broader audience.

A responsive and mobile-friendly design can cater to the growing number of mobile users, enhancing accessibility and usability.

Here are the steps you can take to test and enhance the mobile responsiveness of your website:

Testing Mobile Responsiveness:

1. Manual Testing on Real Devices: Test your website on actual mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) to experience how it functions and looks in a real-world scenario. Check for design flaws, navigation issues, and content visibility.
2. Inspect Element (Developer Tools): Use browser developer tools (such as Chrome DevTools) to toggle device simulation mode. This helps visualize how your website responds to different screen sizes and allows you to make adjustments accordingly.
3. User Testing: Gather feedback from actual users by conducting usability testing sessions. Observing how users interact with your website on mobile devices can provide valuable insights into areas that need improvement.

3 Tips on Improving Mobile Responsiveness:

1. Optimize Images and Media: Compress and optimize images and videos to reduce file sizes without sacrificing quality. Use appropriate image formats and implement lazy loading to improve page loading times on mobile devices.
2. Prioritize Content and Navigation: Simplify navigation and prioritize key content for mobile users. Use mobile-friendly menus, clear CTAs, and concise, scannable content to enhance the mobile user experience.
3. Optimize Font Sizes and Readability: Ensure text is legible on smaller screens by using appropriate font sizes and line spacing. Choose readable fonts and colors that provide contrast for easy readability on mobile devices.

Consider this real quick: The platform your website is built on significantly influences how you customize the desktop and mobile views separately. 

By customizing desktop and mobile views separately, you can rest assured that your website looks and functions seamlessly on various screen sizes and resolutions. 

“Well I’m convinced but what website platform has this??” 

Glad you asked. 

We at Brand Good Time are big fans of Showit. What sets Showit apart is its unique capability to allow separate customization for desktop and mobile views without the need for coding. It has an intuitive interface and drag-and-drop functionality we just love. 

Plus, we are Showit Design Partners (a badge of honor we wear proudly). We’ve been recognized as an experienced Showit website design agency that has produced consistently beautiful site designs. 

Crawlability and Indexability

By focusing on crawlability and Indexability, you can optimize your website for search engines, improve visibility in search results, and ensure that your valuable content is easily accessible and indexed.

• Make sure that your website is accessible to search engine bots by removing any barriers that may prevent them from crawling your content.
• Ensure that important website pages are not hidden behind login forms, robots.txt directives, or nofollow tags, as this can hinder the crawling process.

To check for crawl errors, regularly monitor your site for crawl errors using tools like Google Search Console. Address any issues such as broken links, server errors, or inaccessible pages promptly to ensure smooth crawling.

Robots.txt and Sitemaps:

• Utilize robots.txt file to control search engine crawlers’ access to specific pages and directories on your site. Ensure that your robots.txt file is correctly configured to allow search engines to crawl important content while blocking irrelevant or sensitive areas. 

How To’s: 

• Create and submit a XML sitemap to search engines, containing a list of all your website’s URLs. This helps search engine bots discover and crawl all pages on your site efficiently, improving indexability.

Helpful Resource: Build and Submit a Sitemap | Google Search Central | Documentation 

3. On-Page SEO Audit

Next up on the website audit checklist is the on-page SEO portion. This is the secret sauce that takes your website to the next level. It’s all about optimizing your web pages to rank higher in search engine results and attract more organic (aka free) traffic to your website. If your website doesn’t show up on the first page of search results, your chances of visibility are slim. 

This on-page SEO audit delves into your website’s nooks and crannies to diagnose any issues affecting its performance and visibility on search engines. This audit will dig into your URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, and content, as well as the technical stuff like indexing and site structure. It’s all about crafting a plan to boost your website’s search engine and make it a magnet for eager visitors.

On-Page SEO Website Audit Checklist: 

Content Quality and Relevance

• Focus on creating content that is valuable, informative, and engaging for your target audience.
• Evaluate the accuracy, credibility, and depth of information in your content to ensure it meets the needs and interests of your audience.
• Consider conducting a content audit to assess the overall quality, uniqueness, and relevance of your content across your website.
• Conduct thorough keyword research to identify relevant keywords and phrases that align with your content topics and target audience.
• Incorporate keywords naturally and strategically throughout your content to improve SEO and help search engines understand the focus of your content.
• Avoid keyword stuffing, which involves overloading your content with keywords in a way that disrupts readability and user experience.

Meta Tags and Headers

Meta Tags:

• Review each page’s title tags to ensure they are descriptive, unique, and include relevant keywords.
• Optimize title tags to be within the recommended length (typically 50-60 characters) and compelling to encourage clicks in search engine results.

Header Tags (H1, H2, etc.):

• Check the proper use of header tags to structure the content effectively and indicate the hierarchy of information on the page.
• Ensure that each page has a single H1 tag that includes the primary keyword and accurately reflects the page’s content.
• Incorporate relevant keywords naturally within header tags to signal the main topics of the content to search engines.
• Use variations of keywords and long-tail keywords in subheadings (H2, H3, etc.) to provide context and improve SEO.

Internal Linking Structure 

A strong internal linking structure helps users navigate your website easily and find relevant content, decreasing bounce rates and increasing user engagement. It also enhances SEO, content discovery, and your brand’s relevance and authority.

3 Tips for Effective Internal Linking:

1. Use Descriptive Anchor Text: When creating internal links, use descriptive anchor text that clearly indicates what the linked page is about. Avoid generic phrases like “click here” or “read more.”
2. Create a Logical Link Structure: Organize your internal links in a logical hierarchy that follows the flow of content on your website. Link from high-authority pages to deeper pages that need a boost in visibility.
3. Link to Relevant Content: Link related content together to provide users with additional information on a specific topic. This creates a cohesive user experience and reinforces the relevance of your content to search engines. 

4.  Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Audit

User Experience (UX) for Website Audit

An optimized user-experience website works wonders. It can encourage visitors to explore more content, stay longer on the site, and ultimately engage with your brand or business.

User Experience Website Audit Checklist:

1. Ease of Navigation:

• Check for internal linking and breadcrumbs to help users understand where they are on the site and navigate back easily.
• Evaluate the website’s navigation menu to ensure it is clear, organized, and offers easy access to important pages.

2. Layout and Design:

• Assess the overall layout of the website for consistency, readability, and visual appeal.
• Check for responsive design to ensure the website looks and functions well across different devices and screen sizes.

🍭 For further juicy insights, check out our past blog:  5 Ways to Design A Lead Generation Website with Examples.  

Call-to-Actions (CTAs)

Tips to Improve Your CTA’s:

• Stir in Some Fun Copy: Nobody wants a bland cocktail, right? CTA’s need to be engaging, fun, and oh-so-tempting. Mix in some witty phrases or exciting offers to make your visitors thirsty for more

• Add a pop of color to the buttons: Use contrasting colors for your CTAs to make them stand out from the rest of the page content. This helps draw attention and prompts users to take action.

• Optimal Size: This varies from website to mobile
  
  • Website: generally falls within the range of 44-47 pixels in height for desktop (WPMU DEV: Mobile CTA Button Best Practices).
  • Mobile: The ideal size should be large enough to be easily clickable on a touchscreen, typically ranging from 40-50 pixels in height. (UX Movement: Optimal Placement for Mobile Call to Action Buttons).

Free Website Audit Checklist

Whether you’re a small business owner or a web developer feeling a bit overwhelmed by the marketing mixology…we got you covered. We compiled all the above content into an easy (and pretty) free website audit checklist. Use this to website audit checklist your killer website! 

By regularly auditing your website, you’re setting your business up for long-term success. 

Good news, you can hand off the load to us. Allow our experienced team to take a strategic look at your website from every angle, identifying areas where we can help boost your conversions and grow your brand.

See how our website audit helped a service-based business optimize its website for a conversion boost. 👉🏼The proof is in the pudding. 

We offer expertise, fresh insights, and actionable recommendations to enhance website performance and achieve business goals, all wrapped up in a perfect bow. 

Ready to improve your online presence and drive results? Learn more here.  🎉