Do you know of decreases in traffic to your website? You don't understand why? The conversion rate of your site continues to drop despite your optimizations? Thinking about redesigning your website without really knowing where to start?
The website audit is one of the most important steps in a digital project. It can be practiced at any time and especially before an important redesign project.
 |
| Website Audit |
The goal of an audit is to find out what is working and what is not on your website. It gives you key performance indicators and underperformance of the existing one.
With this article, you will have all the tricks to carry out a complete audit of your website. Follow the guide!
Define the criteria for evaluating the audit of your website
For several years, when we spoke of website audits, we spoke of technical audits. Today, the definition of audit has broadened to take into account all the components of a digital ecosystem : content (think about your strategy), design, natural reference, presence on social networks ...
Before you jump headlong into the audit of your website begin z by defining the criteria that you want to evaluate with this audit. Depending on your site or the scope of your project, the evaluation criteria can actually be different. If we take the example of an e-commerce site analysis of the sales funnel is paramount, while for a site corporate we will focus more on the ergonomics and design.
The SEO dimension of your audit
Natural referencing (or SEO ) is based on 3 main pillars:
1. Contents,
2. The links,
3. The technique.
The same goes for SEO auditing !
To get an overview of the SEO dimension of your website, it is therefore interesting to analyze these 3 levels.
Audit the content of your website
The content available on your site allows you to be found on search engines. They must match the keywords that Internet users type in search engines!
Your content must therefore cover the entire semantic universe sought by Internet users. If you have a site that talks about frogs, people should be able to find your site by typing "frog" or by typing "green animal with big legs".
This content is all the more important as the search engine(Google in the lead), takes more and more into account the notion of "search intent".
The search intention is the need, the deep motivation for which the Internet user carries out a search.
If we take the example above, what does the Internet user want who types "frog"? Know the physiology of the batrachian? Know how to cook it? Print drawings for her children?
The search intention is the Holy Grail: by guessing the underlying research intention of a keyword, the engines guarantee the Internet user the highest relevance in the results displayed.
And for you who write content, the principle is the same. You must use keywords, phrases, phrases, which belong to the semantic universe of the research intention of your targets, and which are necessarily different according to the stage of the life cycle of your Internet usage.
Also, the objective of the analysis of existing content is therefore to analyze their relevance with regard to:
1. In search intent ;
2. The number of keywords positioned ;
3. The semantic cocoons proposed;
4. The most read content ;
5. Of contents that cause high output rates;
This audit is key to allow you to understand the content that performs in terms of SEO, but also those that perform in terms of reading and engagement.
Analyze the inbound and outbound links of your site
We also assess the quality of your natural referencing through links, both those on your site and those pointing to your site.
Here, it is mainly a question of analyzing:
1. The volume of inbound links (also analyze the total number of inbound domains versus the number of links: having a lot of inbound links from a single domain is not necessarily a positive factor) ;
2. The quality of those links (if you work in the b ancy industry, is a link from a recipe blog relevant to you?) ;
3. The internal mesh of your site (the more your pages will be linked together, the more we will understand the consistency of your content) ;
4. Your current level of backlinks compared to your competition.
Read our article on the best SEO tracking tools to find out more.
Audit the SEO technique of your site
Last dimension of SEO analysis : the technique. Concretely, this means that your website must be optimized for search engines (and in particular Google):
1. Is your website easily indexed by search engine robots ( sitemap, robot.txt file)?
2. Is the page loading time within the standards ( server resources, caching, image weight, etc.) . You can take a test on page speed Insights.
3. Are the pages of your site well constructed ( markup, title structure, images, internal and external linking, etc.)?
The criteria of the user experience of years your audit
The analysis of the user experience is an essential step in the audit of a website, even in the context of a redesign of user journeys! These sometimes design errors are causing performance problems, and it is important before a revision to certainly know what does not work, but it works!
Design
More than a subjective opinion, it is about analyzing current practices (and if possible those of your competitors):
1. What visual markers are used ( use of colors, typographies, design styles, etc.)?
2. Does your site remain readable on all navigation devices (responsive web design)?
3. Are your pages readable ( prioritization of information, ventilation, etc.)?
Ergonomics
There are major ergonomic principles on which we can rely in the context of a website audit (the best known being those defined by Bastien and Scapin ). It measures the quality of the ergonomics of your site, notably :
The fluidity of navigation (tree pages ...)
The interaction design,
The building templates (zoning elements, information accessibility ...).
The criteria for converting your website
The conversion is the sinews of war. It is one of the main KPIs for analyzing the performance of a website. Depending on your digital ecosystem, the conversion can be multiple:
1. Completion of a purchase ;
2. Sending a contact form ;
3. The download of a brochure;
4. Clicks on a CTA (call to action button) ;
5. Redirection to a specific page or site ;
Etc.
Because the conversion analysis depends on the technical, design, and ergonomic aspects of your website, it is better to save this analysis part for the end of your audit. For example, you may find that almost none of your internet users use your site's search engine, and the ergonomic analysis will have made it possible to understand that it is not used because it is not visible.
Analyze the other components of your digital ecosystem
A website audit cannot be complete without analyzing all the building blocks that make up your digital strategy. To perform a full analysis, take a closer look at :
1. Your presence on social networks (er ed reputation, commitment, from site traffic ...) ;
2. The impact of your web marketing actions (in terms of engagement, business, etc.) ;
3. The impact of your offline actions (poster campaign, radio spots, etc.) ;
4. The audit of the GDPR compliance ;
Etc.
The technical audit of your website
The technical audit of your website has several objectives:
1. How do I make sure my device is secure?
2. How to guarantee the scalability and the technical performance of my existing one?
3. How can I be sure that I will be able to cope with peaks in consumption tomorrow?
...
technical-debt (1)Various technical audits can be carried out to answer these questions:
1. Of load tests, to measure the capacity of your existing resists sudden peaks of consumption. These load tests artificially launch many scenarios of fake Internet users and identify bottlenecks, slowdowns, and breaking points to identify where the weaknesses of your system lie ;
2. Of penetration testing: one p are testing intrusion into the white box (one who attempts an intrusion has access to the back office and knows the operation of your system), or black box (it's a test to 'blind, without knowing anything about your tool) ;
3. The technical audits of your solution, your accommodation, designed to ensure that technical debt n is not too Large ante, the technical system is up to date security updates, the technology used is still effective, ... ;
4. These technical audits give you visibility on the "health" of your technical asset, its ability to cope with the next evolutions, and guarantee you that you can always count on it, or that a cleaning/optimization is imposed.
How to perform a complete website audit?
Depending on the maturity of your project, several website audit solutions exist.
page speed-insights
Paid tools : Paid audits are obviously more comprehensive than free audits and often focus on the SEO dimension (SEMrush, MOZ…) ;
Human analysis : whether you have free or paid tools, you can not cut off human analysis. Never forget that the art tools give you figures as human expertise you provided does an analysis and recommendations for optimization.
Trust the professionals, trust BITS