Examples of how a website audit can increase eCommerce website’s conversion rates and how audits can even identify weaknesses in their SEO. We explain why retailers should make website audits a fundamental part of their operations.
A website audit is a comprehensive analysis of everything related to a website’s search ranking and page performance.
Retailers who are experiencing poor traffic should put their website under the knife to see the extent as to why sales and conversions are dwindling.
Auditing a website will thoroughly determine if it is optimised enough to achieve traffic and conversion rate goals, and how exactly they can improve performance.
Retailers also planning a complete redesign can benefit from an audit in order to ensure their store’s online presence is fully optimised for the future.
What Type of Website Audit Suits You?
SEO Audit
Measures how well a website is optimised for search rankings. This generally includes analysing the following: keywords, links, traffic, target conversions, Meta data, and image (media) optimisation.
Technical Audit
These audits emphasise the importance of site visibility (crawling and indexing). Broken links, redirect chains, and keyword cannibalisation are the usual culprits.
Content Audit
Stand-alone content can be audited, ensuring that the tone and message of content fully corresponds across the entire website. It helps analyse that who you are as a business is reflected in the main content of your largest conversion gains.
Why Optimising Content is Key
Auditing content is crucial since most online vendors heavily rely on content marketing and social media to boost and maintain their search rankings.
By auditing each content outlet, it will help determine if that digital content is relevant to consumer needs and the message or targets of the organisation at hand.
It can pose important questions like:
Is the content accurate? Does it fully represent the organisation's brand?
Is it 100% optimised for search?
Can the current Content Management System maintain all of the content?
More importantly, conducting an audit will easily identify any missed SEO opportunities, and rectify any areas that lacking basic SEO knowhow (e.g. No image & multimedia files captioned, overuse of keywords, etc).
To surge up search engine results pages (SERPs), website content must be high-quality. It should provide relevant information to consumer questions, and provide resources relevant to each result topic.
To avoid pogo-sticking or increased bounce rates, create content that is engaging & well-written. Add incentives for users to browse further via a Call-To-Action button and links to resources.
Analysing keyword performance is also beneficial for an insight into what topics are providing websites with the biggest gains in web traffic and leads.
Search engine algorithms are more convoluted and intricate than ever before; it’s not simply down to altering a few Meta tags, or adding a few more keywords to a blog post. There are factors that businesses must keep up to date with if they are to generate and maintain high-traffic & conversion rates.
Ensure Maximum Website Performance
Having a responsive web design website is now the norm, with mobile traffic now outnumbering desktop traffic; the focus on offering a streamlined, engaging UI across all devices to provide a positive user experience is essential.
Websites have to be designed with their consumer audience in mind. Both design and the navigation should correspond with what each consumer is actively looking to find - i.e. general enquiry, contact numbers, reviews, etc.
Make sure web-pages are not cluttered with ads and that any CTAs are not intrusive. Each menu or path should be easily accessible and visible, whilst conversion paths ideally need to be as intuitive as possible for a smooth checkout process.
Speed It Up
A website's page speed must be quicker than 3 seconds. According to Google, consumers lose interest on a page after that and then it’s a just another bounce rate.
Audits can target excessively large page sizes, image sizes, and server response times, and especially where HTML and CSS needs to be cleaned up or ‘minified’.
The faster a website’s pages load, the higher its visitor engagement, retention and conversion rate will be.