Our website audit service gives you a thorough and impartial perspective on your website, including both service websites and ecommerce site audit reports, depending upon your needs. Websites are assessed using extensive SEO experience, having worked on websites since 1999, and a range of tools and user testing to help surface technical and usability issues that may be holding your site back in the ranks. An audit wil also aim to help you get more value from your existing visitors no matter the source of traffic as it will address usability and customer flow issues where found.
Website audit report
As part of your site audit, you will receive website audit reports on various technical aspects found for your website including ecommerce usability and customer flow. In order to be as easy to digest and to put into action as possible, these will be sent in stages via email, as the audit progresses. In some instances, you will also receive video feedback of real users using your website on a task. This can be extremely useful in surfacing issues that are found and showing them in action using impartial third-party testers.
See what our audit customers say:
Reports have actionable strategies to deal with issues found, and as part of the audit service you can follow up with questions as required. There are also explanations of why you need to carry out the changes and how they are affecting the website ranks or usability of the site.
What does a website audit give you?
As part of the service, you will receive a comprehensive website audit based upon your requirements, which will cover multiple facets of your website both technically and visually including suggestions for fixing user experience issues, as appropriate.
Website audit checklist
The audit will thoroughly vet your site, covering items a) to f) on the checklist below, as appropriate, and others issues that may be found during the process. These include:
a) Website Technical auditing
A technical audit for a website uses a variety of free and paid for tools and techniques to assess your site from top to bottom through many aspects during the auditing process. These include but are not limited to:
Broken website links
404 errors
301 redirects
https issues
Insecure content
Titles and descriptions
On page ranking factors
Alt text
ecommerce site audits - many aspects of customer flow, usability and ease of use
Schema testing
Schema suggested fixes and improvements
Robots.txt
Sitemaps – html and xml sitemaps
Site structure
Caching of your site
Site speed – testing various page types on your site - product, home, general page types and blog for example
Adjusted bounce rate
b) Website content audit
As part of the audit the content of your site will be assessed and audited for:
Duplicate content on site
Off-site duplicate content
Mixed content issues
Thin content and what to do about it
Opportunities for improvements
Use of images and optimisation
Key content assessment pages you need on your site
Improvements to content required, including how to make changes with specific examples and suggestions and why you need to do so.
Improvement of trust of a website
EAT (Expertise, Authority and Trust) factors for your website and how they can be enhanced
Alt text improvements
Website accessibility
Image optimisation for ranking and site experience
Stickiness of content
Quality of content on the site
"Keith recently conducted an audit for www.wordtracker.com. He did a great job analysing our site and sent through a number of emails with various insights on how elements could be improved. It's easy to miss things that can have a big impact to your SEO and so using an experienced optimiser like Keith was very helpful.
Our website has been through a number of redesigns and he suggested ways in which we could increase traffic as part of those updates. He also suggested a number of ways we could capitalise on our current content, and small changes that should lead to nice increase in traffic.
Before upgrading your website I would suggest using someone like Keith to analyse your site, so you don't lose out on changes that could have a massive impact on both traffic and revenue." Andy Mindel Co Founder Wordtracker
c) e-commerce website audit
If you have an ecommerce site, the audit will include feedback on:
Improvements that can be made to the ecommerce process
e-commerce content review
Helpful extra features to add
Enhancing the saleability of items on your site
the cart process
product improvements
optimisation of products
Improving customer experience during the ecommerce process
Remarketing and capturing user data
d) Opportunities found during the audit
Part of the auditing service may also include some opportunities which are 'low hanging fruit' - items that will little effort may start to improve ranks or discover a new niche opportunity. These can include:
Assessment of ranking opportunities - this covers any obvious improvements found, rather than a comprehensive keyword list
Use of chat and other facilities where appropriate
Improvements to usability which should increase return on existing visitors to your site
e) Link audit
When auditing a site part of this is to look at links:
To your site to see your site’s backlink profile
Internal linking - examining how pages are linked within your site structure to give the best pages the most chance to rank
Suggested improvements in the above areas and opportunities you may have
Image link opportunities found
f) Competitor comparison audit
A look at key specified competitors:
Identifying key areas of improvement based upon your competitors
Facilities or methods you may consider adding to your site
Comparison of competitive ability against rivals and what can be done to tip the balance
Dangerous competitors and what can be learnt from them
What can I expect after the audit is complete?
In some cases, changes suggested will have immediate effect if put into action and the impact will be noticeable straight away. Others will help your site quality over time to various degrees, depending upon how quickly and favourably Google responds to updates made.
You will only benefit from the audit if you put items into practice.
Post audit support and technical help
Questions will be answered in relation to the audit, free of charge, for up to thirty days after the audit is complete, via email, chat or phone call. You can receive help on actual changes to the website if required at extra change and subject to a quote and availability.
Follow up audit
It is suggested that you book in a follow up audit several months down the line to assess whether changes are complete and see if there are other issues that can be addresses or opportunities that have emerged since the last audit.
Free website audit
A free website audit is only likely to cover the basics and although it will catch some obvious items like missing or duplicate titles, broken links etc.. There is little comparison between a free and full audit which takes many hours of assessing a website to complete, as you can see from the above audit checklist.
What’s the difference between free and paid audit?
Free audits are, by their nature, usually going to consist of a quick, dashed off report from an automated piece of software. You need to ask what the opportunity costs of this are to you as they can miss certain elements that are key to a site’s health and therefore its ranking at Google. You need your site to have the right elements in place so that you give yourself every opportunity to rank well.
An experienced website auditor will both check into data that can be found through automated processes and also look manually through the site and using tools to find patterns and issues. They will also use other facilities like Google Analytics and Search Console. They will also search for and find issues and opportunities that might otherwise be missed such as content improvements, much of which cannot be assessed by automated processes – unless you happen to be Google!
Free website audit tools
While there are plenty of free website audit tools that will certainly help you on their way, and which are likely to be used in audits by professionals too, relying on these is a mistake and so paid for tools are also necessary.
If your business makes or stands to make any money, if response forms or orders are valuable to you or if your time is worth anything to you at all, then it is strongly advised that you should use tools that help you to get the most out of the process and to find the items that will make the most difference to you.
Please contact or call 0800 619 1852 for a free consultation, without obligation on your part, in order discuss your needs and to see what you want out of your audit.
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