A website content and SEO audit is a full analysis of your website’s content, structure, and SEO On-Page factors — to identify faults and problem areas that could be reducing your web traffic or interrupting the sales funnel.
Is your website bringing you visitors and sales from search engines — or chasing them away?
Would you know?
Your website is an important piece of online real estate that can bring new customers, members, bookings, and sales into your business or community service organisation. But what happens if your menu system is awkward? Or your payment gateway is clunky? Or you haven’t optimised the text?
You could be losing leads, sales, bookings and web traffic.
Why not carry out a quick audit on your website and check if everything is working for you.
Step 1: SEO
“Ensure that your <title> elements and alt attributes are descriptive, specific, and accurate.” Google.
First, look at your site’s SEO and how it currently ranks with the major search engines. In this step you should focus on SEO on-page factors like:
- Page titles — do they use keywords related to your business?
- URLs — are they short and relevant, or long and clunky?
- Headings — do they follow the H1, H2, H3 … hierarchy?
- Images — do they have logical names and alt-tags?
- Meta-descriptions and web snippets — have you created a web snippet that promotes the pages in search?
Step 2: Navigation
“The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content is important.” Google.
Website navigation refers to the menus and icons that your visitors click to move around your site. Have you ever been on a website and weren’t sure where to go and what to click? It’s critically important to get this right, so the next thing to check is your overall menu structure.
More specifically you should check your:
- Menu text (is it logical and easy to understand?)
- Menu buttons, internal links and social share icons (are they visible, sized correctly, working properly?)
- Complex navigation (can you get to anywhere on your site in less than 3 clicks?)
- Pop-ups and advertising (is this overwhelming the text and annoying to readers?)
Step 3: Readability
“Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.” Google.
Next, do a complete review of the actual text and how easy it is for someone to read and understand. Reading on a screen is tricky, so work through each page taking note of:
- Titles and sub-headings
- The way the text is placed on the page (bullet points, internal links)
- Supporting images.
- Duplicate content.
Then look at how much content you actually have. Many websites I come across have hardly any content, and you need at least 250-300 words on every page to be indexed by Google and the major search engines.
At the same time, I see other websites with pages and pages of content in great big blocks — if you want someone to actually read your content the text needs to be broken up into short paragraphs with plenty of sub-headings, bullet points and images.
Finally, look for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, fuzzy logic, and content that is out-of-date or no longer relevant to your business.
Step 4: eCommerce
“Create a Google Merchant Centre account so your product information will show on surfaces across Google. This allows people to see goods from your store on various Google platforms, including rich product results on Google Images and rich results on Google Search.”
Rigorously testing each step of your online sales process is critical to running a profitable online business. You want your products super-easy to buy because customers quickly disappear if their shopping experience is confusing or clunky.
First, look at the buying procedure to make sure everything is easy to follow and working properly. There is nothing worse than advertising a coupon or discount only to find it doesn’t work when your customer reaches checkout, so you should definitely test all your:
- Product deals (eg, 15% off everything in-store)
- Linked and related products (eg, customers who bought this also bought …)
- Product attributes (eg, size, colour)
- Product add-ons (eg, buy 2 for $50 and get 1 more for $10)
Next test the payment procedure and functions including:
- Adding and deleting items in the shopping cart
- What happens at checkout
- Where the customer is led if they cancel the payment
- The simplicity of the payment gateway (eg, PAYPAL, credit card)
- Navigating back to the store after a payment
- The confirmation and sales emails
Google prefers websites that have clear product descriptions, refund and return policies, and detailed information about payment methods and customer privacy.
© 2020 Melinda J. Irvine. Images: Canva and Pexels.