Periodically, even the most beautiful site needs an update, a redesign. There are many good reasons that justify the redesign of a website, ranging from the need for rebranding to the transition to a new Content Management System (CMS), from low popularity to a design that can be traced back to the dawn of the web.
Styles change and freshness is lost only as a result of competition and new trends. Strategies change, new tools guide the game and you risk losing competitiveness.
So at a certain point reasons emerge that lead us to consider a redesign and optimization work to be necessary. And that’s why, before starting headlong into a new redesign project, a careful preliminary audit must be carried out.
What is a website audit?
We could define a website audit as an examination of the performance of its pages before a search engine optimization (SEO) intervention or a website redesign. Thanks to an audit of your website you can determine if it is optimized to achieve traffic objectives and, if not, how to improve it to increase its performance.
Conducting a website audit annually is best practice, even when you aren’t planning a redesign.
That said, the business can often seem daunting, especially if you have a complex site with many different pages.
That is why we recommend dividing the audit into two parts:
- a technical check
- a design audit
The technical audit will help you: better understand your website performance, identify missed SEO opportunities, and discover areas where your lead generation efforts may be strongest.
The design audit will help you: identify brand inconsistencies, evaluate usability and accessibility, update your current design system to simplify future website updates.
In Kiosk we have an audit model that we can provide you for free. Just request it.
Types of Audits
Competitive site audit
A competitive website audit tracks your competitors and their online strategies and serves to identify what opportunities your brand may be missing. Essentially, a competitive audit allows you to see what works for other companies in your market so you can incorporate those tactics into your strategy.
SEO Link Audit
This type of audit processes the links pointing to your website to find potential problems or opportunities in your backlink profile.
By evaluating your links, this audit will help you optimize your site to rank for your target keywords.
Lead conversion optimization audit
A lead conversion optimization audit analyzes a website’s conversion problems and opportunities. In this audit, you analyze how traffic is coming to your website and where it is coming from.
Google Analytics is an excellent tool for this. Knowing where your traffic is coming from will help you better understand your audience’s behavior and help you optimize your site’s content to meet their needs.
Speaking of content, you will also need to analyze the content of your website. Make sure the content is useful, informative and up-to-date
Social media audits
Your brand’s online performance can also be influenced by your social media channels.
If your social media presence isn’t driving more traffic to your website, then it’s time to conduct a social media audit.
To start the audit, create a list of all your company’s social media accounts and analyze whether they are all consistent with your brand: tone of voice, texts, images, style, etc.
Finally, use the information from your assessment to better understand your audience and optimize your social media for better engagement.
Website SEO audit
While an SEO link audit analyzes the links associated with your website, an SEO website audit evaluates all factors that can impact your site’s performance in the SERPs.
This includes incoming and outgoing links, but also extends to other aspects such as keyword usage, content, metadata, page loading speed, user journey, and video and content optimization. images, scripts etc.
It’s possible to conduct an SEO audit yourself, but you’ll likely get more in-depth answers in less time by employing an agency.
Data privacy control
A data privacy audit verifies that applicable data privacy laws are followed and ensures a safe space for website visitors.
Search engines look for privacy-related pages when determining whether a website is high authority. For example, Google’s main goal is to serve the best and most reliable content to users from trusted sources.
Sites that comply with data privacy requirements will most likely be considered more authoritative than those that do not have these essential legal policies.
The benefits of an audit of your website
These are just some of the main benefits you get from a marketing point of view:
Competition analysis and definition of new objectives
Conducting a website audit will allow you to compare your website to your competitors. You can analyze how well you are ranking against competitors for keywords and determine potential new sources of inbound traffic.
Improving your SEO
With a website audit, you will be able to identify any missed SEO opportunities and remedy any incorrect or poorly executed SEO pitfalls throughout your website’s content.
Conversion rate optimization
Website audits also allow you to reevaluate the effectiveness of your website in terms of lead generation and conversion.
As a result, you’ll be able to spot any previously overlooked opportunities to convert visitors into leads, improve CTAs, and identify gaps in your landing pages so you can optimize them to increase conversions.
Improved performance
Website audits usually evaluate a site for its content and technical performance. As a result, an audit will give you the opportunity to inspect the robustness of your website’s technical framework and infrastructure.
It will also reveal how friendly your website is to search engines and determine how easy it is for users to navigate your website to find the content they are looking for.
Identification of problems
Finally, a website audit highlights issues that are hurting both SEO and conversions, such as broken links, unsuitable content, and long page load times.
But let’s try to understand what an audit consists of.
Are you looking for an agency to entrust with the strategic restyling of your current website?
How to put together a redesign team
Before you get down to business, it’s important to take the time to assemble a team of stakeholders.
The DARCI framework serves as a valuable starting point for assembling that core team and can help you understand who to engage and when to engage.
DARCI stands for Decision-Maker, Accountable, Responsible, Consulted and Informed.
The DARCI framework has become almost synonymous with project management because it made it possible to define who to work with and in what capacity when it was necessary to execute a project or initiative in a rather complex organization.
There are other versions of it such as RACI, which is what you will find in PMBOK GUIDE, a useful guide for managing projects . RACI is the same as DARCI but excludes the Decision-Maker.
In summary DARCI helps to clarify responsibilities and creates the shared language to assign and track responsibilities, making the team more efficient and allowing others to see who is responsible for the particular task.
DARCI allows you to consider and identify the people you need to consult and inform before the start of your project and during its execution. If you skip this step, you will most likely end up in typical situations such as assisting someone entering the project towards the end of the game, and having the project team back off and start over.
The subject is frustrated, and the whole project is overdue. And this is just one example, but we could do others.
The points we wanted to cover here are the starting point for conducting a good audit before tackling the redesign of your website. Our experience has taught us that the success of a good redesign starts before the design process begins.
Do you want to improve the performance and effectiveness of your website?
Kiosk, Hubspot’s solution partner, is able to audit your site for you, and provide you with a useful overview of the strengths and weaknesses of your current website.
Request a complete audit by our experts now.
What you will get from our audit:
- Detailed evaluation of your site’s structure and design
- In-depth performance analysis, including loading times and responsiveness
- Identifying potential SEO problems
- Tips for improving usability and user experience
- Recommendations to optimize safety and regulatory compliance
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Request a free audit of your websiteWe know the importance of a well-optimized website ready to meet the needs of its customers. |
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Request a free audit of your websiteWe know the importance of a well-optimized website ready to meet the needs of its customers.
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