Website Audit: When and What to Track
If you’re disappointed with your site’s performance, you can look for ways to increase rankings and traffic. And, we don’t just mean adding a few new buttons or banners. To ensure that your site aligns with your objectives, you have to follow the correlations and audit your site regularly.
What’s a website audit, and why should I care about it?
A website audit assesses all aspects related to your website’s conversions, traffic, and search engine results page exposure. It entails a thorough examination of online or mobile user interface areas. The goal is to get a sense of your organization’s performance and determine its strengths and flaws.
The data gathered from a comprehensive site audit should provide you with a profound, extensive insight into why your site is attracting or not attracting visitors. A website audit is essential to examine your website’s present state, determine what changes you can make, and set realistic goals.
How often should I audit my site?
Google, and other search engines, are constantly updating its algorithm to provide the best results. If you want as many pages indexed as possible, you can’t overlook Google’s “crawling” experience on your site. When Google decides to make an algorithm update, it typically gives business owners very little (if any) notice.
Given how frequently search algorithms are updated, audit your site every 2-4 months. It’s also good to monitor your site after a negative occurrence, like a significant decline in traffic.
Key Metrics You Should Track
There are a variety of metrics that can help you identify your best-performing web pages, blog articles, and how long people remain on your site. These indicators are crucial for understanding your site’s performance and determining your marketing activities’ effectiveness.
1. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage or proportion of visitors who complete your website’s goal. Goals are actions you want guests to take, such as making a purchase, completing a contact form, or seeing a specific page on your website.
The conversion rate is arguably the most crucial measurement of them all, as it has a considerable influence on the profitability of your website. Conversion rate helps you assess how successfully you persuade your traffic to complete the desired action because you calculate it as a percentage of total visits. Your earnings will double if you can double your conversion rate from 1% to 2%.
2. Loading Speed
Your website loading speed can affect its search engine rankings and conversions. Visitors will abandon a website if its pages take too long to load, resulting in fewer conversions. The same thing will happen if a website’s pages don’t load adequately on mobile devices–which many people use.
Use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to assess your page’s site speed; this tool gives your website a performance rating based on its code and how fast it loads for Chrome users. PageSpeed can also alert you to other speed-related issues with your website and what you can do to address them.
3. Visitors (Both New and Returning)
Keep track of new and recurring visitors to your site. The new site visitor statistic measures the growth of your user base and can help you determine whether your marketing efforts to boost traffic and brand awareness are effective. While attracting new visitors is the goal, making and keeping repeat visitors is the endgame.
Returning visits indicate that your user engagement initiatives are succeeding. In most situations, the aim is to persuade a new user to return to your website because returning users are less expensive to acquire, spend more money, and convert faster than new visitors.
If your visitors aren’t returning, your content approach needs to improve. In addition to user interface and experience, the quality of the information is what keeps people coming back.
4. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the proportion of guests that leave your website relatively shortly after they arrive. Visitors arrive at a website but don’t interact with it; they don’t click on any links and then exit the site. The shorter time a guest spends on your site and engages with it, the less likely they will convert.
Bounce Rates won’t tell you why people are departing, but they may tell you something is wrong with your marketing campaign. For example, if you don’t use keywords related to the content on that page, or if the description of the external link that is delivering them to that page isn’t accurate, visitors will most likely leave quickly.
To prevent drawing incorrect conclusions while working with bounce rate, you must apply logic to the circumstance. For example, you may have a high bounce rate due to the sort of website you have, not because something is amiss. A news website or FAQ page should have a greater bounce rate than an e-commerce website.
Worry About You
It’s impossible to keep track of Google’s algorithm because it changes hundreds of times every year. While that number sounds daunting, you shouldn’t be concerned because most adjustments are minor. Instead, focus on how you can regularly audit your site to preserve its relevance and keep up with SEO developments.