Web Audit

If you are thinking of enhancing the reach of your website, the first thing you will need is a Web Audit that shows you the general status of your site in order to make the best possible decisions. This audit will provide you with a detailed report of both the aspects of your website that stand out and others that you must improve.

The reason why you should do an online web audit is clear. Would your mechanic start fixing your car without first conducting an inspection? Well, if what you want is to improve the performance of your page, you will need to detect and correct errors, enhance its strengths, analyze what experience the user has within it and check that all the technical improvements are applied that will take your SEO to the next level. Let’s get on with it!

Keys to a good web audit

A good audit of a web page has several different parts. Usually, people talk about SEO Onpage, SEO Offpage, and user experience, but there are many other important parts:

Check Accessibility and fix bugs

Accessibility is not just that the content remains and is accessible to the user. It is also to avoid errors such as content duplication, broken links, 404 errors, and factors that make a page not optimized and secure.

For example, a typical error is that of the same pages that have both the URL with HTTP and HTTPS. The second, HTTPS, is an Internet communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of user data interconnected between their computers and the website. It is basically a protocol that indicates whether a page is secure or not.

As well. Currently, there are many pages that still have HTTP (the old protocol), and therefore are insecure from Google. The solution to this duplication problem is to redirect the HTTP protocol to HTTPS.

Other typical problems are 404 errors or broken links or indexing or canonical problems. A good auditor should be able, using special tools such as Google Search Console and Screaming Frog, to detect these faults and proceed to their solution.

Web Architecture

With web architecture, we refer not only to the content architecture (their arrangement as elements on our website) but also to the architecture of the URLs.

Basically, with this concept, we refer to the way in which web pages are structured, hierarchical, and linked to each other from the point of view of a URL. Not having a good architecture will make it difficult for Google to understand the meaning and importance of the most relevant sites on your website.

A good auditor should be able to, after analyzing a page, propose appropriate solutions to give relevance to the main sites and make a hierarchical and coherent structure for Google.

In addition to the hierarchy of URLs, interlinking is of great importance in this section, that is, how some content is pointed to others via links to share the link juice or the internal linking authority. An audit will detect the most linked pages and prioritize actions to support the pages that should have the most internal links.

On-page SEO

on page SEO actions are those that can be performed on the elements of the web page and constitute some basic points of SEO positioning.

During a web audit, all the On-Page elements should be checked that they are correctly performed. One of the most important is to check that the web indexing is being carried out correctly by the search engines.

Then, a large number of parameters that may be influencing the positioning of the page would be reviewed. Some of the main ones are, for example, the semantics of the web, the title, and the meta description, the hierarchy of the headers, the optimization of the images, by means of the ALT attributes and the title, etc.

Off-page SEO

SEO Off page is another relevant factor for positioning on the web. It is closely related to all references to our website from all over the internet. The number of references in blogs, the followers in social networks or the links that we have on other pages considered “important” will affect the position in which the search engine ends up placing us.

Therefore, to get a good position in the top positions of Google not only need good content. In addition, it is necessary to have a good link building strategy.

This technique is based on obtaining popularity or authority within the internet from links from other pages. But beware, be very careful with spamming that can penalize you.

Web usability and user experience

Web usability and user experience are fundamental factors to take into account in a web audit. Basically, it is to know how the user understands, perceives and if the page is attractive to him, and also how he perceives our website before, during, and after being used (experience)

Usability responds to specific technical criteria and the user experience depends more on the type of client we focus on and to which we must adapt. As much as our website has perfect usability, if it does not meet the tastes of our so-called “buyer persona”, it will not offer you a good experience.

Take, for example, the desire of our potential client to pay cash on delivery. If we do not offer you this possibility, the user experience will be negative, even if our usability is perfect.

Web Page Optimization (WPO)

Web Page Optimization or WPO is the set of techniques and tools that are used to improve the general performance of a web page. It is closely related to SEO because the WPO tries to correct web factors that worsen the user experience, such as excessive loading time for resources and images.

Making the web faster will reduce the abandonment rate and the bounce rate, making Google see that you satisfy the intention of your visitors. Your reputation will improve and this, in turn, will give more strength to your pages.

One of the most influential factors in WPO is image optimization. These must have an exact size, normally less than 100kbs to facilitate its reading, loading, and to optimize space on the server.

Another of the classic WPO problems has to do with programming code factors such as CSS or JavaScript (or JS). Google usually takes longer to read these factors as normal, so if they are not optimized the result will be longer lead times.

Similarly, there are many other factors that affect these metrics, such as server response. Knowing them and having a professional who knows how to audit and locate them will be the first step towards your new website.

The security of your website

Another prominent factor that affects the user experience is the security of your website. Try as much as possible to reduce spam or any other type of attack that makes your website look vulnerable.

In addition, a good strategy for this is to implement an SSL certificate, whose function is to encrypt user information. This must be a must in your SEO strategy. If your website doesn’t have the famous padlock yet, I don’t know what you’re waiting for! Not only will you transmit more security to the user, but you will really be providing it.

Study your competition

Another basic of web auditing, but one that is often overlooked. Competition in any business is essential if you want to position yourself. As much as we do everything perfectly, if the competition does it better it will be impossible to beat them.

Therefore, an audit must take into account and study how the competition does in terms of content -user search intent-, makes a study of their link building strategy, investigate what their usability and web experience factors are, which channels are used to convert, etc.

Sometimes the best way to catch up with the competition is simply by mimicking what it does but doing it even better. In that sense, it is worth taking useful ideas from this study to plan a future positioning plan.

What can you improve with a web audit?

Now that you know all the aspects of the SEO of your page, you are ready to start applying improvements. In this post, we will also explain the four fundamental bastions that you can improve after an online web audit.

Content is king

In his day, Bill Gates said it, and today it is a saying that continues to accompany all SEO campaigns. Without good content, it will be difficult to place your page in the best positions. Study your audience, their interests, relate them to your sector, and start adding value to your visitors.

Once the content is created, optimize it so that Google begins to nurture knowledge to its navigators. For this, there are some important keys:

• Take care of the semantics of your website. In the past, to position a keyword it was enough to repeat it over and over again. Luckily, this is no longer the case today and Google is able to measure the quality of content using many other parameters. Take care of the synonyms, the vocabulary of the topic of the post, go deeper and surely your article will reach high.
• An optimized title and an attractive meta description. The title and the meta description will be the clothing that your content wears to compete in the SERPs. Therefore, you must optimize them by including the keyword in the title and creating a description that makes the user want to click.
• NOTE: make sure you meet the maximum number of characters!

Take care of the hierarchy of the headings. In addition to the title, be sure to optimize the other headings. Use them to place secondary keywords, synonyms of the main keyword, or other words that you can take advantage of. In addition, there are certain rules: you can only use an H1 and the rest of the headings must follow a logical order. Nothing to go from an H3 to an H6.

Establish a Linkbuilding Plan

After an audit comes the most difficult, getting down to work. If the content is king in SEO projects, link building is king.

Google takes into account in ranking factors what others say about us. And the easiest way to find out is through the links. A good technique is link baiting, that is, making relevant content that gets other pages to publish and link us naturally.

But the most advisable thing is to carry out specific link-building campaigns by making guest posts on other blogs, including your page in content aggregators, recommended in forums, or working on your social networks.

Improved usability and user experience

As we discussed earlier, these terms are different, but they are closely linked. Both will allow their correct optimization to produce a satisfied visitor. And a satisfied visitor, as you may already assume, is a visitor who is much more likely to come back and buy.

Some of the tips that you can implement are the following:

• Keep it simple and implement a clean design. Your website must be easy to use, with clearly visible calls to action and the fulfillment of the different objectives within one or two clicks by the user. Apply the rule of less is more.
• Be responsive. Today they visit us from countless devices, all of them of different sizes. Don’t leave anyone out with a good responsive design.
• Intuitive navigation. If your goal is for them to buy: make the cart clearly visible. If your goal is for them to navigate: make the menu clearly visible. You should always make it as easy as possible for the user.

WPO and upload enhancement actions

The good thing about these improvements is that once they are made, they usually remain overtime except in cases of major changes in the design. Optimize the loading times of the images, introduce a lazy load or a preload of essential resources for both the images and for the JS and CSS files essential for the first rendering of your page.

By improving the loading speed of your website with the associated metrics of Google Page Speed ​​Insights, creating relevant content and with an appropriate link-building campaign, you will grow like foam.