Website audit tips for higher clicks

Here’s a quick guide to auditing your website in 2022. Stand your ground and get noticed with a captivating, well-optimized website that draws traffic and shines across search engines. Stick around as we unpack some simple steps for running an effective website audit in 2022, including best practices for onsite SEO, UX/site navigation, and leading content.

While vital to audience engagement and organic reach, Website Auditing in 2022 is just the tip of the iceberg. If youré looking to monetize your website traffic to the fullest, bring in more leads and run the best onsite ads, check out the below guide to this year’s most Essential Monetizations Strategies.

How to Audit my Website

Website auditing can be easy (in theory) but takes a fair amount of dedication to get it right. Running regular site audits can be the key to higher rankings. Luckily you dont need to be an SEO specialist or content strategist to take your site to page 1. You just need to be super-cool in the eyes of Google and have the website content to back it up. It also helps to keep up to date with the latest SEO trends.

Google Search Engine 2022

Google’s main objective is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and helpful. They send out web crawlers to analyze a website according to Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (or EAT). These crawlers index website content in real-time and send the best pages to the most prominent positions. 

Benefits of Running a Regular Website Audit

If you’re running a regular website audit, you’re staying top of mind. Simple. The more frequently you update your content, improve SEO and eliminate dead links, the higher your audience engagement, organic reach, and ranking potential will become. Below are some of the leading benefits of running a frequent website audit. 

📈 Higher traffic and conversion potential 

🦾 Better placement on search engines

📣 Enhanced customer usability and access to information 

📚 Expert content that answers questions and attracts interest 

✏️ Better ability to rank for niche keywords.  

🌱 Improved organic search visibility.

When auditing a website in 2022, it helps to know that key tools can streamline your time and effort. These tools anticipate what Google is looking for and provide improvement suggestions in real-time across content, UX, and onsite SEO.  

Choosing the Right Website Crawler 

To better understand how your website is performing, you’ll need a website auditing tool or crawler. Some of the top options on the market include Screaming Frog, or Ahrefs. You’ll need to pay a monthly fee to unlock the most powerful features, but what you stand to gain in optimization and ranking potential is well worth the initial cost. These tools provide specific recommendations and tips to improve overall website performance, including: 

• Guidelines for optimizing H1 tags, alt tags, meta descriptions, titles, and images.
• Recommendations to improve page speed and loading times.
• Relevant keyword suggestions and content construction guidelines.
• Highlighting deadlinks, broken images, duplicate pages, and other onsite flaws.

After your auditing tool has brought back the data needed to start improving your website, you’ll need to run through the results and repair the most pressing issues. Look for suggestions and fixes around content quality, titles, meta-descriptions, image sizing, mobile-friendliness, security, and backlinking. 

Track Your Findings

Take the most critical elements and place them onto a spreadsheet that you can refer to as you’re fixing your site. Categorize according to the issues you want to improve first, add the URLs that need to be addressed and start auditing. Depending on the size of your site, this can take a while. Pick one element and refine it across all pages. Cross it off from your list and move on to the next one. The three major onsite elements to note are your UX/Design, Content, and On-Page/Technical SEO. 

A website audit usually takes a few minutes, and after that, it’s up to you to take your findings and use them in the best possible way to improve your overall website performance. Check out the Ultimate SEO Ranking Guide for more detailed tips and tricks for boosting your on-site performance. Here’s how to create a website audit, broken into three categories.

Website Audit for UX and Design 

These days, the right onsite UX is more important than ever. First impressions are everything, and audiences can be pretty unforgiving when it comes to site navigation. If your site is difficult to use and your information is hard to locate, you’ll always be working twice as hard to bring in higher engagement. So think about your audience when auditing and updating your site. 

Make your end-to-end user experience attractive and straightforward. Eliminate unnecessary steps and move your audience through the funnel as quickly as possible. Your site’s overall attractiveness and ease of navigation will permanently set the stage for how your audience interacts with your content, products, and services. 

Also, spend time on your visuals. Regardless of the site or its niche, bold, original images go a long way, as do prominent Calls to Action, sub-tabs, and similar. If you haven’t already, work to unify your site with a fixed brand identity and a fixed color scheme. Here are a few points to remember when auditing your website’s user experience. 

UX/Navigation Checklist

Below is a quick checklist of what you can start improving where needed. User experience takes a little more time to perfect than content or even SEO, so take your time, put yourself in the shoes of the person navigating through your site and focus on the most crucial elements first. 

• Navigation tabs always appear at the top of the page. 
• All primary CTA’s per page should be placed higher on the page to avoid drop-off. 
• The website is optimized for desktop, mobile, and tablet navigation. 
• Webpage backgrounds share a typical style with the homepage
• Where appropriate, product price points, subscription fees, etc., must be easy to find.  
• The website ties in with your overall brand, corporate identity, and color scheme. 
• Your company’s logo should be visible at the top of the screen. 
•  Use headings, images, and spaces to break up your content. 
• Provide clear links on all pages and link them back to the homepage and other key categories
• Visual indicators must appear for clickable content.
• Provide a filter for category/product pages. 
• For eComm sites, provide clear links to the basket/checkout page.
• Use Pop-up windows and onsite advertising strategically.

Website Audit for Onsite Content 

Once your audience sees the value in moving forward, you’ll want to direct them to the most relevant content as quickly and as possible. Site content includes blog articles, pillar pages, product descriptions, company information, etc.

Regardless of the type, your content needs to be relevant, engaging, and easy to understand. With so much content circulating every second across every topic imaginable, you must create and refine your offering using the latest practices. This goes for original and repurposed onsite content alike. Having the right content strategy in place will ensure that you:

📣 Keep your existing audience engaged and interested for the long run. 

👀 Increase your site’s visibility and ranking potential. 

💡 Generate rich leads that will stay engaged after converting. 

🏆 Bring in new prospects that are willing to champion your brand. 

Content Checklist

Below you’ll find a quick checklist for auditing your website content. Lead with valuable information, break up content for better digestibility, and use your copy as an acquisition tool to draw potential clients back to your products and services. 

• You should break up long content into shorter paragraphs, headings, lists, and images. 
• Explain acronyms and specific features in full. 
• The background color should complement the content and make it more prominent. 
• Blog posts should include FAQs. 
• Blog posts and product categories/descriptions should be indexed. 
• Users should be able to navigate through longer posts using jump links. 
• Write out and develop clear and concise content.
• All onsite content should drive traffic to a specific CTA.
• Use sub-headings frequently, and keep them short, clear, and descriptive.
• Product and feature pages should include prominent key selling points. 
• Subcategorize your blog content and product pages.
• Content needs to link internally to similar pages for higher authority. 

Check out this Guide to Simple (SEO-inspired) Content Strategy and put your content marketing strategy to the test. 

Website Audit for Technical/Onsite SEO 

SEO plays a considerable role in getting your site seen by a wider audience. Google and other leading search algorithms pay close attention to sites that frequently optimize, revamp, and display relevant keywords, alt text, inbound/outbound links, page speed, etc. 

While it takes a little time to get right, you’ll be able to see your organic reach start to climb when you put the proper optimization tactics in place. The end goal is to make it easy for search engines to understand your website and identify whether your content is relevant to search queries in your niche. 

The more weight your site carries in terms of its expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, the higher you’ll climb in search rankings and the better the likelihood that you’ll be able to start generating organic conversions. 

If you’re looking for more hard-hitting onsite SEO tips and insights, take a page from SEO guru Javier Morell and his Website Ranking Starter Kit for 2022. 

Technical/Onsite SEO Checklist 

Below you’ll find some of the best practices for auditing your website’s SEO. Focus on the most pressing technical improvements first and work through your site in stages. Try and revitalize your onsite SEO efforts every three months or so and measure your progress through Google Analytics, where, over time,  you’ll be able to gauge whether your organic efforts are paying off or not.

• Eliminate and replace all broken links using the Dead Link Checker Tool. 
• Prominently display CTA’s with the appropriate embedded links. 
• Ensure that your website is indexed. 
• Check your images and resize them where needed.
• Set up a tracking tool to measure and report on your website’s key SEO metrics.
• Use SEMRush & create a keyword list that you’ll be able to rank for in terms of difficulty. 
• Populate these primary & secondary keywords throughout your onsite content. 
• Use these keywords and their long tail synonyms in headings and subheadings. 
• Use coherent title tags, description tags, image tags, and meta tags.
• Provide inbound links to similar pages onsite, but only where relevant. 
• Reference other sources through strategic outbound links to bolster authority. 
• Find and fix duplicate meta-descriptions and title tags. 
• Use schema markup for video.
• Organize topic clusters on the blog and product categories.
• Ensure that your website is fully optimized for mobile. 
• Check and improve your site loading speed.
• Check canonical tags and add structured data.

Website Audit Summary 2022. Key Takeaways

When you start running your website audit, there are a few fixes you can implement off the bat to start ranking higher. Google will check to ensure your website adheres to the below before anything else. These include: 

• URL/Title tags contain relevant keywords specific to your brand. 
• Optimize all pages for mobile. 
• Content answers questions and builds trust.
• Images are always the right size and include the correct alt tags. 
• All pages are fully indexable. 

Start with the above and tick off the relevant boxes as you go Remember to keep a sheet of structural improvements and track them according to UX, content, and SEO. 

Use any of the worlds leading website auditing tools to run quick site inspections and improve your reach where needed. Good luck with your upcoming website audit. Remember that as your traffic volumes start to climb, you can monetize your reach and earn revenue. 

If you’re already a part of the Adcash Publisher portal, please reach out to our dedicated team for further ad optimization insights. Get in touch to better understand which ad placements will run and convert most effectively on your site. 

And if you’re new to Adcash, you can register an account today and start monetizing your website traffic to the fullest. 

Spread the Word and Get a 5% Referral Bonus!

Are you getting the results you’re after? Refer other publishers to the Adcash platform, and we’ll guarantee you earn a 5% Extra Commission for every new lead. 

All the best on the journey ahead and free to let us know if we missed anything in the comments below.