Kas Szatylowicz
Performing a website audit for SEO purposes is one of the most important things any small business owner should be doing in 2019. The problem is that performing one sounds a) time consuming and b) complex.
While we’re not going to tell you that it isn’t any of those two things (it really is), your life will be made much simpler when you work with the right tool. In this article, we’re going to take a look at what a website audit checklist should look like, and how you can use Nightwatch 2.0 to finesse it.
Why You Should Perform a Website Audit
A website audit gives you a comprehensive overview of what’s working and what isn’t on your website. It takes a look at your content, your SEO, your usability, your relevance and so on.
The idea is that you then use the insights you’ve gained to develop a better marketing strategy.
An SEO audit is especially important because it’s SEO that helps you rank higher on Google, thus boosting your visibility, traffic – and sales. An SEO website audit measures the performance of your website for metadata, goal conversions, traffic behavior, link profiles, and keywords, as well as more technical aspects, such as site speed.
SEO is, after all, complex and always changing. To stay on track and one step ahead of the curve, it’s important that you perform regular website audits.
What Should a Website Audit Checklist Look Like?
Usability – If your website isn’t usable, your bounce rate will rocket. Then, your page will drop down the rankings. Usability includes things like navigation, page loading time, good grammar and solid readability. For example, sub-headings are your friends when it comes to content.
Content – Google is on the lookout for awesome content that provides lots of value and educates the audience or the end user. It should be highly relevant, well-written and simply useful. It also helps if your content is long-form (anything more than 1,000 words)
Keywords – Keywords still matter in SEO, although they’re a bit less important than they used to be. However, making sure you’re targeting the right people with the right keywords is an important part of your website audit.
On-page SEO – This includes things like placing your keyword in the page URL, and optimizing your images, meta descriptions and meta titles.
Mobile – Your website must be mobile friendly in 2019, otherwise, your SEO strategy will totally dive-bomb.
Using Nightwatch 2.0 To Perform a Website Audit Checklist
Nightwatch 2.0 – the latest incarnation of Nightwatch, an SEO tool – was recently launched with new features, including Site Audit.
Site Audit makes it easier for you to run an exhaustive and comprehensive website analysis that will show you what needs to be tweaked in your website’s structure so that you start ranking better. The feature is easily customizable to your needs and provided an easy-to-understand report that shows you what’s going on.
You can also tweak the parameters so that you get to grips faster with SEO and website auditing in general.
To make the Site Audit feature as user-friendly as possible, we added a smart scheduler. This makes setting up, running and saving your crawls super easy.
With this you can:
- Compare data in the long run
- Create a steady time frame
- Filter your needs
- Set insights in various SEO projects – including your own and your clients
We added more features, too:
Progress Sharing
Wouldn’t it be great if you knew how much progress your website was making? It sure would. This is why Nightwatch added our Progress Sharing feature, which lets you use a private and unique link to check (and share) your dashboard graphs.
We think it’s a really neat, practical and valuable feature for SEO agencies and professionals who have a number of different clients. You can also share your progress with your followers on social media at the click of a few buttons.
Backlinks Monitoring and Filtering
Dead and otherwise harmful (spammy) links just plain suck. We at Nightwatch know this, which is why we added the Backlink Monitoring and Filtering feature. It helps you quickly identify and remove spammy links that would otherwise cause you to tumble down the SERPs.
Our feature offers super clear insights via advanced filtering that are easy to take action on.
Overall, Site Audit from Nightwatch 2.0 lets you identify problems that are preventing your website from getting off the ground on Google so that it starts to rank higher and higher. The tool also provides you with recommendations for improvements that should be top of your list of priorities.
It’s important that you use your tool to perform regular website audits. While there’s no silver bullet for when it comes to frequency, it’s a good idea to perform an SEO website audit four times a year (once per quarter). There might be some value to performing an audit even more frequently than that, but it essentially comes down to how much time you have.
Conclusion
No one really likes to do a website audit because it can be a real pain in the butt. But think of performing one as being akin to cleaning out your closet. Remember how amazing and refreshed you feel after doing that? That’s how a site audit will make you feel. As a bonus, it might put you on page one of Google 😉
Readers, please share so other website creators learn about Nightwatch’s new website audit checklist.
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