If you're looking to improve your website's performance and increase conversions, knowing how to audit a website is an essential first step. Conducting a website audit can help identify issues hindering your site's SEO and user experience.
But, with so many audit tools and services available, how do you know where to start? In this post, seobase will guide you through how to conduct a website audit, what it is, the different types of audits available, and the best website audit tools and services to use.
What is a Website Audit?
A website audit evaluates a website's performance, often before a large-scale website redesign or search engine optimization (SEO) effort. Knowing how to conduct a site audit is crucial in determining whether your site is optimized to achieve your traffic goals. To improve SEO, it is recommended that you perform an SEO audit, which can help you identify areas where you can optimize your site for search engines. You can conduct a site audit manually or use a website audit tool. If you're unsure how to audit a website, consider using an audit service or consulting an SEO professional. The best website audit tools provide detailed reports on your performance, including areas that need improvement, such as page load speed, mobile responsiveness, and user experience. You can gain insights into improving SEO and reaching your traffic goals by conducting a site audit.
Types of Website Audits
Let's take a moment to discuss the various types of audits that marketers often perform before delving into what to look out for during an audit. Here are some of the typical audits that you may encounter in marketing. 
1. Competitive Website Audit
It is a great way to track your competitors' online strategies and identify missed opportunities for your brand. This involves performing a SWOT analysis on your competitor's website, where you identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. For example, you can assess if their website is easier to navigate than yours. However, it has slower page loading times, or if their website ranks higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) than yours, your site loses leads. Additionally, you should consider the tools and software they use to streamline their processes, which can help you discover new ways to run your site more efficiently and make it more accessible for consumers. So, if you're wondering how to audit a website or how to conduct a website audit, consider using a website audit tool like the seobase Site Profiler tool to help you improve your website's overall performance.
2. SEO Link Audit
Are you looking to improve your website's SEO? Consider conducting a site audit that includes a link audit to identify potential issues or opportunities in your backlink profile. By evaluating your links, you can optimize your site to rank for your target keywords and improve your website's visibility in SERPs. To perform an SEO link audit:
- First, start by gathering all of your link data. You can use website audit tools like Google Search Console to download the latest links and create a link audit spreadsheet.
- Then, manually evaluate your links by paying attention to factors like anchor text, IP address, and page content to determine the value and equity (link juice) being passed on to your page.
- If you want to take the guesswork out of analyzing the value of the links you gathered, you can use website audit SEO tools like the seobase backlink checker.
3. Lead Conversion Optimization Audit
One way to do this is by conducting a website audit. It is a process of analyzing your website's performance to identify areas for improvement. You can use a site audit tool like Google Analytics to start a site audit. This tool will help you analyze your website's traffic and determine where it's coming from. Following the few pieces of information below will help you optimize your website's content to meet your audience's needs:
- One important aspect of a website audit is a website SEO audit. This involves analyzing your website's content to ensure it's helpful, informative, and up-to-date.
- Ensure your content contains keywords and phrases to boost your ranking in SERPs.
- Outdated or irrelevant content can hurt your conversions and SERP ranking.
- Other areas to observe during a website audit include your forms, checkout process, design and layout, and overall user experience.
- Furthermore, make sure your forms collect enough information to contact a lead.
- Also, if you notice a lot of shopping cart abandonment, customers may be having issues with the checkout process on your website.
- Ensure your CTAs are clear and visible, your copy is easy to read, and your website is easy to navigate.
If you're unsure how to conduct a site audit, consider using an audit service from seobase. Also, you can consider using the seobase Site Profiler tool as the best tool to help you optimize your website and improve your SEO. With these tips, you can conduct a successful site audit and boost your performance.
4. Social Media Audit
Social media can significantly impact your brand's performance. To perform a website audit:
- First, start by creating a comprehensive list of all your company's social media accounts, including any accounts from other departments you may not know.
- Then, ensure that each account aligns with your company's branding using the same images, logo, and tone of voice.
- Next, evaluate the performance of each social media page to determine the type of content that resonates with your audience.
- Furthermore, identify the content type that performs the best and the one that underperforms. Analyze how frequently these pages are updated.
- Moreover, use the information you gather from the audit to optimize your social media presence and engage your audience.
- Finally, you can update your social media strategy to attract them to your website.
5. SEO Website Audit
SEO audit evaluates all factors that can impact your site's performance in search engine results pages (SERPs). These factors include:
- Links
- Keywords
- Content
- Metadata
- Page speed
- User journey
- Video optimization.
So, what is a website audit, and how to conduct a website audit to improve SEO? While it's possible to do a website audit independently using a website audit tool, employing a website audit service can provide more thorough answers in less time. If you're looking for the best website audit tools, consider a website audit service that can offer you the most comprehensive website audit possible, like seobase. 
The Benefits of a Website Audit
Website audits could improve performance, visibility, user experience, and security and provide insights. Here are some benefits of the website audit:
Comparing your website to your competitors.
A site audit is vital for analyzing the performance and improving its SEO. It allows you to compare your website with your competitors and identify potential sources of revenue. If you're wondering how to conduct a website audit, several website audit tools and services are available, including the seobase Site Profiler. This SEO tool can help you gather insights about your competitors' websites, such as how they attract visitors and generate conversions. Using the best website audit tools and services, you can learn how to improve SEO and brainstorm new tactics and strategies for your site. So, if you want to know what is a website audit and how to do it, start by finding the right tool or service for your needs.
Improving your SEO.
A website SEO audit can help you identify missed SEO opportunities and improve the performance of your website. Using an audit tool or service, you can analyze the content of your website and identify any misguided or poorly executed SEO practices. This includes; keyword stuffing or exact-match anchor text links. A website audit can also help you improve SEO by refocusing your efforts on users first and search engines second. Therefore, this approach will protect you from constantly chasing changes to search ranking algorithms, ensuring you won't resort to misguided practices just to rank at the top of the SERPs.
Optimizing conversion rates.
It's worth noting that website audits can help you re-evaluate the effectiveness of your site for lead generation and conversion. You can identify previously overlooked opportunities to convert visitors into leads by conducting a website SEO audit. This will enable you to add relevant CTAs and optimize your landing pages to boost conversions. A website audit is useful for analyzing your performance and ensuring it is optimized for lead generation and conversion. So, if you're wondering how to audit, conducting a site audit can help you optimize your website for maximum impact.
Enhancing your website performance.
It's essential to understand that website audits evaluate a site for its content and technical performance:
- A website SEO audit can help you inspect the robustness of your website's technical framework and infrastructure, ensuring it functions optimally.
- Additionally, it can assess how friendly your website is to search engines, making it easier for your site to rank higher in search results.
- Furthermore, it can determine how easily users can navigate your website to find their desired content.
Identifying issues early.
A quality audit can help identify issues hurting your SEO and conversions. These issues may include broken links, hidden content, and long page load speed times. By identifying and addressing these issues, you can ensure that your website is functioning optimally and traffic is not being diverted. Assessing your website's content and technical aspects will open up opportunities to drastically improve the traffic and conversions your website generates. Therefore, to conduct a website audit, it's essential to know what a website audit is and why you should do one. With this knowledge, you can effectively conduct a website SEO audit to optimize your website for maximum impact. 
How to Conduct a Website Audit
A website audit is your key factor to higher rankings on the SERPs. Here are some steps you can follow to conduct a website audit:
1. Run your website URL through a site audit tool.
To start a website audit, finding a reliable auditing tool that can help you analyze your site's performance is essential. You can receive tailored recommendations and test your page's speed and other critical metrics by running a website SEO audit. If you're wondering how to perform it effectively, utilizing site audit software is a crucial step in identifying areas for improvement and optimizing your overall performance.
2. Find technical errors.
To conduct a website audit, it's important to remember that technical errors related to performance, SEO, mobile, and security can negatively impact your customers' experience on your website. If you've noticed a high bounce rate or a lot of abandoned shopping carts, a website SEO audit can help you identify the root causes of these issues.
3. Identify SEO problems.
When conducting a website audit, examining SEO-related issues is crucial to enhancing your search engine ranking. To learn how to audit a website effectively, you should focus on meta descriptions and image alt text. Optimizing these elements can increase your website's visibility and attract more organic traffic. Improving your SEO strategy and achieving higher rankings on search engine results pages is essential.
4. Analyze design and UX.
Evaluating the effectiveness of your website's design and user experience in engaging your customers is essential. Some auditing tools offer heatmaps that provide valuable insights into how users interact with different elements of your design, including what parts of the page draw the most attention and what content is being read. This analysis can help determine how well your website design and user experience resonate with your visitors.
5. Assess website content.
Evaluating your current pages' performance is essential in learning how to audit a website effectively. Ask yourself questions such as "Is my content ranking well in search engines?" and "Is my on-page SEO and performance aligned with my traffic numbers?". You can identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to optimize your content for better results. Incorporating content analysis into your audit process improves overall performance and increases engagement.
6. Create a website audit report.
When learning how to conduct a site audit, it's essential to know that creating a comprehensive report that identifies site issues and provides solutions can be quickly done with the right tools. To get started, you can create an account on seobase and answer a few questions to generate a free audit report. However, some technical knowledge is necessary to interpret the in-depth information fully. In the seobase Site profiler, your report covers essential categories such as SEO performance and site security, listing individual issues and offering recommended fixes. With a complete report, you can begin making necessary improvements or share the findings with relevant teams in your organization to address the identified issues.
Wrapping Up Your Website Audit
In conclusion, conducting a website audit is essential to improve your performance and achieve your business goals. Using the right tools or services, you can identify technical errors and SEO-related issues, assess your design and content, and create a comprehensive report outlining the necessary changes. By the end of this post from seobase, you'll be equipped with the knowledge you need to conduct a website SEO audit and improve SEO for your website.
