When your Melbourne SEO agency taks about a site audit, they aren’t talking about an inspection of your premises – rather, they’re talking about your website!
The discovery phase is crucial in a lawsuit, as this is where evidence is shared and cases created.
An inspection by a structural engineer is the first step in a renovation project, as it determines what work is feasible and safe.
Think of your site audit as the SEO equivalent of both these important stages.
A site audit is step number 1 in any digital strategy. Arguably, it’s the most important part of your SEO strategy, as it lays the groundwork for everything that follows, including:
- Whether or not your site needs a facelift
- How much of the old site is useable
- How much optimisation needs to be performed
- The amount of development work required
That’s all well and good… but what exactly happens during a site audit?
What exactly is a site audit?
A site audit is, conveniently enough, almost exactly what it sounds like: in a nutshell, it’s a stocktake of your website. Your SEO team will go over your website with a fine tooth comb to see what is and isn’t working.
In particular, our Melbourne SEO team will focus on three main factors:
- Search engine optimisation
- Web design and appearance
- Technical considerations
In short, it’s about much more than just how your site feels and looks!
Many other agencies will only look at the first – we however understand that much more goes into building a good website.
During each stage, we’ll take notes about how your site performs on each of these areas, as well as areas that need to be fixed before we can start generating leads for your business.
1) The techy stuff
The first thing our team looks at before we jump into the content, the design or the marketing approach is the technical side of the site.
Your Melbourne SEO agency will get their developers to look at the back end of the site, taking a deep dive into the code.
Why start with the code? A couple of reasons.
For starters, it influences how easy (or hard) it will be to work with your side. Part of your SEO strategy may involve developing new pages, or parts of your site may need a facelift to improve its attractiveness.
Needless to say, if the code is a mess, it can be difficult to do so!
Not to mention, messy code (“spaghetti code” as we in the business call it) can impact site performance, and lead to long loading times or pages that simply don’t work, full-stop.
Finally, say your site is old. In this case, it may have been built using an older coding language that’s incompatible with new web design trends such as responsive design, or embedded media. Not to mention, technical support may no longer exist.
Once your Melbourne SEO agency is done with the code, they’ll also look at a range of other technical considerations:
- Site speed
- Cookies
- Plugins
- Security
- Viruses
All of these things are incredibly important because each one is like a cog in a larger machine. If one of them isn’t working then it can affect the others.
For example if you have virus. That might signify that your website is vulnerable and you need to improve your security. If you’re using the wrong plugins or too many plugins it can affect your site speed.
During our audit, we’ll identify issues with these particular errors, as well as what can be done to fix them
After our team have assessed the overall technical performance of the website, our team will start looking at…
2) User experience
Your website is a marketing tool, first and foremost. And one of the factors that can impact how much influence your website has over the customer is the user experience.
User experience includes a lot more than just your site’s appearance and design – it also covers:
- How pages link to one another
- Page layout
- Loading times
- Multimedia
- Information overload
- User friendliness
- Click to call button
- Location of booking buttons
A lot of this stuff is subjective – it can be hard to quantify something like user friendliness.
During this stage, your SEO team will use a range of tools to measure as many of these subjective issues – we aren’t going off of feel.
For example, say we’re analysing an informational page like a product page. In this case, the user wants to learn more about your product: its specs, capabilities, you name it. A good user experience in this case would mean easy access to the information they’re looking for.
One tool our Melbourne SEO experts use are heatmap tools. These tell us exactly which parts of a webpage are getting the most attention.
Let’s say the heatmap shows the all-important product information is showing up with fewer clicks and views. In this case, we know that the user experience is sub-par, as the user isn’t getting what they’re here for.
It could be because the information isn’t highlighted, it’s camouflaged amidst other information or it’s towards the bottom of the page.
That’s just one example of how our team can help you measure user experience!
3) SEO audit
And now, we get to the main course, the coup de gras, the main attraction: how your site is performing from an SEO perspective.
As an SEO agency Melbourne, we’re naturally very interested to see what results this part of the audit presents!
During our SEO analysis, we’ll look at a range of factors that influence how your website and pages are being ranked by Google, including:
- How well it’s optimised for keywords and phrases
- Loading speed
- Multimedia usage
- Inbound and outbound links
- Domain and page authority
As you’re no doubt aware if you actively follow this blog, there are a lot of different things that can influence how effective your SEO strategy is.
During a site audit, your SEO agency will look at each of these ranking factors and more, and measure how your site stacks up.
We might look at what types of keywords and phrases you want to be found for, and take a look at your metrics to see how well your site is currently performing for those keywords using a range of rank checkers and tools.
If we discover that you’re ranking poorly for your target keywords, we’ll start brainstorming why that might be the case.
For example, we may learn that you’re missing metadata in your pages, or that your linking structure isn’t making it clear enough to Google’s algorithm what each individual page is actually about.
Get your site audited by our Melbourne SEO agency
Performing a site audit is a bit of an art form. There are so many different aspects that are interconnected with one another – to get it right, you need the right team of people behind you.
That’s where our Melbourne SEO experts come into play.
Our team of online marketing professionals aren’t only good at what we do – but we’re passionate about it too. We have been working in this field since 2006, with a single goal: to help good people and businesses succeed.
And it all starts with an in-depth site audit.
Give our Melbourne SEO team a call to find out how your site stacks up. Our friendly team will be happy to answer any of your questions – contact us on 1300 88 64 50, or get in touch online.