If you think your website could be performing better but your’e not sure where to start making changes, why not consider a conducting a quick Website Audit Checklist.
An essential starting point before you embark on the Website Audit Checklist is to identify who visits your website, what are they looking for and track if they are doing what you want them to do.
These tips are aimed at helping you to carefully review your website, so you can conduct a website audit by yourself and can track changes where they need to be made and fixed.
website audit checklist
10 tips to create a Website Audit Checklist
1. On-brand – ensure that your website has a cohesive colour palette or colour scheme to accurately reflect your organisation’s brand and that your typography and tone of voice is consistent across all content and ensure additional online resources and downloads are on-brand too.
2. Design – check that you have a format for navigation, headers, typography and hyperlinks, plus check you have a structured layout that ensures important content can be accessed/viewed easily this can be achieved by use of ample white space.
3. Coding – you may not be developer, but try and identify your sue of H1 headers and ensuing sub headers, minimise your images to ensure your load speed is optimised and ensure your coding is SEO friendly.
4. Ease of use – help your visitor to find information easily so ensure there is a header, a distinct body of content, sidebars for calls to action, a clear navigation bar with minimal drop downs to encourage users to easily read and digest content, equally pepper content with bullets and hyperlinks.
5. Quality content – research potential page content to make it relevant and topical to each audience category and ensure that it is continually refreshed so it remains engaging to give visitors a reason to revisit and in turn pass on and share sources and links that can stimulate a deeper user engagement.
6. Unique content – it is important that you publish unique credible content (not copied word for word from somewhere else online) as search engines will filter this out and penalise your ‘findability’ ultiamtely copied content undermines the user experience
7. Keywords – consider words and phrases that your target audience would search for and build this in to your headings and content by mapping out which pages they should appear on, however avoid over filing your pages with keywords and phrases.
8. SEO – to take full advantage of your on-page SEO, make sure each page has a clear title and the page URL has SEO value, in the Content Management System (CMS) you should add full meta descriptions and keyword rich titles.
9. Social Media – this needs to be fully integrated into your site, visible links to follow and provide social share opportunity to generate organic search opportunities. this must be supported by regular active social media interactions and engagement to encourage new website visits.
10. Mobile-friendly – it’s essential that your website is mobile responsive to make it easier for your visitors to view, use and share; indeed if you have a large website you could consider having a dedicated mobile site that is personalised.
So take one step at a time and work your way through this suggested Website Audit Checklist, there may well be elements outside your technical comfort zone but don’t be phased if you think there might be more to do than you anticipated. And remember, promote your website on wider offline/print collateral and keep up to date with analysing web traffic.
alexandrapatrick provides original, cost-effective strategic marketing services in Kent, UK. alexandrapatrick has particular experience and expertise in digital marketing, copywriting, public relations, location/destination marketing, healthcare marketing and marketing consultancy.
If you’d like to find out more about how we could support you to create a Website Audit Checklist for your business, email info@alexandrapatrick.co.uk or contact via Twitter.
