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Ultimate Guide: How to do a website audit to boost SEO, usability, and conversion rates

website audit
By Benjamin Boman. Last Updated June 17, 2024

At the beginning of any web design project for an existing website, it’s generally good practice to do a website audit. 

A good and comprehensive audit of a client's existing website will help you convert more pitches for projects. It can help you pick up on some pretty big holes, and ultimately pitch (and win) a bigger project than merely reviewing the visual design.

This is a practice I used myself as a freelance marketer when looking to win web design and SEO projects.

However, while there are a lot of guides swimming around on the web for auditing a website, they seem to only cover parts of the process. 

Here is a more comprehensive guide or website auditing checklist, based on my experience, that I hope can help you in your own client work or form the beginning of your own checklist.

What is a website audit?

A website audit is basically an analysis and evaluation of a website’s SEO factors, usability, conversion rate performance, and security. The point of doing a website audit is that it will help you find and prioritize issues to be fixed.

What should a website audit include?

The website audit should include an analysis of four key areas.

  1. SEO factors
  2. Design and usability
  3. Marketing & conversion rate
  4. Security factors

SEO factors

SEO factors are those technical, off-page, and on-page factors that will influence the website’s rankings in search. 

In practice, this is centered around looking through the structure for the correct hierarchy and markups, looking through both internal and external links for any off-page issues, and finally examining your on-page content to make sure it is fully optimized for your target keywords.

The on-page audit is a mix of objective and subjective assessments. While checking content for plagiarism, for instance, can be an objective assessment, assessing content quality and usefulness is subjective and it takes a trained eye to get the audit process right.  

Design and usability

As a website designer, design and usability issues are probably going to be the easiest for you to examine. This will cover questions about whether or not the features of the website work and are intuitive to use. This will also examine whether the brand and website design have visual consistency.

Marketing and conversion rate

Websites are generally designed to produce financial outcomes for our clients, not just look good, so we will need to examine them from this perspective as well. 

Marketing performance can be analyzed by looking through the website's content to see whether it is both serving the reader and driving conversions. It will also check whether or not the client's website is properly tracking all conversion-related data such as events and goals on Google Analytics.

Security factors

Finally, there are security factors in general that you may want to examine when auditing a client's website. 

For me, these are checking whether or not adequate security plugins have been installed, an SSL certificate is properly used, and there are no other pending general security issues on the website such as unknown users or lack of backups.

Why do a website audit?

Aside from allowing you to present tangible outcomes that you can provide for your client by resolving issues found in the audit, there are four key reasons to do a site audit:

  1. Increase search traffic
  2. Reduce usability issues
  3. Increase conversion rates
  4. Improve security

Increase search traffic

Naturally, fixing any technical, on-page, and off-page SEO issues will help your clients enjoy increased rankings and organic traffic from search engines. Often, simple yet important fixes to your client's websites can significantly boost their organic search rankings.

Reduce usability issues

As a web designer, you will know that usability is a key objective of any client’s website. By identifying and resolving usability issues, you will improve the user experience for their prospective and existing customers.

Increase conversion rates

After reviewing a client’s conversion rate metrics, you will be able to make changes to forms, content, and user flow to boost their conversion rates. This can include simple changes, such as making sure a form is correctly formatted, to more complex tasks such as reducing the exit rate on a key page.

Improve website security

Knowing that a lot of you will have built client websites on WordPress, you already realize that there is a great security risk with these sites if left to their own devices. 

Having run a proper security audit, you can lock down a lot of the hatches that may lead to spam and other nasty malware infections.

What you should prepare

In practice, you will likely end up with a website audit template where you can copy and paste issues that you identify. But if you don't, now is a good time to start from scratch so that you can reuse the same document for future clients.

Also, make a spreadsheet in Google Sheets or whatever your favorite tool is, and be prepared to mark down issues as you go.

You will also want to ask for admin access to the following:

  • Google Analytics
  • Google Search Console
  • CMS access
  • Any information regarding target users/clients

How to do a technical SEO audit

The technical audit is comprised of the steps below. As you go through them, take note of any issues identified and begin populating the spreadsheet to keep track of them and for prioritization later.

Here is a starter technical SEO audit checklist:

  1. Use an audit tool for a quick first-pass
  2. Look for low-quality and unnecessary pages
  3. Analyze the backlink profile
  4. Check the website is mobile optimized and responsive
  5. Check the sitemap
  6. Check internal linking for broken links and structure
  7. Check Google Search Console
  8. Check site speed for improvement opportunities

Note that the technical audit doesn't include analysis related to keywords or keyword performance which may be part of a more holistic SEO audit checklist. 

More likely, keyword research, strategy, and analysis would be in a completely different service handled by you if you offer SEO services or another agency.

Use an audit tool for a quick first-pass

Thankfully, there is a myriad of options for SEO audit tools, so running a client's website through one of these tools for a quick first pass should be fairly easy to do. 

What we're looking for here is to pick up on any quick wins without having to do any manual inspection. So using an SEO tool makes sense. And there are free tools out there, too.

Personally, I like to use SEMRush they have a fairly comprehensive, and free, audit tool.

SEMRush

For the errors picked up by the tool, simply copy and paste them into your running issues spreadsheet.

Look for low-quality and unnecessary pages

This seems to be an interesting discussion around low quality, and thin content pages and how they affect search volume. The conclusion has been basically to remove low-quality pages and sometimes duplicate pages.

Another option here is to test removing some pages at a time and see how that affects your overall site indexing.

With your audit tool, you should have a list of all the thin and low-quality content pages that you can list and potentially remove from indexing. Some of these can also be removed entirely as they are ‘zombie’ or useless pages in general.

An example of these could be tag pages, unpopulated category pages or other thin content yet indexed pages.

Analyze the backlink profile

The backlink profile of your client's website is also an area where improvements can be made in SEO. Google says

“... if you think you're about to get such a manual action (because of paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines), you should try to remove the links from the other site to your site. If you can't remove those links yourself, or get them removed, then you should disavow the URLs of the questionable pages or domains that link to your website.”

analysis of a Backlink profile

An example backlink report from SEMRush.

Using a backlink auditor, you can discover what questionable sites are linking to your client's website. These may be spam or low-quality websites that bring your client's website's overall domain authority down and may be labeled as toxic or otherwise suitable for removal by your auditing tool. 

Each of these would be an opportunity for improvement that you can add to your running list of opportunities.

list of opportunity

At the same time, you will also want to look on your report for backlinks coming to the website which are going to broken pages, also known as 404s. 

Generally speaking, leaving these pages broken will lead to poor user experience which will affect the overall SEO health of the website.

Check the website is mobile optimized and responsive

This used to be a really big deal about eight or nine years ago, but it is still surprising to see that some websites are not properly responsive with a good mobile version. 

You can be a hacker and use right-click > inspect and use the device settings on your browser to check. For a more formal process, you can use a tool like the responsive design checker below to see the different device results to do a visual check that the website is rendering correctly.

checking for mobile responsiveness

Content Snare is nicely optimized for mobile from this mobile friendly test. Nice work guys.

Check the sitemap

A sitemap is a shortcut way for Google to understand what pages are on your website by clearly presenting the site architecture and links. 

What we will be looking for here is that it is easy to find and that it is correctly profiling all the pages on the website.

Most websites will use a plugin, for example, Yoast SEO on WordPress. Find the sitemap and check that A) that there is only one site map, in case of multiple SEO plugins, and B) that it has listed the pages, posts, categories, and tags as expected on the website.

checking the sitemap

Check internal linking

There are two things that you will be looking for in the internal linking of a client’s site; link structure and broken links.

Having the correct internal link structure can help Google more accurately understand the importance and categorization of your pages. The link structure refers to, in this case, how your pages come together, which pages are prominently linked interlinked, and from where and what categories are used.

Unfortunately, I haven't found any reliable tools for visualizing the content structure of a website other than simply reviewing the sitemap.

However, you should be able to get a feel for the overall structure by looking through pages and how to navigate to certain sections of the client's website. You will need to mark down the opportunities for streamlining and improvement to your running list.

checking internal linking

Oops. I found some broken links on my own website.

The next thing you want to look for now is broken internal links. This is also a problem from a usability perspective, but it is also generally bad from an SEO view too. You run the risk of leading users to broken pages and having them exit the site and reduce dwell time etc.

You can see from the screenshot here that there is a free tool that I use, but there will generally be a lot of them out there that will help you find broken links. You can also use something like Broken link checker for WordPress.

Check Google Search Console

For the very few who probably don't know, Google Search Console is the ‘mother ship’. It is the main place to analyze and understand how Google is currently indexing your website, and if there are any associated issues with this.

Example issues may be that while you have a lot of pages indexed, others are having issues and not being picked up by Google.

OK, so a few things to look for here.

  • Sitemaps
  • Manual actions
  • Security issues
  • Performance report

First, sitemaps are the easiest one to check. Go to the site ap section of Google Search Console and look to see that their sitemap has been submitted.

If there aren't any recent submissions that are up to date, this is a great opportunity to get a really easy boost from Google by making sure every page has been submitted. 

adding sitemap

Next, have a look at the manual action section to check that there are no issues pending. Google will list any issues here, such as penalties for getting bad links that must be dealt with as soon as possible.

Also, have a look in the security issues section for the same thing. If there is spam on the website then this will probably be blaring red.

checking site performance

Finally, have a look at the performance report tab. What you'll be looking for here is to see whether there are any major issues with sudden rank position changes or a massive decrease in clicks or impressions.

Should you find any of these, then likely you will need to work through the list above to see whether it is due to some other problem on the website.

Check site speed for improvement opportunities

Next up is one of the most frustrating aspects of any website improvement project. The speed test.

Go to Google’s PageSpeed insights tool and run a check for both desktop and mobile.

page speed insight

Not showing my mobile results until I have optimized them myself.

Note down the general scores here because you will want to reference them later when you make improvements to the site's page speed.

Now, you will need to try and diagnose a little bit about what may be slowing down the website in detail. For this, I'd like to use the Website Page Speed Test by Pingdom to get a more comprehensive report on the elements that can be optimized.

results of page speed test

Even Gary Vee has some work to do.

If you find any glaring issues here that need to be rectified, you can add them to your running list of opportunities for improvement.

How to audit a website design

Alright, here is the fun part for most people: analyzing the design and user experience of the website.

Here is a list of things that you will want to look at to make sure that you have formed a basis for your web design and improvement recommendations.

  • Check for the last website design update
  • Check for visual consistency
  • Check UX signals on Google Analytics
  • Check for responsiveness
  • Check user behavior analytics
  • Check the forms and checkout work

Check when the website design was last updated

This is a fairly easy thing to check. But knowing when the website was last updated, for example, two years ago, will help give you some context around the design changes that may have happened since then.

Even sites that are just a couple of years old will begin to look dated quite quickly, so it makes sense to check when it was last updated.

Check for visual consistency

If the client has a well-developed brand, they should have a brand book or some kind of UI UX design library to reference. Using this, you can review their website for consistency and make sure their brand is properly represented and demonstrated.

Check for visual consistency

Example website UI design kit by Captain Design.

Small changes to the brand consistency can make a website look very unprofessional, or give that ‘slightly off’ feeling to the website.

Here are some common areas where the design may be inconsistent.

  • Fonts sizes on articles versus pages
  • Padding and spacing
  • The proper use of white space

Another small but important point. Check to see that the client has applied a proper favicon to the website, too.

Check UX signals on Google Analytics

Now that you have done a visual design check, you can move into some of the data analysis parts of the website review.

With access to Google Analytics, you can now review all the major pages on the website and look out for key UX signals. Examples of these are:

  • Bounce rate
  • Dwell time
  • Exit %

To review these, go to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages, and set the reporting time period to the last 6-12 months

checking ux signals

Example page report from Google Analytics.

If the client's website has a lot of pages, you may want to narrow your analysis down to the top 10 to 50 pages in terms of importance and traffic.

Generally, a high bounce rate will tell you that either the traffic visiting that page is misaligned, or the content on the page itself is not serving the user adequately.

Dwell time on, the other hand is a good and bad metric. 

Dwell time could signal that users are interested and engaging in the content. However, if that is not the intention of the page, then it could be a signal that the page itself is confusing and unclear.

The exit percentage is also a good and bad metric. A high exit rate may signal that the page is not serving the visitor leading to lost engagement.

On the other hand, a high exit rate may also be due to the fact that a reader has been satisfied by the page. 

Ultimately these are all merely signals. You will have to do your own analysis to work out what the root of the cause really is and add this to your list of opportunities.

Check for design responsiveness

Although this seems to be less of an issue these days, it is still worth checking that the design is properly responsive. This can be particularly atrocious for tablet devices, which are a pain to design for.

However, this could be a real issue if the website has a lot of tablet users or if you notice that UX metrics above are different based on device. This could signal that you will need to investigate whether or not the designs are properly responsive for those devices.

Check user behavior analytics

This is a fairly fun one that most readers should be pretty familiar with. Now is the time to review the website’s behavior analytics tools, like Hotjar or something similar. This will help you detect whether there are any broken features or user frustrations.

Things to check include:

  • Screen recordings (if any)
  • Heatmaps
  • Click maps

What you will be looking for here is to find any areas for improvement in the user journey or experience. Add them to your list.

For example, a user spends a lot of time reviewing the client’s team profiles which may suggest that there is an opportunity to improve the information or capture more engagement.

This could take quite a long time, given the number of issues you could pick up here. So, for the sake of profitability, you may want to reduce your analysis to a certain timeframe based on the estimated project size of the website.

Check forms and checkout work

This is a particularly important area to test. Make sure all the forms are working on a website as intended. There is nothing sadder than realizing that an important form has not been working and leads have been lost. 

This includes:

  • Subscribe boxes on the footer
  • Lead magnets
  • Checkout processes
  • Correct redirection/notices upon completion

Be sure to give the client a warning so that they can make sure they remove those leads and notices from their database as you test them. Try to test with the same email and use a different message in each signup form if possible to help signal where that signup occurred.

Make sure you look in the plugins themselves if you're doing this on WordPress to see that there are no errors with the plugins in processing your signups. 

How to do a marketing audit for a website

This is a section of the audit that your clients will likely appreciate quite a lot. Analyzing the website from a marketing and conversion perspective.

What you will be looking for here is opportunities to improve the number of people who translate into inquiries or bookings and so on.

Here are some elements to review:

  1. Check on-page SEO
  2. Goal tracking on Google Analytics
  3. Click-through rates
  4. Review key user journeys

Check on-page SEO

On-page SEO you can make a huge improvement to your search rankings. Check whether or not the critical pages of the website, such as those with high traffic or high traffic potential, are properly optimized.

You will probably want to round it down to the top 50 or 100 pages depending on how much time you want to invest.

Things to check:

  • H1s, H2s, H3s, etc properly used
  • Page titles
  • Meta descriptions
  • Content length
  • User intent is satisfied

For tools, you can use Surfer SEO to do a content audit on the very key pages. Surfer SEO is a tool that analyses the top results in Google for their keyword density, length, etc for their on-page SEO factors.

Note that auditing the content will use up some of your Surfer SEO allowance in doing the audit, so you may want to do this only on some key pages to demonstrate that you are able to identify opportunities and add value here.

After doing the audit, add the key issues such as length and general optimization of meta titles and so on to your list.

Goal tracking on Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a godsend for marketers. So it makes sense then that you should check whether it is properly set up. A major thing to look out for, essential really, is whether or not goal tracking is put in place.

Goal tracking will help ensure that the website is properly tracking conversion data. It can help you attribute conversions to the source and see the user flow of conversions.

Goal tracking on Google analytics

Go to Admin (the gear icon in the bottom-right) > Views > Goals. See if the goals are in place, configured correctly, and tracking conversions as expected in the last 7 days.

Check click-through rates

Click-through rates are a good inflexion point for analyzing the effectiveness of a page. There are two areas where you want to check the clickthrough rates for. 

First is the clickthrough rates on the top pages on Google Search Console. This will help you identify whether or not you can improve the client's website from a search discovery POV, by encouraging more people to actually visit the search results.

The next is the actual clickthrough rates on key pages. These may be:

  • Home page
  • Product pages
  • Pricing page
  • Blog posts
  • Contact page
  • Other important pages

Analyzing the clickthrough rates on these pages will help you get an idea of the overall effectiveness of the website once a user has landed on the website.

click through rates

An easy way to measure this is to look at the behavior flow report on Google Analytics. Look for the drop-off rate on key pages and think through whether or not you could improve these by changing the design or information on those pages.

For eCommerce, this can be seen through the funnel visualization report under Conversions > Goals > Ecommerce > Funnel Visualization.

For these types of issues, you're probably going to be looking for problems with elements of trust or clarity in the checkout process. 

Review key user journeys

Now that you have analyzed goal tracking and click-through pathways, you can review the user journey from the visitor's perspective. Pick out a few key user journeys, for example making an inquiry, or booking a sales call, and observe the journey from their eyes.

This may bring up some interesting points where improvements can be made to increase conversions. A framework I like to use is the LIFT model by Chris Goward, after being taught how to apply this by chatbot founder, Paul McKeever.

The LIFT model explains that there are 5 elements of conversion optimization:

  • Relevance
  • Clarity
  • Distraction
  • Anxiety
  • Urgency

You can improve conversion by increasing the relevance and clarity of the page or process. Likewise, you can improve the process by reducing distractions and anxieties of the user. Finally, you can drive more conversions by increasing urgency.

You may want to limit your analysis here to just a few user journeys and just a few hours each. You can then note down any observations for improvement in your running list.

How to do a website security audit

This is an area that can be quite weak for a lot of medium-sized businesses and most small-size businesses. Unfortunately, it is very easy for a lot of these things to be missed by the average webmaster.

This is going to be a bigger issue for WordPress websites, but will still be a valid area for exploration for other websites too.

Here are the baseline points to check:

  1. Security plugins
  2. SSL and insecure elements
  3. Unknown users
  4. Out of date plugins
  5. Backups 

Security plugins

Security plugins are the backbone of WordPress security. After being installed, they will offer a whole range of tools designed to lock down any holes in a regular WordPress website’s security.

Check to see that the website is actually using a security plugin in the first place.

Should you be able to edit the website for the purposes of the audit, you may consider installing a tool like Defender Security or Wordfence to run the initial security scans on the website and see the results.

Example alarming result from Wordfence.

Both applications will give you a fairly substantial report, admittedly covering different things, so I use both. That will give you a really good overview of any pending issues on the site. For example, it may discover malicious files, openings for code injections, and spambot visitors.

SSL and insecure elements

This is a fairly obvious one, but definitely worth checking. Make sure that the client's website has an SSL certificate and that there are no insecure elements on the website.

The reasons for doing this are partly for SEO and obviously for security. The SSL and secure elements will help make sure that the information transferred between the website and the user is secured and harder to collect or modify.

jitbit

For using tools to do this, I like to use JitBit’s free SSL Check which is a free insecure content scanner. It will crawl the entire website so be mindful of this.

Unknown users

This is a fairly interesting one, and quite shocking if you do discover it. There can be malicious uses added to a website without the administrator knowing.

Check through the website, particularly if it is on WordPress, for any users that the admin may not recognize. You can simply run the list past the website owner to make sure that every person is accounted for.

Out of date plugins

This is another fairly obvious one, but make sure all the plugins are updated. Plugins are going to form the main source of vulnerabilities for a WordPress website, so make sure that these are checked and alternatives found if the plug-in has been abandoned.

A tool that you can use here to automatically update websites' plugins is MangeWP. 

If I have a lot of websites to look over and keep track of, this makes it really easy by connecting them all to the one system and having them automatically updated on a routine basis. It costs about $1 per website, though.

Backups

Finally, check that the website has automated backups. Backups are crucial for maintaining website security in that you need to have instances of the website that you can easily revert to before malicious actors or changes have been made.

If the website does not have backups in place, the webmaster may be stuck with having to completely rebuild the website or lose a lot of newly added features and content if the last backup is too old.

Closing Remarks

Alright, so we have covered four different areas of a website audit. We looked at the website from a technical SEO, UX, marketing, and finally security POV. 

Hopefully, this is providing you with a very solid base from which you can build your own website audit checklist. I suggest that you start here and research some other areas where you can easily add value by identifying issues that could come up for a client website.

Keep in mind that you will want to have a reusable document or checklist that you can start with for future clients so you are simply copying and pasting in the issues identified. 

An easy way to do this is to have a heading and an explainer paragraph for every analysis point on your checklist. Then simply copy and paste in the issues identified below the explainer paragraph.

If you want to take it one step further, you could even start profiling your own benchmark data if you have a lot of clients in the same industry. For example, you could start writing down the conversion rates you have seen for each of these points and the expected change/ROI after improvements.

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