Website audits are an important part of ensuring that your website provides a great user experience for every person who visits it.
Digging into the technical details of your site to find issues that harm its performance is a straightforward process. But if you haven't done one before, it can be hard to know where to start.
We've put together this actionable guide to help you perform your first website audit so that you can dive right into optimizing it for visitors.
Why Do an SEO Website Audit?
Technical issues will crop up no matter how meticulous you are with your website.
Whether it's an old page you forgot to redirect to a new one or insecure pages without an SSL, it's easy to overlook something. Running a website audit will help you find those problems. It will also help you develop an action plan to resolve them.
Regular auditing can benefit any website that you want to rank on Google or optimize for a higher conversion rate.
Running these types of audits can help you eliminate duplicate content, find broken links, find broken pages, and other problems that may harm your website's performance.
It's not a complete SEO checklist (you can find that here), but it is a step in the right direction toward a better site experience. It can also have positive implications on your organic traffic from search engines.
If you've never run a site audit for your site before, it's probably time to do so.
Site audits are also ideal at the start of any website redesign or digital marketing campaign driven by law firm SEO tactics. Regular website audits are useful for keeping technical problems under control on your website to ensure the best experience for visitors. They can be time-consuming if you do them by hand, but some tools allow you to run weekly or daily automated site audits.
Setting Up Ahrefs Site Audit
There are a lot of ways that you can do a website audit.
Most of these ways involve a tedious process of finding and cataloging issues and actions by hand. The easiest way to do it is by using an SEO audit tool that will automatically surface issues for you. Ahrefs Website Checker is a free SEO audit tool designed for quick and basic website analysis.
However, we recommend using the Ahrefs' Site Audit tool to crawl your entire website each week and bring any problems to your attention. This SEO analysis tool is designed to crawl all the pages on your website, similar to how a search engine would. It's powerful enough to identify a wide range of issues that could be affecting its search engine performance, including technical SEO issues, on-page SEO problems, and content quality issues.
It's also one of the easiest website audits for beginners to do.
To get started, go to Ahrefs and navigate to the Site Audit tool. If you don't have an account, you can sign up here.
First, you'll need to set up a project. Here's how to complete the initial project setup process.
Once you've set up your projected and verified site ownership, you'll need to configure the instructions for Ahrefs' site crawler. This includes setting a schedule for the crawl and telling the tool where it should start crawling. This tool has a wide variety of crawling options, but a basic setup will surface plenty of data for you to act on.
Before you start the site crawl and auditing process, Ahrefs also lets you configure more details for your project.
You can choose target keywords you'd like to track your site's rankings for and competitors you'd like to benchmark your site against. If you're not sure what keywords to add, you can always do keyword research and add targets later. At the end of that process, Ahrefs will start crawling your website.
With the setup complete, it’s just a matter of time before your first site audit is ready.
Reviewing Issues Uncovered by Your Website Audit
Once your site crawl is complete, it's ready for you to review and take action.
After completing your site audit with Ahrefs, you'll be greeted with a wealth of data about your website’s performance, structure, and SEO health. This data, while invaluable, can initially seem overwhelming. Here’s how to make sense of it, prioritize your actions, and understand the impact of common issues found.
Interpreting the Issues Uncovered by Ahrefs Site Audit
Ahrefs presents issues in a straightforward manner, categorizing them into errors, warnings, and notices.
- Errors: These are critical issues that can significantly impact your site’s SEO and user experience. Errors often include broken links, missing titles or meta descriptions, and 4xx errors. Addressing these should be your top priority.
- Warnings: These issues are of medium priority. They might not have an immediate negative impact but can affect your website's long-term health and performance. Warnings could include slow-loading pages or images without alt attributes.
- Notices: These are minor issues or recommendations that don’t have a direct impact on your site's current performance, but are good practices. Notices might include suggestions for improving HTML or CSS.
To interpret these issues effectively, you'll need to align them with your website's goals. For instance, if your goal is to increase site traffic through organic search, prioritize errors and warnings directly affecting SEO.
Categorizing Issues Based on Priority and Impact on the Website
Once you’ve understood the severity of each issue, categorize them based on their potential impact on your website. To do this, consider the following questions:
- How does this issue affect my site’s user experience?
- Is this issue hindering my site’s ability to be discovered through search engines?
- What is the immediate versus long-term impact of this issue?
Create a list ranked from high to low priority. High-priority issues are those that negatively affect your site's visibility and user experience, like broken links on high-traffic pages or missing SEO elements on key pages.
Medium-priority issues might not affect your current traffic but could impede growth, such as image optimization. Low-priority tasks are often those that affect pages with little to no traffic or are simply cosmetic changes.
Understanding Common Problems Found During Audits and Their Implications
Common problems found during an SEO website audit often revolve around site health, user experience, and SEO. Here’s a breakdown of these issues and their implications:
- Broken Links (404 errors): These disrupt the user experience and hurt your site’s SEO as they lead to dead-ends for users and search engine crawlers.
- Missing Titles or Meta Descriptions: This makes your pages less appealing or informative in search results, potentially lowering click-through rates.
- Large and Unoptimized Images: They slow down your site, negatively affecting user experience and SEO, as site speed is a ranking factor for search engines.
- Lack of Mobile Optimization: With the increasing prevalence of mobile search, a non-optimized website can significantly reduce your mobile user engagement and harm your mobile search rankings.
Each issue uncovered in your site audit has unique implications. By systematically addressing these issues, starting with the highest priority, you can significantly improve your website's overall performance, enhance the user experience, and boost your search engine rankings. The key is to approach these findings with a strategy that aligns with your website's long-term goals and user needs.
Ahrefs' website audits are well-organized, but all the different scores can be overwhelming if you've never seen one. Here's an interactive guide for what you need to know when you look at your site crawl data:
Older sites, larger sites, and sites that haven't been maintained may have a lot of issues to deal with.
Drilling down into specific categories of issues can make reviewing them easier. Ahrefs breaks issues into three categories: errors, warnings, and notices. Errors are the most urgent, and notices are smaller, less pressing items.
Once you’ve reviewed your issues, you can start acting on them.
Resolving Issues Discovered During Your Site Audit
There are two common ways to resolve the issues you uncovered with your SEO audit tools. The method you choose just depends on what's most comfortable for you.
The first way is to keep your Ahrefs Site Audit open in one window or tab, navigate to each page on the list, and resolve issues in order.
The second way is to export the issues from Ahrefs.
This is a good idea if you're not the person who does technical updates to your site. You can place this file in a spreadsheet and send it to the person who resolves site issues. You can also use the spreadsheet to track the status of issues.
Whether you decide to resolve issues by working directly from Ahrefs or a spreadsheet, an audit sets you on the path to improving your website.
While you're resolving technical issues, keep an eye out for other problems Ahrefs couldn't surface.
You may want to look for pages with UX issues, such as annoying popups, non-functional chat widgets, or a poor mobile device experience. Accessibility issues are another important thing to watch for. You can also run a content audit to find thin or low-value content on your site. Resolving these issues can go a long way toward improving your site experience for visitors.
Addressing and Fixing Website Issues
After conducting a thorough SEO audit using a reliable SEO audit tool, you'll uncover a range of issues that could be hampering your site's performance. Systematically addressing these problems can seem daunting, but prioritizing and tackling them logically can significantly boost your search engine results pages (SERPs) presence and website visitors' experience.
Best Practices for Systematic Resolution
Begin by categorizing the issues identified by the audit tool into buckets like on-page SEO issues, site speed concerns, internal linking structure, and content quality. This helps you understand the nature of your website's problems.
High-impact issues like slow page speed, which directly affects your site speed and, consequently, the user experience, should be on top of your list. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights can offer actionable advice here.
Look for Quick Wins
Addressing meta tags and improving content quality on key web pages can be quick wins. Updating meta tags can enhance your visibility in search results, and refining the page content can engage website visitors more effectively.
Enhancing internal links helps in distributing page authority and search engine visibility across the entire site.
Tackling High-Impact Problems
Some issues unearthed, such as poor site speed and mobile usability, are critical because they affect your Core Web Vitals, which are key Google ranking factors.
Initiatives like optimizing images, leveraging browser caching, and minifying CSS can lead to significant improvements in website performance.
Regular Website Audits
Continuous monitoring through tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console helps track website performance and search engine optimization progress.
Conduct comprehensive SEO audits semi-annually to ensure no new issues have arisen and to check the efficacy of previously implemented fixes. A structured audit checklist can guide this process, ensuring all aspects of SEO and website health are consistently evaluated.
Seeking Professional Help
Complex issues like technical SEO audit findings involving server responses, rendering issues, or extensive overhaul of your website’s internal linking strategy may require professional intervention. Don't hesitate to engage SEO professionals, especially when your in-house team lacks the necessary expertise.
Next Steps
After doing a full on-page SEO audit, you'll have a ton of information at your disposal to improve your website.
A great thing about site audits is that many of the issues you find will be sitewide. That means you can fix the error on one page, and every other page with that error will be resolved, too. The hard part is that fixing some of these issues takes some technical that many site owners don't have.
If technical expertise is something you need help with, consider working with a site optimization specialist.
At Rankings.io, we help attorneys get the most out of their websites. If your law firm needs help with site audits, technical SEO audits, or search engine optimization, contact us today. With our experience, your site can start generating new cases for you like never before.
