Twelve Benefits of Website Audits for Small Businesses

About 36% of small businesses are operating without websites. Which means they aren’t reaching the full audience that they could be, limiting their reach.

Unfortunately, failing to complete regular website audits can also impact your reach. Completing a website audit will give you a chance to recognize room for improvement. By making regular website updates, you can improve your reach and generate more business.

Here are twelve ways regular website audits can help your small business. By reviewing these benefits, you can discover new ways to boost your brand.

1. Improve User Experience

The higher you rank on search engines like Google, the more often consumers will see your brand. Google wants to provide its users with an easy, convenient experience. If your website is difficult to use, slow, or confusing, you could risk scaring away customers.

Regular website audits can give you a chance to improve the user experience (UX). A strong user experience focuses on speed and ease-of-use.

The easier your website is to navigate; the more likely consumers will find what they’re looking for. They’ll likely click around, explore, and dwell on your site as well. As consumers explore and remain on your site, they’ll improve your clickthrough rate and dwell time.

Both metrics can improve your search engine rankings.

If people leave your site without clicking around, it can increase your bounce rate. A high bounce rate can have a negative impact on your rankings.

UX Design

There are a few ways you can improve the user experience. It’s important to note that UX design trends change all the time. By completing regular audits, you can recognize the latest trends and implement them across your site.

A few UX design trends to consider include:

– Mobile optimization

– Navigation

– White space (which gives your content room to breathe)

– Page speed

You can use Google’s Page Speed Insights to determine what’s slowing your site down.

You can also improve readability by using:

– Bulleted and numbered lists

– Shorter sentences and paragraphs

– Better font size and style choices

– Contrasting colors between text and backgrounds

The easier your content is to read; the more likely people will linger on your site.

Mobile Optimization

Is your website mobile-optimized? About 66% of Americans check their phones 160 times every day. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, it could impact the user experience.

Google also uses mobile-first indexing to determine search engine rankings. If your website isn’t adjusted for mobile devices, Google will rank competitors ahead of you. Maintaining a mobile-friendly website will improve your rankings.

It can also improve the user experience and encourage mobile users to click around your site.

2. Remain Relevant

It’s not enough to update your design to improve the user experience. You also need to update your website to remain relevant. Otherwise, your site can look old, outdated, and behind the times.

About 38% of users will stop interacting with a website if the layout is unattractive. If your website has become outdated, consumers might think your company is too.

By making regular website updates to your design, you can remain relevant. Improving your website’s design can help you stand out from competitors.

3. Update SEO

Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second. That’s 3.5 billion searches a day. If your website isn’t ranking on Google’s search pages, you’re losing customers.

With search engine optimization (SEO), you can boost your reach. SEO can also help you:

– Generate more brand awareness

– Improve your brand authority and credibility

– Position your website ahead of the competition

– Attract more website visitors

– Increase leads, conversions, and online sales

– Boost your ROI

In fact, 66% of marketers claim that improving their SEO is a top inbound marketing priority. As the top method for driving traffic to content websites, you can’t ignore your SEO strategy. Otherwise, you’ll fall behind competitors, allowing them to reach your would-be customers.

To maintain a strong SEO ranking, you need to understand who your customers are and what they’re searching for online. Your customers can develop new interests throughout the year. Regular website audits allow you to keep up with those interests and improve your SEO accordingly.

Google also makes changes in SEO throughout the year. If you’re not keeping track of changes to the search algorithm, it could impact your search engine rankings.

By making regular website updates, you maintain your ranking and keep improving.

Once you reach the top of a search page, you can attract more customers than ever before.

4. Optimize Keyword Distribution

To improve your search engine rankings, you’ll need to distribute your keywords. Google’s bots will scan your content to determine which keywords should rank for. An audit allows you to analyze your pages and improve your rankings.

For example, your keywords should appear in:

– The URL

– A header

– The opening and closing paragraphs

– The body text

– An image alt tag

– The page’s meta description

You can also use an audit to determine the frequency of a target keyword. If the keyword appears too often, Google might penalize you for keyword stuffing.

By completing regular audits, optimization for keywords will become much easier.

5. Discover Repurposing Opportunities

Google looks for unique, fresh content when determining search engine rankings. Regular audits can help you identify opportunities for repurposing your content.

For example, you can turn a series of blog posts into an eBook. You might want to turn an infographic into a detailed blog post. Either way, one piece of content can turn into three or four new pieces.

Repurposing your content into new formats will help you create fresh content throughout the year.

6. Pinpoint Content Problems

Regular audits can also help you recognize content problems that are hurting your search engine rankings.

For example, you might notice a broken link on your site. You can redirect the broken link to a working page to improve the user experience. You can also update tags and categories on your blog.

Otherwise, you can adjust your content to include personalized messages that appeal to your target audience.

Recognizing issues with your content can help you make improvements. Otherwise, letting those issues linger can impact the user experience and your rankings.

7. Evaluate Your Content’s Quality

Companies with blogs have 434% more indexed pages than companies that don’t. It’s not enough to upload content to your blog, though. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, you also need to make sure you’re producing high-quality content.

Remember, Google focuses on providing its users with fresh, high-quality content.

Google’s crawlers can determine when a piece of content is repetitive, too-short, or invaluable. If Google thinks your content is low-quality, it could impact your search engine rankings. Regular audits can help you review your content and make improvements.

8. Improve Your Structure

Is your website easy to navigate? Can visitors skim your content to find the information they need? Are your tags organized and easy to find?

You can make regular website updates to improve your site’s structure. When everything is easily accessible to the reader, they’re more likely to find what they need. Once they find the content they’re looking for, they’ll linger on your website.

Otherwise, your bounce rate might increase, which can have a negative impact on your rankings.

Content audits can help you determine how to better present the information on your site.

9. Complete a Backlink Analysis

Backlinks are links that send consumers to your website. Backlinks can improve your domain authority and boost your SEO ranking. A website audit that includes a backlink analysis can help you determine your domain authority.

It can also tell you how many backlinks you have.

Google prioritizes quality over quantity. It’s important to make sure you have backlinks from high-authority websites. Improving your domain authority will give your search engine rankings a boost.

10. Maximize Conversion Rates

Is it easy for consumers to convert on your website? Can they fill out a form, call your business, or shop on your site?

An audit can help you maximize your conversion rates. You can improve your call-to-action, adjust buttons, and develop new conversion opportunities.

Then, you can create a seamless sales funnel on your site, allowing you to generate more conversions.

Making changes in SEO can impact your conversion rates, too. Which keywords are generating the most conversions? Which pages are failing?

By completing a regular website audit, you can improve your conversion rates and increase your ROI.

11. Find Content Gaps

You might not realize that areas of your website are lacking helpful information.

Google prioritizes helpful, informative websites. What value are you offering your customers?

You can fill content gaps by offering consumers with helpful, actionable information. It’s also important to support any claims you make with research and data. Using external links to reputable sources can benefit your search engine rankings.

You can also determine which topics you’re not covering. By creating posts that cover these topics, you can expand your audience and convert more visitors.

12. Keep Up with the Trends

Remember, Google’s search engine algorithm changes throughout the year. These changes in SEO often cause new trends to emerge.

Voice Search

For example, Google’s BERT update relies on machine learning to gain a better understanding of the user’s search intent. Voice search and assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google are impacting SEO too. In fact, voice searches will account for 50% of all searches by the end of 2020.

About 35.6 million Americans are already using voice-activated devices. One in six Americans owns a smart speaker.

To appear for voice searches, you’ll need to keep up with your keyword research. What questions are consumers asking their voice-activated devices? Chances are these searches are direct questions.

You can appear for these searches by using the user’s question as your main keyword. Then, answer the question in a quick, short summary. Google prefers short answers for voice search queries.

These answers average at about 29 words.

After you answer the consumer’s question, you can provide more information throughout the rest of your post. Completing regular website audits will help you recognize which posts you can adjust for voice searches.

Featured Snippets

Other changes in SEO include featured snippets and the zero-click position.

Featured snippets are short answers that appear above organic search results. These answers appear as summaries, lists, bullet points, videos, and other formats. We call this top-of-page position “zero-click” because consumers no longer have to visit your website.

Instead of clicking on a link, Google users can read the featured snippet to find the answers they need.

By completing regular website audits, you can discover opportunities to rank for the zero-click position.

You’ll need to adjust the formatting of your posts for featured snippets. For example, do you have a post that lists information? You can have that post appear for a listed featured snippet by outlining the headings at the beginning of the post.

You can also adjust your content for position zero by adding quick summaries to the beginning of your content.

Video Content

About 50% of consumers will search for a video related to a product or service before visiting a store. By 2022, video content will account for about 80% of all web traffic.

Completing regular website audits will help you recognize which blog posts you can convert into videos. You can even turn a single, lengthy blog post into a video series. By creating video content, you can appeal to a larger target audience.

Video content can also improve the dwell time on your website. Remember, low clickthrough rates and high bounce rates can impact your search engine rankings. As people click on your videos and watch your content, these metrics will improve.

Then, your ranking will improve as well.

Your YouTube videos can also appear in position zero. Auditing your website to find content you can turn into videos can help you rank above the competition. As you improve your ranking, you can attract more website visitors and improve sales.

Stay Successful: Twelve Benefits of Regular Website Audits

By scheduling regular website audits, you can make improvements to your site throughout the year. Then, you can improve your search engine rankings, expand your reach, and generate more business.

Making regular website updates and improving your strategy can help you maximize your revenue.

Does your digital marketing strategy need improvements? Request a digital marketing review today.