What is a website audit?

A website audit is exactly what it sounds like - a regular audit, but of your website. It will conduct a complete analysis of your website, telling you what’s working and of course, what isn’t working. The audit allows you to examine what you have in place before taking on a project like website redesign. If that’s something you’re looking to do, check out our article on web redesign! 

The results from a website audit will offer insight on what you can do to achieve traffic goals, and where you are placed compared to competitors. Benefits of auditing your website include improving your SEO (Search Engine Optimization), enhancing website performance, helping to determine small issues in your website before they become major problems, and diagnosing content gaps. Website audits take into consideration overall traffic, where you sit in terms of search engines, and will offer insight on what you can do to make sure your users are having a positive user experience. We’ve compiled a list of some of the best and FREE website audit tools down below:

GTmetrix

GTmetrix has analyzed over a million pages and counting! This includes several top websites such as Microsoft, Hasbro, and Deloitte, to name a few. GTmetrix has features such as notifications when pages are slow, scheduled performance trackers of your site, and also provides performance reports that break down information in an easy to read manner. GTmetrix believes in making web performance optimization accessible to all, so check out the Basic (Free) Account to get a feel for the functionality of GTmetrix.

Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse is another free tool that is designed to improve your sites’ performance, along with improving user experience. It focuses especially on “core web vitals” (used by Google to rank sites in search results), while auditing accessibility and the SEO of your page. Lighthouse generates reports based on performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO, and the Progressive Web App (which shows web application performance). Google Lighthouse can be used by installing the Lighthouse Chrome Extension, and opening your site with Google Chrome. Click the lighthouse symbol in your address bar, and then “generate report”. Ta-da - now you’ve got a solid report to base any website redesign off of!

SEOptimer

SEOptimer is an SEO audit and reporting tool that recommends website improvements to improve your online presence. The reports from SEOptimer cover SEO, usability, links, performance and social media. The reports are available in several different languages, and are easily customizable in terms of font and colours in case you need to present these results. SEOptimer also provides a wide range of additional FREE (!) tools such as keyword and metatag generation. It is currently free to use, so head on over and check what changes your website could benefit from!

Semrush

Semrush has over 55 tools and reports available to users, and they span across interest areas such as SEO, content, market research, advertising and social media management. With the largest keyword database on the market, boasting more than 23.7 billion keywords, Semrush allows you to perform a detailed analysis of collected keywords so that you can use the ones that work best for you. We recommend you start with their web traffic data and market insights report, as this provides estimations on any website traffic and analyzes other competitors. Semrush offers a seven day free trial program which supports businesses in their marketing efforts. Check out this link for a more in depth description on what you can do with a free Semrush account!

SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is easy to set up and use, and has the added bonus of having tools that can be used within a couple of minutes. You can even set it up on each tool to get regular reports on how your site is doing. SEO PowerSuite offers a free license that includes four tools (Rank Tracker, WebSite Auditor, SEO SpyGlass, and Link Assistant), unlimited keyword tracking, and site crawling/auditing. The full list of available features with the free plan is located here.

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We hope that you find at least one (or all!) of these tools helpful, and that you consider using them semi-regularly in order to optimize your website and provide users with the best possible experience. If you ran an audit and are curious as to what to do next and where the improvements need to be made, reach out to us, we’ll be happy to help walk you through the next steps and see how we can help. 

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