The audit is an essential step in the life of your website! Whether as part of a site redesign or simply to understand a drop in performance. You must be able to analyze your website and identify any problems. You can also get in touch with Website Development Services Company Today we list FREE tools that allow you to audit the key points of your website on your own!
What is a website audit?
As we have planned to list you several free website audit tools as long as you are sure of what we are talking about! 😉
A website audit is the inventory at a given moment of the different characteristics of your website.
An audit allows you to better understand the performance of your site and identify anomalies and areas for improvement.
The audit of your website can be broken down into three fields: technical performance , SEO and User Experience (UX).
When should you audit your website?
In general, we choose to do an audit when we notice a significant drop in conversion on our site . This is often the signal that alerts us to a possible anomaly.
In reality, even if you do not observe any particular decline, an audit of your site must be done regularly . It’s a bit like maintaining your car, you don’t just have to wait for a red light to come on on the dashboard!
A regular check-up allows you to identify problems before they become disasters for your site and your business!
1st tool: GOOGLE ANALYTICS to analyze your site traffic
It is essential to integrate a traffic monitoring tool into your website . If you do not have one, we strongly advise you to install Google Analytics on your site today!
When this is the case, you will be able to analyze different key traffic data!
If Google Analytics is already installed , so much the better! You will be able to use it for your audit!
Here are the different points you need to consider:
– Traffic volume
The first point to analyze is the volume of traffic . Has your site suffered a drop in traffic?
To answer this question you have to visualize the number of visitors over different periods: one month, 6 months, one year… Whatever seems relevant to you in relation to your activity.
Remember to compare this data to the previous year as some decreases or increases may simply be due to seasonality.
After this analysis you will be able to know if there is a problem related to the frequentation of your site.
– Acquisition channels
This is a very important point in analyzing your traffic! Identifying a drop in traffic is one thing, but understanding the source is another!
It is thanks to the analysis of your different acquisition channels that you will be able to find the origin of this loss of traffic!
Anyway, analyzing your traffic sources is very important because it allows you to become aware of the importance of each channel in your traffic acquisition.
Study each channel and make comparisons by period, month, semester, year… Identify the channel or channels that have suffered a drop in traffic.
A drop in organic traffic?
Your website has most likely suffered a drop in positioning on one or more traffic-bearing keywords ! This will therefore require further analysis!
A drop in paid traffic?
Have you reduced your Ads budget? If yes ! This is probably a “normal” drop .
On the other hand, if your budgets have not changed , there are surely things to improve in your campaigns!
If your Google Ads campaign is managed by an agency , do not hesitate to ask them to take care of the necessary optimizations!
A drop in traffic from your social networks?
Have you reduced the pace of your publications ? Has your editorial line changed? How are your social networks doing ?
2nd Tool: GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE to analyze performance on Google
This really useful tool allows you to collect key data
If you are not yet a fan of this awesome tool, I advise you to quickly add your site to this monitoring console to start collecting key performance data.
To help you use it, you can consult our article dedicated entirely to the Google Search Console and its features .
– Impressions on the search network
The first point to check is the level of your impressions . A drop in impressions is very often accompanied by a drop in traffic.
Look at the state of your curve over the last 3 months and observe its evolution over the year, then compare the different periods with those of last year.
Again, a drop in impressions can be linked to a drop in searches simply due to seasonality.
– Clicks
Well, it’s a bit THE data not to be overlooked during your audit. A drop in clicks will inevitably be associated with a drop in organic traffic.
Yes who says fewer clicks says fewer visitors!
And that is something to observe in the same way as for impressions, comparing each period.
What is important to determine in this analysis are the queries that lost the most clicks . If your site has received fewer clicks for a given request then this means in most cases that your positioning has dropped.
This is why it is important to audit … we give it to you in a thousand: the average position!
– The average position
If this data remains an imprecise “average” of the positioning of your website , it nevertheless remains a good indicator of your referencing.
A drop in click is usually linked to a drop in positioning . This is why it is essential to identify the keywords whose positioning has evolved downwards.
– The cover
This time we enter the more technical part of the audit ! It is the analysis of the indexing status of the pages of your website!
Some of your pages may end up de – indexed or not at all due to a quality or performance problem.
With the Google Search Console you are able to identify all the pages on your site that have technical problems such as 404 error pages for example and mobile ergonomics anomalies.
Thanks to the audit of the coverage status of your site, you can thus highlight the pages that handicap the performance of your website.
3rd tool: PAGE SPEED INSIGHTS to assess your Core Web Vitals
Another Google tool … We promise you we don’t have any action with them! But here is another tool that Google makes available to you for free to help you audit your website’s Core Web Vitals!
You are surely aware of the importance of these metrics in the SEO of your website! And if you don’t know, we let you read our article on the use of Core Web
For almost 1 year now, Google has been using your website’s essential web signals as SEO criteria.
Page Speed Insights is an online tool that allows you to test web page performance and get key data about your page loading speed.
You then obtain a performance score from 0 to 100 (100 being the maximum score that your web page can obtain).
If your score is between 0 and 49 then there are probably a lot of optimizations to do!
Be careful however because most of the suggested modifications concern the technical aspects of your website and will be more intended for people experienced in CSS, JS and other components specific to web pages.
So don’t panic if you don’t understand all the data that will be brought to your attention! It’s all about knowing if it’s okay or not and if you can do something about it!
If you do not have the skills to intervene on certain points , do not hesitate to call on the professionals!
4th tool: SCREAMING FROG, for both a technical and SEO audit
• 4th Screaming Frog tool: for both a technical and SEO audit
Screaming Frog is freemium software that exists in a free limited version and a paid full version.
We are talking to you today about its free version which is already very powerful from an analysis point of view!
The free version allows you to analyze 500 URLs , if your site has more, unfortunately you will not have access to all its performance data!
If your website has less, that’s great! You will have exhaustive data of the web pages of your site!
Thanks to Screaming Frog you can audit a multitude of technical components . Here are the most important things to check:
– Title and h1 tags
The crawler allows you to find the content of your Title, h1 and h2 tags!
You then visualize in a table all the SEO titles of your web pages!
The tool then clearly tells you if they have SEO anomalies:
– Titles too long or too short
– Duplicate titles
– Title identical to H1
– Missing titles
All you have to do is correct the problems found on the pages concerned.
– Volume of content on your pages
Screaming Frog also gives you data on the volume of text that makes up your pages. It tells you which pages have weak content (less than 200 words).
In general, a page whose content is weak is less likely to be well referenced than a page whose content is more elaborate. (Although there are obviously many other SEO criteria)
– URL in error
This tool also allows you to identify which pages have errors on your site.
A site that has many error pages can see its SEO penalized!
Screaming Frog allows you to easily identify them and take action to fix them!
The HTPP codes that should hold your attention are mainly codes 404 and 500 and in general all codes starting with 4XX and 5XX, which are synonymous with errors.
