Website Audit Checklist Excel
soumya GhorpadeAn audit can help your business determine which pages or posts should be deleted, combined, or edited; and which are producing the highest levels of traffic or leads.
There are various free and paid tools that can help you conduct a website content audit, but this template allows you to collect data from multiple sources in one spreadsheet.
1. Sitemap
Sitemaps are organized lists of pages, media files and files on a website used to help search engines crawl and understand its content. They’re often utilized by search engines in their efforts to effectively index a site.
Conducting a website audit can be intimidating for small business owners without the budget for professional evaluation services. With this checklist template’s website audit check-list you can assess your website from top to bottom without breaking the bank.
An audit is an invaluable way to identify what’s working and what’s not on a site content basis, particularly when dealing with old, irrelevant, duplicate or duplicative material. Furthermore, this template from Google Analytics and SEM Rush helps identify these problems for you quickly.
2. Mobile-Friendly
Mobile-friendly versions of your website are an essential component of digital marketing. They make it easier for students to access information and engage with your school.
Google offers an easy way to check if your website is mobile-friendly using their Mobile Friendly Test Tool. Simply enter a URL, and the tool will display how the page would look on a phone – check for content cut off or needing scrolling in order to be seen clearly.
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, search engines will penalize it in rankings, which could significantly impact traffic. To stay safe, use this tool regularly to monitor all pages on your site and alert any issues as soon as they arise. Alternatively, view GSC’s Mobile Usability report to get insight into how your pages are doing overall.
3. Content
An audit is the practice of reviewing and assessing each page on your website for useful, relevant, up-to-date and search intent content. A website content audit helps keep your site fresh by making sure the information provided on every page is accurate and helps visitors decide to buy.
This light website content audit template leverages all of the best aspects of more in-depth audit templates above and applies them exclusively to core pages on your site. By leveraging Google Analytics data and manual inspection, this audit enables you to determine which pages require removal, edits or consideration based on criteria such as time spent on page or performance metrics below average or target levels.
4. Analytics
Website content audits involve reviewing page and post-level data such as keywords, meta descriptions, titles, headers, redirects, word counts and more to identify opportunities for search engine optimization. A content audit is an integral step in SEO as it ensures your website follows best practices and stays abreast of Google’s algorithmic changes.
Conducting a comprehensive website audit requires several tools and a considerable amount of time. Many digital marketers take advantage of free and paid tools to speed up and simplify this process.
Crawlers like Screaming Frog can collect vast amounts of data into a spreadsheet. Other tools, like SEMrush, provide more in-depth details for every page analyzed; click heat maps and scroll maps help give an understanding of user interaction on your site.
5. SEO
Content audits provide your website with an audit trail for search engine optimization and ensure traffic, leads, and conversions are maximized. They also reveal pages that need improvement to increase page rank and performance.
These improvements may involve backend issues like broken links and slow loading times, as well as on-page issues like keyword optimization, title tags and alt text for images. Sometimes even simple tasks like eliminating duplicate content or optimizing page titles to increase ranking can make a big difference!
Make sure that you have all of the right tools available to conduct a comprehensive site audit, including analytics and Google Search Console (or Bing Webmaster Tools). These will give an immense amount of data about how well your website is performing and any issues it might be having, while having these installed and configured on your site makes many of these steps in this checklist much simpler.