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It takes approximately 50 milliseconds for a user on your website to form an opinion on whether they like it or not. To put it another way, your website has 0.05 seconds to impress a visitor. 

Due to the extremely high number of websites available, a user running a search query is spoiled for choice. That inevitably leads to a lower tolerance for a website with poor website user experience.

To ensure your site can stand out from the rest, you need to conduct a website audit and identify what areas need improvement. Here is an in-depth guide highlighting how a site audit can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and boost your rankings. 

1. A Website Audit Helps You Correct Technical Errors

In the course of running your website, it's easy to overlook the technical nitty-gritty matters under the hood. The problem with that is the more these issues persist, the poorer your site will perform. As a result, conducting an SEO website audit helps you regularly bring to the surface any technical matters that can tank your ranking. 

Google arguably places a high value on user experience design (UX) when assessing websites. Part of what Google will look for while determining whether a site is up to snuff is the time it takes to load. 

A fast website means that a user will find what they need quickly. Thus, scheduling a regular site audit can help you keep a consistent eye on your site's speed to avoid a high bounce rate. 

Another technical aspect a regular site audit can help you nail down is how well a search engine can crawl your site. If, for example, you happen to have set some of your site's pages to 'noindex' it means a search engine can't find them. A regular site audit can alert you to such a situation so that you can make such pages visible and increase your traffic. 

A regularly scheduled site audit can also help you boost your users' experience by clamping down on redirects and errors. For example, a 404 error on your site is a major stumbling block for many users. When a user can't find the content they need, chances are high they will abandon your site altogether.

Relying on a consistent site audit can help you update your web pages so that users aren't redirected too often. Additionally, the audit can assist you in maintaining short yet descriptive URLs that contribute to better user experience.

2. It Helps You Stay Competitive

A competitive site audit is one that helps you identify who you are competing against in your field. Using a competitive audit, you can uncover the useful tricks your opponents use to become visible. Once you know the strategies that work for your competition, you can then adapt and improve on them to gain an edge. 

A competitive site analysis will help you breakdown the approach your opponents are using to satisfy customer needs. The idea here is for you to spy out any gaps that your competitors are not filling so that you can capitalize on them. Once you know the areas your customers aren't getting served, you can add that to your offering and become more valuable in your customers' eyes. 

An effective way to understand how well your competitors are fulfilling their customers' needs is to uncover the keywords they target. A site audit can help you hone in on customer intent during a search and compare that to what the competing firm delivered. The variance between the two will help you identify an unmet need you can then use to differentiate yourself. 

When did you last unearth a new marketing channel that could help you reach more clients? A competitive site analysis can help you do just that by assessing how your opponents reach their customers.

Once you notice a marketing channel you've never used bear results for your competitors, it's time to add it to your arsenal. You should test it out to gauge how to best use it in growing your customer outreach.

3. It Enables You Craft a Content Strategy

Anyone who handles small business SEO services will affirm that your website will live or die by the content quality you offer. Therefore, a content audit for your website is crucial to ascertain just how well your content is performing.

A content audit will assess the material on your website and gauge its strengths and weaknesses. From the results of this analysis, you can identify what you need to rectify when developing your material so that it delivers more exceptional results. Not only that, but you also get to understand what you're doing right with your content and improve on it.

For the material you developed before and posted, a content audit can assist you in figuring out how to repurpose that content. A part of this might involve looking for relevant material that isn't performing as highly and refreshing it with valuable, up-to-date information. 

A content audit is not only useful in understanding the material you have, but it also helps you identify that which you don't. By conducting a 'gap' analysis, you can compare your existing content with what your users are looking for. The gap between these two will inform the new material your content strategy can seek to develop. 

For visitors to your site to benefit from the high-value content you put out, they first have to gain access to it. A content audit is a helpful tool in streamlining the structure of your material so that users do not struggle to get to it. 

For example, through running a content audit, you can assess the effectiveness of the search terms you use. If you find out that the parameters are too broad, you can utilize the feedback from the content audit to develop precise search terms. 

Keep Them Coming Back to Your Website

There are way too many websites today, and as a result, users have little tolerance for a mediocre site. Your website has milliseconds to impress a visitor, and therefore you must keep tweaking it. A website audit is a critical part of your SEO strategy that will enable you to develop a site that keeps users coming back. 

Denver Media Group is your one-stop-shop for intuitive and SEO-friendly web and mobile solutions. Talk to us today to get an excellent website that can win in today’s cut-throat online market.