Website Audit – What to Check

Why keeping your website up to date is crucial

Having just completed an audit of a website for a prospective new clients website, which wasn’t ranking well with Google, the client wanted to find out why. The site itself was built around 3 years ago. We discovered 4x key issues, which, whilst applicable to this client, anyone who has an older website in need of updating should take note of and do some quick checks to see if they fall into the same categories.

These are 4x simple checks you should consider reviewing and adjust accordingly to improve not only your Google rankings but also your prospective client’s experience when they find your website:

Make sure you have a responsive design.

Making sure your website is 100% mobile friendly and compatibility is now crucial. According to Google, more searches now take place on mobile than on desktop, so you have to make sure your site looks good and works correctly on the small screens, i.e. a responsive design.
You can do a quick mobile-friendly test here to see if your website adheres to the latest Google practices.

Update and edit your Title & Description tags.

If the Title and Description Tags weren’t formatted correctly in the first place, then you are doing yourself no favours. However, like everything times change. According to Googles latest practices for best SEO Title Tags should be ideally 55 characters with spaces and Description Tags between 150 and 160 characters with spaces, the ideal being 155!

Identify and remove any duplicate content.

Nothing can kill a website faster and drop its ranking than duplicate content. Duplicated content is also very confusing for Google, so the chances are you won’t get any good visibility, and even if readers did somehow make it to your website, duplicate content is seen as spammy. Review all your website content and get rid of this immediately.

Add new relevant and unique content

Google loves websites that are frequently updated. Review your existing content ~ is it up-to-date? Have you added new products or services? Can you add new images to the website (fully optimised of course)? Do you have add blog? All these factors can assist improve your SEO results and keep prospective clients updated.

Did you know one of our website services is website maintenance to help keep your website up-to-date, fresh and secure?