Table of Contents

Intro

Knowing which parts of your site are contributing to its success is
essential. Do you know which parts of your site are helping drive
traffic and which ones are doing their part to get your business closer
to its goals. If you’re looking for an answer, you’ll need to be able to
determine how your site is performing in the first place.

Your site’s content should represent the heights that your business is
trying to achieve. However, if you want to learn more about how your
site performs, you’ll have to perform a quality audit on the site. If
you don’t know what this consists of, it’s essentially a doctor’s
checkup on your site.

Over the course of your site’s lifetime, it will see plenty of updates
and changes. This will sometimes upset a website’s quality, and you’ll
need to perform routine audits to make sure that the quality is
maintained throughout each update. This will also help you make sure
that your strategies are accomplishing what you want them to.

To better understand what website quality audits are and why they’re
necessary, you’ll need to understand what constitutes website quality.
This article will cover what you need to know about website quality as
well as how it may impact your quality. By the end of the guide, you’ll
know more about the process that you need to go through to ensure that
your audit works well.

To conduct a simple website audit with a minimum amount of effort, check
out our Web Audit tool, which automates many of these processes.

What You Need to Know About Website Quality

Your website’s quality is essentially made up of your site’s health and
how it ranks when someone searches for it. The basics of SEO are
dependent on how well-assembled a website is, and this will determine
how easy it is for searchers to find it when they enter a search query
on a site like Google. If your site has quality content, it will rank
higher in the search results.

When your site ranks properly, you’ll find it at the top of the search
results page, and this will ensure that your site is seeing more traffic
regularly. However, your site will also need to follow the webmaster’s
guidelines so that it can be considered high-quality.

When content is uploaded to the site, it will need to pertain to what
the audience expects to see. Your content is checked against parameters
that are established in advance when you upload content to it. What’s
examined is whether or not the content meets the level of expected
quality and if this isn’t the case, your site may not be at the top of
the search results.

If you want to ensure that your website retains its quality, you’ll need
to analyze it and ensure that it follows a certain structure. When you
analyze the site, you’ll be able to determine whether or not your site
needs specific changes to match the criteria to maintain its quality.

How Does Your Website Quality Impact Your Organic Performance?

You can put all the effort into marketing your site that you want,
though if you don’t rank highly when people search for you, your site
may end up suffering. This means that your target audience will have
difficulty finding your site and your site will receive less traffic.

It’s essential that people be able to find your site organically because
that’s expected of businesses in the present day. To make sure of this,
your site needs to rank as highly as it can. However, this will only be
possible if your website is of higher quality. You will need to upload
content that is pertinent to the kind of service or product that you’re
selling.

As with any SEO-based content, it will need to be rooted in keywords
since that will make it easier for people to find you through search
engines. Using tools like our Keyword Finder will allow you to figure
out which ones will work best for you. However, your content isn’t the
only thing that’s important since you’ll also need to account for how
your site is structured. Google will drop your search ranking when you
don’t follow qualitative guidelines.

Your site and business’s success depend on getting enough organic
traffic, and if your content doesn’t perform the way you want it to,
people likely won’t even make it to your site. In the case of data
inputs that don’t perform the way you want them to, your site likely
won’t end up getting found by the people you’re trying to target.

What Affects Website Quality?

There are many different factors that will impact your site’s ability to
be found higher on search engines so that you can enhance your brand
value. These factors are essentially the building blocks of your
website’s quality, so let’s explore them.

Accessibility

People shouldn’t have to browse through countless pages so that they can
get to where they want to be when they reach your website. This makes
your site easier for your audience to access it. This will allow you to
make sure that people come back and it also bumps up your site’s value.

Accuracy

You also need to make sure that the content you upload to your site is
accurate and sticks to the facts. If there are errors in the info that
you present on your website, your website may end up not trusting you,
and it will also lower the quality of your site. If your data isn’t
correct, you’ll even find your search rankings plummeting.

Relevancy

You also always need to make sure that the content on your site is as
relevant as possible. If your content doesn’t apply to your topic, then
you may end up diminishing your site’s quality in the eyes of search
engines. Make sure that your content is relevant enough to meet the
needs of your audience.

Make Sure That Your Content is Uploaded on Time

Finally, you want to be sure that your content is being uploaded to your
site on time. If it isn’t, your site may not be considered active enough
by a search engine. This can result in its quality being diminished and
this would reduce your search engine results and performance.

What Are Website Quality Audits?

We’ve already mentioned that you need to have a quality website to
ensure that you have a strong presence on the internet. We’ve already
discussed what goes into determining the quality of a site, but we’re
now going to go over how you can audit your site. However, before we
explore that, we’re going to discuss what an audit is in the first
place. In the simplest term, a quality audit is an examination of your
site’s quality.

You’ll need to conduct a website audit if you don’t think that your site
will generate sufficient traffic organically. By auditing your site,
you’ll be able to determine what the issues are so that you have a path
you can follow to fix things. Common issues include content, structure,
and even the functionality of the site itself.

Along with that, you’ll be able to figure out which parts of your site
can possibly create opportunities to improve your organic search value.
The size of your business will influence the extent of the results that
you’ll be able to glean from a website audit.

For a new website, it’s important to conduct a quality audit as soon as
possible so that you can determine where you have issues. This will
allow you to change up your site and ensure that you can gather leads
organically, which is a crucial part of ensuring your success.

If you’re already established, quality audits can still be a crucial
part of making sure that your business thrives since you’ll be able to
see what’s working and what isn’t. By doing this, you’ll be able to
determine what opportunities you have as well as what’s possibly
endangering your organic traffic.

Why Are Quality Audits so Important?

When you perform a website quality audit, you’ll be able to determine
what isn’t working so well on your site. While creating content allows
you to improve organic traffic, you’ll also need to weed out any issues
to ensure that your rankings can be boosted. Audits will allow you to
discover these issues with ease.

Some of the issues that an audit will help you figure out include
duplicate content or links that aren’t working properly. By fixing these
issues, you will ensure that your website quality increases. The audit
will even go over the speed with which your site loads, which is another
factor that impacts site quality.

When you post an article to your site, it will dramatically affect the
site’s quality as well as the amount of traffic that it generates. Make
sure that this content always caters to your audience and that it’s
relevant. Audits will go over your content and see if any of your
keywords are irrelevant or if they can be misinterpreted by your
audience.

By performing one of these audits, you can radically transform your site
and start getting more traffic flowing through it. A quality website
will boost your search engine rankings and it will also ensure that your
site will show up higher in the search results when people enter a
search query related to what your business provides.

To sum things up, a quality audit essentially allows you to grow your
website and your brand, though it will need to be conducted properly.

What Do Quality Audits Do?

At the beginning of a website quality audit, you’ll need to crawl the
site itself. To crawl the site, you’ll need to use our Ranktracker
Website Audit Tool. This will allow you to easily gather all of the
relevant info about every web page.

Some of the main things that will be checked include duplicate content
as well as how well your keywords are ranking. If you want to make sure
that your keywords rank, we’d recommend using Ranktracker’s keyword
finder tool. The audit will also figure out how well each of your web
pages is performing. When the audit has been completed, you’ll be able
to understand what pages are pushing you forward as well as which ones
are holding you back.

By the time you’ve finished your website audit, you’ll have a lot of
actionable information available. This info will allow you to figure out
the following steps. Sometimes, you may have to remove web pages that
aren’t adding any value to your site. Don’t get emotionally attached to
them because they will lower your site’s rankings.

You can also change the direction you’re going in with your site’s SEO
to better optimize it. To do so, your site audit report will present
what you need to change so that you can have a higher quality presence
online.

If the audit was conducted successfully, you’ll be able to boast of a
site that performs quickly and that contains content that can ensure
that your audience is satisfied with what you have to present.

What Inputs Are Necessary for Website Quality Audits?

Using the applications that we mentioned in the previous section, you’ll
need to review and analyze each and every URL that is present on your
domain. It will be a lot easier to do this if you go over the XML
sitemap since this is what guides crawlers through your site. Keep in
mind that you may have to go over several sitemaps depending on the size
of your site.

Using SEOSpyGlass, you’ll also want to confirm your site’s backlinks.
This tool essentially shows you the number of people who link to your
site and who visit it. Links are a fundamental building block of any
site, so you’ll need to understand what’s going on with them.

To figure out keyword rankings, you’ll need to resort to yet another
tool: the Ranktracker Keyword Finder. This will allow you to figure out
how well your keywords are ranking. Knowing this, you’ll be able to
determine which keywords are working best. It will also tell you exactly
how that keyword ranks as well as the number of times people search for
it.

Don’t forget Google Analytics when you’re performing a website quality
audit. This will make it easier to see how much organic traffic you’ve
had over a certain amount of time. There are several ways the info can
be displayed, including through conversions, visits, traffic lost, and
sales.

Using a Google search audit, you’ll be able to learn more about the
search results page and the number of Google clicks you’ve had over a
particular period of time.

If this all sounds like too much software, you can always use
Ranktracker’s Web Audit tool that combines all of these functions
into one and presents them to you neatly and cleanly.

What Do You Get Out of a Website Quality Audit?

It’s understandable to be interested in the results that you can gain
from a website quality audit. What these audits do is essentially give
you a single report that you can refer to so that you can find what’s
missing in your site. The various tools that you’ll use to compile the
report will tell you exactly what you need to know so that you can make
the proper changes to your site.

There are various categories in each report that can be used to further
understand what kinds of problems your content or site is plagued with.
By splitting up your web pages into categories, it will be a lot simpler
to figure out what needs to be done to rectify these problems.

Keep in mind that audits aren’t only useful if you’re trying to make
changes to your site. You may wish to simply analyze the quality of your
site every year to ensure that it’s remaining consistent and that
internal factors aren’t pushing you the wrong way.

You can also use audits like these to create a better SEO strategy that
you’ll stick to for the foreseeable future. SEO and market requirements
will typically be used to categorize your results. What this means is
that your changes will allow you to boost your search rankings.

To meet the demands of searchers and the market itself, you’ll have to
carefully and correctly go over the results of your audit.

Building a Website Quality Audit Report

There are six primary sources that you can use to create a website
quality audit report. You’ll need to compile a good audit report if you
want to be sure that your audit goes smoothly in the first place. The
first thing you’ll need to do is find your site’s sitemap. A site with
no sitemaps will need to have them created. If there are several
sitemaps, you’ll have to include all of them.

After that, you’ll want to use an SEO tool to import that data. This
will allow you to figure out more about your site’s URLs. You will also
need to import things like files that are uploaded to the site, meta
descriptions, canonical tags, and even the number of words on every
page.

When you import the site’s data, you can then use SEOSpyGlass to figure
out more about your site’s backlinks. In the future, you’ll also be able
to use our backlink tools for this part of your audit. This will let you
know more about the links that are present on your site as well as the
web pages that those links lead to.

After you’re done with that, you can use a tool like our Keyword Finder
to figure out more about how your keywords are ranking. The Keyword
Finder report will even tell you which of your site’s web pages your
keywords can be found on.

Finally, you can use Google Analytics to figure out more info about your
site’s conversions, sales, and traffic. Keep in mind that this data will
only refer to your site’s organic performance. Using the Google Search
Console, you’ll be able to pull that data and then add it to your
report. This data will include Google clicks that lead to SERP
impressions. To learn more about your SERP performance, use
Ranktracker’s SERP Checker tool.

Cleaning Up a Website Quality Audit Report

While most of the data in a website quality audit report will be useful
in some way or another, there’s also a lot of useless info that you’ll
want to get rid of. This is known as cleaning up your audit report. Both
SEO professionals and business members auditing their own site will need
to make sure that a report is free of this extraneous info.

To get started cleaning your audit report, you’ll want to delete any
formulas that don’t tell you the info you need. This will ensure that
the only info there is useful to you. The easiest way to do this is to
copy and paste the report into a new Excel sheet tab while retaining
only the sheet’s values.

You can then go on to delete the other Excel sheet tabs since they will
no longer be of use to you. To ensure that your report is easier to read
through, you may even wish to color-code each of the tabs.

What Categories Will You Find in a Website Quality Audit?

Once you have your audit report ready, you can then go on to split it up
into different categories. This will make it a lot easier to go through
your quality report and analyze the info on it properly. This is
possible because you can go to each tag, perform an analysis, and move
on to the next one.

By doing this, you’ll be able to go over pages and fix their problems
based on the exact kind of issue you’re working with. This will also
ensure that no pages get left behind by accident. You can even use the
same tag to compare two different pages. Similar pages will have similar
objectives, leading to better and more precise results.

Let’s go over eight of the different kinds of categories that you’ll
have to account for in your audit report. Keep in mind that some audit
reports may have more than these:

Product Page

These pages contain any products that you may be selling and they’re
particularly popular for ecommerce websites.

Product Category

These pages contain various categories of products that your business
may be selling so that customers can find them with greater ease. Once
again, these pages are typically only for ecommerce sites.

Local Lander

Local landing pages are split up according to various places that your
website or business may be operating in. However, if your business only
operates in a single area, then your homepage will count as your only
local lander.

Lead Generation

These sites are designed to draw leads to your site, and they are often
set up similarly to local lander pages. However, these pages don’t only
focus on local audiences. Rather, these pages allow you to focus on
audiences from entire countries rather than more specific areas.

Blog Post

Blog post pages contain written content that your visitors will read so
that you can build rapport with them and improve your SEO.

Blog Category

Blog category pages are present on sites that have various types of blog
posts, so they may or may not be present on your site.

Resource or Guide

Resources and guides are similar to blog post pages in that they have
the same goal, but they tend to execute it a little bit differently.
This kind of content is longer and more in-depth.

Site Info

Site info pages let visitors know about terms and conditions, shipping
info, and these pages tend to be standalone. About pages and the
shopping cart are included in this category.

FAQs

FAQ pages address frequently asked questions that your customers may
have about your site or your business.

If you wish to make use of these tags, you’ll need to create another
column that includes the kind of category that the content you’re
looking at is a part of. While this may take a long time, it will save
you time later on because it will be easier for you to structure and go
through your report. You will have to do this for every URL in the
report.

Quality Audit Report URL Actions

When you’ve assigned categories to each of the URLs in your report, you
will also have to figure out which action you’ll take for each of them.
The right action for a URL will depend on the problems that you’re
having with it as well as the category that it’s in. These actions will
allow you to boost your site’s SEO rankings.

We’re going to explore nine different types of actions that you can take
to clean up your site. Keep in mind that you should select the action
that you take based on the issue that’s present on your spreadsheet.

Leave As Is

Assign this tag to web pages that don’t have any issues and that are
performing according to your expectations. It can also be applied to
pages that don’t have any value in SEO terms.

Update on Page

This means that you’ll have to update the info present on a page like a
resource or a blog post. This is usually due to the info on the
particular page being out of date.

Target With Links

Assign this to pages that should have SEO value but currently aren’t
ranking.

301

These pages are currently providing no value, so you will want to
redirect them to pages of your site that have higher relevancy.

Canonicalize

If two pages on your site contain similar info but both are currently
crucial, you’ll want to assign this tag to the page that you want to
focus your SEO value on.

Block Crawl

These pages may be crucial for your audience but may not help you rank
in SEO terms. This means that these pages won’t be crawled so that they
don’t negatively affect your rankings.

No Index

This tag is used to prevent pages from being indexed by Google. You’d
usually do this for a page that is standalone and of low quality.

404

This tag means that a page should be deleted because it doesn’t do
anything for your site.

Update

This means that you’ll need to boost the number of keywords that are
present on a page or in a certain block of content.

You will have to manually assign each of these actions to various URLs
across your site. To do this, you will need to look at the pages
themselves as well as the category tags that they have assigned to them.
Keep in mind that you aren’t limited to only a single action per URL.

How to Build Action Items When Compiling a Website Quality Audit Report

Once your report has been compiled, you’ll need to find a way to ensure
that the report is easy to understand. This will make sure that the
actions on the report are completed properly.

We’d recommend creating a separate spreadsheet in which you can assign
specific actions to the team members that are qualified to perform them.
These spreadsheets should contain the name of the team member, the page
in question, and the action to be performed.

You may also wish to create a column that notes the priority of a
specific task. You can even outline the steps that are involved in the
action that you have specified in a separate tab.

Finally, if there are multiple URL actions for a particular page,
outline which of them is the highest priority through proper
organization and ordering.

How to Create a Presentation Deck of a Website Quality Audit Report

A presentation deck will allow you to explain your actions to more
casual observers such as your clients, and these presentations are
usually a simple PowerPoint. Include what you have discovered as well as
the actions you intend to take to rectify any issues.

Start off by explaining website quality and what an audit is in basic
terms. You can then go on to mention how you gathered the info that’s
present in your report.

After that, you’ll want to explain what the category tags and the URL
actions mean for those who may not understand them. This will make it
easier for clients to explore and understand what you’ve discovered.

Make sure that you avoid clogging up your presentation with superfluous
info. Only include things like actions that your client currently needs
to know about as well as any insights you’d like to get across to them.

Finally, cap off your presentation with an action tracker so that your
client knows what actions you will be taking. You may also wish to
briefly mention your follow-up plans.