SEO Pitalls: Not auditing your existing site

Mistake #3 of Hubspot’s 6 SEO Pitfalls to Avoid During Your Next Website (Re)Design is Not doing an audit of your existing site.

If you are redesigning your website, make sure you take the time to examine your current site to see what is working and what is not. If it’s working, keep doing it. If it’s not, this is your chance to figure out where the opportunities lie to help your site rank better in search engines.

There are many reasons why you would conduct an audit of your existing site. Maybe you are not getting as much traffic as you hoped for. Or, maybe you are getting traffic but visitors don’t seem to be engaged in what you’re selling them. Perhaps your website is old and neglected and you need to identify what pages need to be totally revamped, or removed. Regardless of why you are redesigning your website, a properly conducted audit will help you to identify what content delivers better results and what content may be hurting your website. The audit will help you to establish how popular your content is and if it is meeting your visitor’s expectations. For example, a high bounce rate or low time spent on a website might indicate that visitors aren’t engaged with your content, and leave your site right away.

Below are some key metrics you may want to consider when auditing your website:

Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors
Bounce rate
Average time visitors spend on your site
How many new vs. returning visitors does the website achieve
Top performing keywords (in terms of rank, traffic, and lead generation)
Number of inbound linking domains
Total number of total pages indexed
Total number of pages that receive traffic
Top landing pages
Content review – do the main pages of the site have enough content? Which pages are receiving the most traffic? Which pages are visitors spending the most time on?

A website audit is the first step in the path to redesigning a website. This process will provide you with the insight and context you need to make informed design decisions. An audit is not necessarily about finding what is wrong with your site, but rather to find a list of things that can be changed to help make your site rank better in search engines.

Looking to redesign your website but aren’t sure where to start? That’s what we’re here for!