Redefining Comprehensive Website Audits for 2016
Google and other search engines are always updating their search algorithms. To this end, webmasters are looking for new ways to improve user experience, increase sales, and improve their SEO approach to generate better rankings.
To help shed light on ways to improve SEO and the overall web marketing potential of a site, a comprehensive website audit can be the best investment. However, not all website are treated equally and some are more sparse than others.
Ensure that you invest in a complete audit that covers all bases. Learn more below about what you should expect from comprehensive website audits in 2016.
Navigation and Usability
A usability audit simply looks at the good and the bad of your website from a user’s perspective. It is about testing for factors that make your visitors come back or abandon your website for good.
Your site should be user friendly; visitors should be able to find the information they need with ease, they should be able to access all the pages of your website and should get clear content from whichever device they are using. Navigation and usability website audits help you determine the behavior of your visitors and what you need to change to improve website-user engagement.
Technical Fluidity and HTML
You do not want to make it hard for search engines to crawl your site as this may cost you traffic and make you lose business. You thus need to conduct technical website audits from time to time. These audits basically look at how smooth your website performs.
Technical site audits look at server response codes and how they affect your website and SEO performance. These response codes or errors include the 301, 302 and the 404. These server responses are returned when a page on your website has been permanently or temporarily moved or when you have broken links.
The audit identifies broken links and redirects on your site. Very important to do regularly for ecommerce sites, technical audits further look at the friendliness of website’s URLs, loading time, XML sitemap issues and duplicate content.
Conversion Touchpoints and Funneling
This part of a website audit, which is very important for managing SEO and web marketing, simply looks at your website’s ability to convert. Its aim is to help you understand what is preventing visitors from buying anything on your site.
Even the best websites may have a low conversion rate due to minor factors such as lack of quality images, poor website layout, lack of enough products or services details and poor call-to-action statements or placement. This audit looks at which, among the factors listed above, makes visitors not to buy from your site.
Search Engine Optimization
Every webmaster wants their website to appear on the first page of Google. To achieve this grand approach to cohesive and success drive SEO, you need good content, great internal links, good use of keywords, backlinking, use of XML sitemaps to help Google bots find your site, site performance and much more.
While many seek website audits in the hopes of getting SEO-specific information, these parties are best suited to invest in SEO site audits that are central to SEO elements.
Not only do you need unique content but also well formatted and integrated with pictures and sometimes videos. SEO website audits look at how you have applied each of the factors above and what your site may be lacking in order to rank high in Google.
Content and Social Integration 
When integrated properly and fused with other SEO strategies, businesses can get a lot of traffic from social media. It is projected that traffic from social media will increase in 2016. A great business website needs to integrate their website content with their social media pages.
The website audits at this front looks at how you are using social media campaigns to improve your business and what you need to do to improve it more.
It looks at your strategies to grow your social media reputation, the presence of social media buttons on your website, how you share blog posts on social media, how you engage your social media fans and how active you are on social media.