For your website to be effective, you have to evaluate your website from time to time. Website assessment may be a tedious process, but it can make your website perform to its full capacity.
Digital marketers are always finding new ways to outrank their competitors. But if you and your competitor are using the same techniques for SEO, then your website is no better than theirs. Thus, competitor analysis is integral when doing a full website assessment.
This is when website assessment takes a crucial role. This guide will help you optimize your website further through assessment. So sit back and grab some pen and paper. We’ll discuss everything you need to know about website assessment.
What is Website Assessment?
Every website needs maintenance every once in a while. There may be usability issues that are undetected unless you make a complete website assessment. These issues can affect your website’s performance and authority.
Website assessment is the method of testing your website to see if there are underlying issues. It’s a measure of how well your site performs and its weaknesses.
However, you don’t need to evaluate your website every day. You can assess your website monthly or even quarterly, provided that your site is performing well.
What Do I Gain From Website Assessment?
As a website owner, there are a lot of benefits to evaluating your website. You’ll be able to see your website from the viewer’s perspective and see what’s working and what’s not. You will also see if your site is swarmed with ads and pop-ups.
Your blog will also improve if you examine your website. Is your blog fully optimized? Is your content beneficial for your readers? If not, you can fill these content gaps and improve your site’s authority.
And, of course, the best benefit you can get from evaluating your website is increased conversion.
What Do I Evaluate From My Website?
When doing a web assessment, you can’t just assess everything on your website. It will take too much of your time and effort. Only assess what you need to assess on a website.
Here’s a list of the things that you need to evaluate:
a. SEO
The first thing that you need to check when doing an assessment is your SEO. Check if your website is ranking well and examine where you lack. This includes all the technical aspects of SEO.
Evaluate the on-page and off-page SEO of your website and audit the technical issues that you encounter. This could affect your website’s performance on search engines.
To evaluate other types of SEO, you can read more about it here.
b. User Engagement
User engagement can be a measure of how valuable your website is for your visitors. If your visitors find your website useful, they’re more engaged in your content. This could lead to a more profitable outcome for your website.
You can assess user engagement through user behavior analytics. If you know how they (visitors) behave once they land on your website, you’ll have a holistic idea of what they’re looking for.
c. Branding
Aside from your company’s branding, you can also measure the strength of your branding through your referring domains. You can check for unlinked brand mentions and gain new referring domains. This will strengthen your website’s authority.
d. Look and Feel
Your website’s appearance plays a big role to keep your visitors engaged on your website. To make a professional website, you should make it look and feel professional.
Take a long look at your site and see which elements do not fit the mix. Feel free to remove or edit elements that are unnecessary for your website. Remember that a clean and simple design is a professional design.
e. Website Security
You should take a moment to check your website security again. This will prevent any exploitation of your website. If your website gets hacked, search engines and visitors will lose trust in your website.
Enhance your website security to make sure that no important website data will leak. This will protect your website from random cyberattacks.
f. Accessibility to Search Engines
For your website to be indexed by search engines, you have to optimize your sitemap for site crawlers as well. If site crawlers were able to navigate between pages with ease, your website will be favored by search engines.
If your site is navigable by search engines, it’s a good indicator that your website’s navigation is easy and accessible to your visitors.
Factors to Consider When Evaluating Your Website
1. Technical SEO Parameters
The first thing that you need to examine in your website is your technical SEO parameters. If your visitors have to wait for a few seconds each time they load a page, they will leave your site without hesitation. This will also leave a bad user experience.
These technical SEO parameters will determine your website’s performance on search engines. To improve your website’s performance, you need to evaluate 4 different parameters in SEO. These parameters are:
- Website loading speed
- Functionality and Use
- Content
- Compatibility
You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to measure your site loading speed. This tool will give you an analysis of your website’s performance based on these SEO parameters.
Another useful parameter in PageSpeed Insights is the first contentful paint (FCP). This gives you the amount of time it took for the first text/image to load. The optimal FCP scoring is anything less than 2 seconds.
You can hire an SEO reseller to assess your website and provide solutions to critical problems. You won’t have to worry about checking these technical SEO parameters one by one.
2. SEO Score
SEO score is a parameter that will show your website’s rating compared to other websites. It also indicates whether your website needs further optimization.
This parameter is dependent on 4 subcategories: technical SEO, content, mobile compatibility, and user experience. Failure to meet the standards for these subcategories may damage your SEO score.
There are online tools that can measure your website’s SEO score. SEOptimer is a great tool to audit your website and see if your website needs improvement. This tool also bases its audit results on 5 major criteria (on-page SEO, links, usability performance, and social engagements).
3. Spam Score
A spam score is like an SEO score, except you’re analyzing how spammy your website is. It’s a risk assessment criteria to see if your website will receive penalties from Google.
17 spam flags are analyzed to know your spam score. Moz’s Link Explorer Tool finds these spam flags and compiles them to calculate your site’s spam score.
We all know that spamming is punishable by search engines. By determining the spam score of your website, you can make sure that you’re not crossing the line.
4. DA and aDR
Moz Domain Authority (DA) and Ahrefs Domain Rating (aDR) are two parameters that are important in website assessment. These parameters tell you how effective your SEO strategies are. These are measured through backlink checker tools like Moz Domain Analysis Tool and Ahrefs Site Explorer Tool.
However, these parameters do not affect your SERP ranking. They simply show you a numerical rating of your website’s SEO and link profile. Both are scaled from 0-100 and getting a perfect score means your website is spotless.
5. Site Architecture and Navigation
Think of your website as a place and your visitors as newcomers. Imagine their frustration if they get lost on your website. That’s why you have to carefully plan your site architecture and navigation.
The trick here is to lessen the number of clicks needed for your visitor to see what they’re looking for. LinkDoctor™ recommends keeping the number of clicks below 3.
Your site should also have a clear funnel to help your audience find what they’re looking for. Sitemaps are very useful for users and web crawlers when navigating your website. You can use the Z or F viewing pattern to help your audience navigate through your site.
6. Website Quality
To assess the quality of your website, you need to look at your content. Ask yourself a few questions if you, as a reader, benefit from your content. Your audience must understand the purpose of your website by providing useful and helpful content for them.
And to keep your website of top-notch quality, you have to provide accessible and high-quality content. Remember that the primary goal of your website is to help users.
If your blog posts provide legitimate and reliable information to your niche, they will see your site as a reputable one. A thorough examination of the range and depth of your content will help you optimize the quality of your website.
7. Website Identity and Authority
Your website must have an identity that people can recognize. Your website will leave an impression on users – and we know that first impression lasts. Observe what first impression you’ll get by visiting your website.
Author profiles and expertise will show “social proof” of your content’s legitimacy and authority. Letting your users know that real people are working on your website can increase their trust. This will reflect on the reputation of your website.
During website analysis, make sure that your website shows social proof. People will remember your site based on your social identity.
8. Branding
When doing web analysis, you also have to take a look at those websites that mention your brand. These are unclaimed natural backlinks that are readily available. These unlinked brand mentions can be used as part of your link-building strategy.
You can check your referring domains using Ahrefs Site Checker Tool. This tool will give you a list of domains that refer to your site. You can also do it manually by searching “domain.com” -inurl:domain.com on Google.
You can also check those sites that stopped linking to your site. Ask the website owner for the reason why they removed your link and if they can get it back.
9. User Engagement
Now we’ll look at how your audience perceives your website. When analyzing your site’s user engagement, you must put yourself in your user’s perspective.
You need to find out how your users behave on your website. By doing so, you will have an idea about what your users interact with on your website.
There are behavior analytics tools that you can use online. One good example is HotJar. This tool gives you a detailed heatmap that tracks the user’s mouse activity on your site.
10. Reviews and Ratings
When doing an assessment, it’s important to include the reviews and ratings that you get from other people. Keeping track of the reviews that you receive gives you a general idea of what users think about your website.
Online reviews are trusted by consumers, much like how we approach personal recommendations. Getting a five-star rating is a good indication that your SEO efforts and impressions are excellent.
You can do an automated tracking of your site’s reviews by using online listening tools. These tools will monitor social indicators and reviews earned by your website. Automating your assessment for reviews will save you a lot of time.
11. Social Media Engagement
Social media was once a place where you can talk to your friends online. Now, because of its popularity, it also serves as a marketing platform. Through active engagements with your followers, you can turn these leads into customers.
That’s why it’s also essential to track your social media engagements. Make sure to manage your social media profiles and have meaningful interactions with your followers. These posts are often favored and prioritized by Facebook and LinkedIn.
To improve your social media engagements, make sure that you’re timing your posts well. Look at your audience’s active hours and strategically post useful content during these times. Be consistent with your efforts and be true to your audience interactions.
Don’t Stop Here, Read More:
- List of 10 Brilliant Website Optimizer Tools for Businesses
- 6 Ways to Improve Website Ranking in 2023
- Website Competitor Analysis (15 Tools and 5 Tips)
Final Word
Doing a full website assessment will reveal your website’s shortcomings and minor issues. By knowing the issues, you will be able to optimize your site even better and resolve these issues.
After reading this guide, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge and the tools necessary for web assessment. Make sure to look out for these factors and parameters to improve your website’s overall performance.
