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Websites have become the center of most marketing efforts. Every customer who visits your homepage judges the quality of your site and then makes a split-second decision on whether to continue browsing or clicking the dreaded “x” in the corner. So, if consumers are making immediate judgments about your site, it stands to reason that your site should be high-quality and without errors, as any malfunction or error can make or break a sale.

Customers are very sophisticated when it comes to browsing the internet. Over the years, they’ve developed a subconscious criterion for determining whether a website is “worthy.” Some examples of common criteria are websites that load too slowly, websites that have elements placed haphazardly throughout the site, and site errors like 404s. These are just a few examples of issues that consumers deal with on a daily basis. Consumers want quality, ease of use, and value, so how do you make the necessary changes to your site to provide what consumers are looking for? One way is to start with a website audit. When you perform a website audit, you look for all of the aforementioned issues and more, and, after you fix the issues plaguing your site, visitors become more receptive to what you are selling.

Perform A Website Audit

Luckily, several tools exist today that can make your website audit pretty painless. Take Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) for example. This tool helps you monitor those pesky issues like 404 errors and resources that are blocking portions of your site from loading. Upon first glance, it looks fairly simple, but as you dig further, you find the Search Console is a powerful method for monitoring the health of your site.

Here are some issues to look for:

Crawl Errors

Search Console will display any crawl errors to your site and point you directly to the issue. So, if you see a sudden rise in 404 errors, you might want to have your developer take a look and see if they can fix the issue.

HTML Improvement

This is one of the best tools for examining your on-page errors and finding issues in your SEO. Here you will find things like duplicate content and missing title tags and meta descriptions–important information that Google’s robots might not be crawling due to a backend issue.

Google Index

Google Index can show you quite a bit about how your site is doing, and often you can find issues relating to how your site is appearing in the search engine. You will find options like Blocked Resources, which might show you snippets of code which are negatively affecting your site, and you can take a look at your index status. So, for example, if you see a lot of your pages being deindexed in a short amount of time, that might be a sign that there is something wrong.

Google Search Console is a fantastic tool for finding technical issues with your site, and after you fix these issues, the health of your site will rise dramatically, and users are more likely to stay. There are other tools out there, such as those focused on user experience, which are worth a look, too. Stay tuned to our blog for more tools for performing website audits and tips on how to improve your web presence today.

If you want to learn how you can improve your web site’s ROI, please contact Net-Craft.com today.