The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 50. How to audit your own website

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

It’s Jennifer today and I am sharing with you how to audit your own website. Auditing your own website is going to help you identify any issues that could be preventing growth or visibility of your site. If you are wanting to grow your blog, auditing your website is so important. Today I am sharing the tools that you need, the steps that you need to take, and and the basic technical things you need to be aware of. Auditing your website is so important whether you are a new blogger or an experienced blogger. Tune in to hear more about auditing your website and why this is important whether you are a new blogger or experienced blogger.Thanks for listening! Connect with us on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsCheck out The Blog Depot. This is a community and course that we have set up for you if you need questions answered before you start your blog. Join the waitlist for The Ultimate Blog Bootcamp, our online course and coaching that helps you build the blog that you have always dreamed of.SHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode50

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinecke and Jennifer Draper. We're on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you're just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we're excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm, and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success, and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging

and work from home life, all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. Hey there, and welcome back to another episode of the Ultimate Blog Podcast. This is Jennifer, and today I am going to be sharing sort of a tutorial, so to speak, with you guys about something that I think is super important if you are an experienced blogger or if you are a new blogger, and that is how to audit your own website. Today, we're not going to get super, super technical. So even if you're a new blogger, or even if you are just thinking about starting a blog, I think this episode will still be pretty beneficial for you. And you'll see why as I dive into this. But being able to take a step back and look at your own website, your own blog from a

different perspective is really important and can be really beneficial. So I want to talk through some of that with you guys so that you can have kind of another tool in your toolkit, so to speak, to help you figure out how to run and grow your blog. And it'll also help you identify any problems that come up, things like that, and maybe get on top of things a little bit sooner. So let's just go ahead and dive in and talk about what does it mean to audit your own website? And this can mean a lot of different things. So I'm just going to put it in the perspective of what I would like to talk to

you guys about today. And it's really just a couple things. I want you to be able to look at your website objectively through the eyes of a user that's coming to your website. We look at our own websites all day long so much. I think we tend to like overlook or miss things that could be important from somebody else's perspective. And then the other thing would be just look at some of the technical aspects occasionally that you may not pay attention to on a daily basis. This is going to give you some ideas of things that you can kind of check on or look at to make sure that your website is running as best it possibly can. And the reason that you're going to want to do a website audit is it's going to help you

identify any issues that could be preventing growth, you getting more traffic to your site, readers coming back, and just the overall visibility of your site on other platforms or in Google searches. So if you're wanting to grow your website, it's really important that you periodically just do sort of a mini audit of your own website. So I guess more in depth, what is a website audit? And so there are professionals out there who will audit your website. And typically those are done for more specific types of things. So what I mean is you could hire somebody to do an SEO audit of your site. That's search engine optimization. So they're going to be making sure you're creating your content correctly, that a lot of things on

your blog are optimized for search engines for Google to be able to find it. So that's one type of audit. You could have somebody just do an audit on specific website type issues and errors. You can have somebody help you with errors that show up in your Google console, which we'll talk a little bit more about later. You can have somebody audit your website for things like if you have different signup forms on your site to make sure that your conversions are working properly or at the rate you want them to. So there's a lot of different things that you can audit on your website. And that would be more like a professional website audit. It would be more specific to some of those things. And so that's not really what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk more about doing your own audit. So just looking at some of those

bigger picture, general things that you can take care of on a regular basis so that you can make sure your site is good for your users and readers, and that you can make sure that you are visible by Google. So the question is, who should audit their own website? So I know if you're here, you might be thinking, this does not sound that much fun. But I promise you, this is going to be a super important tool that you will have to make sure that your website can continue to grow. So if you've been blogging for six months, a year longer, and you haven't

done an audit yet, now's the time. If you are brand new to blogging or just starting your blog and you're wondering how you're going to grow it, how does this all work? This is going to be for you because you can start to understand some of the things that are going to impact your site growth and this ultimately the success of your blog. So it's important to know these things. And even if you're just, like I said, you're just sitting here listening and thinking about starting a blog, I think this can be beneficial to you as well because you start to get an understanding of kind of what goes into blogging to see if this is really going to be for you or not. So I talked a little bit about

there being people that audit websites professionally. And I guess I want to talk about should you look at doing that or who should look at getting a professional website audit? And the prices vary all over the place. They're not inexpensive. So I would say as a blogger, you obviously don't want to get a website audit unless you have a website. But I've seen people do it at all stages, a few months in to make sure they're set up for success. People do it a while later and find things that they want to fix and improve on their site. So I think pretty much at any stage of the game, getting a professional website audit could be helpful. So I would say much at any stage of the game, getting a professional website audit could be

helpful. So I would say first and foremost, when you can afford it, that would be one of the first things to look at is do you want to invest the money in the website audit? If you are serious about growing your site, then a professional website audit may be for you. You know you're in this for the long haul. And when you know you have an issue that came up that's causing a problem on your website, that may be a good time too. So those are some kind of criteria for you to think about when you decide whether or not you want to invest in a professional website audit. But I think regardless of whether you get that audit or not, I think taking that step back and looking at your

own website and doing your own audit of it are important either way. So let's talk about the how-tos. So like I said, we're going to keep this a little more general, a little more basic, more from a beginner's perspective. So if you've had a professional website audit, you probably already have looked into a lot of these things. But if not, I think this will be really helpful so that you can start putting together the tools that you need to be able to look at your site from that new and different perspective. And I also want to just help you so that you know how to identify any issues that may be preventing your site from from growing the way that you want it to so if you're

feeling like hey I'm putting out all this really good content why is it why is my site not growing like I think it should you know looking at this may be able to give you some answers to that as well. So a few tools you're going to want to have in order to audit your own website. So you should have Google Analytics and Google Console set up. So that's just going to be a basic thing as a blogger that we're going to recommend. If you go through our Ultimate Blog Bootcamp, if you have been through our Ultimate Blog Bootcamp, we walk you through getting that all set up. But that is critical and something that we think that you need to do from day one. So if you don't have those things set up, you'll want to get that done and start getting

some data to your site so that you'll have that to look at. You'll also want to look at some page speed information. So you'll want to use either Google PageSpeed Insights, or there's a tool called GTmetrix. So we'll dive into that a little bit more later. And then you'll want to utilize a Google schema markup tool, especially if you have something like recipes on your site. And then another optional thing, if you really want to get into this a little bit further, would be a tool like SEM Rush. It's a keyword research tool, but also an auditing tool. There is a ton of information in there. You can run all

kinds of reports about your website. So if you really need to dig deeper, that may be an option for you, although it is kind of pricey. Do you want to start a blog, but you aren't sure what to do first? Are you still wondering what you're going to write about and who your ideal reader is? Have you researched blog platforms only to be left with even more questions and have no idea what platform to build your blog on? Guess what? We created the blog Depot just for you. The blog Depot is a nine module course that was designed for someone who thinks that they want to start a blog, but wants to build a solid foundation and ask themselves the important questions before jumping in.

In the Blog Depot, we will help you understand what you need to build a successful blog and important questions to ask yourself, and we do it all with our self-paced online course and membership community. You get access to the course and community forum immediately upon signup. And as a special bonus, we do a live coaching call with Depot members every month. So you can talk to us about your specific questions and needs. We want you to feel confident when you decide to finally start blogging someday and the blog Depot will help you do it. It's only $47 a month, but if you sign up today and use code UBP50, you'll receive 50%

off your first month. The link to join us is in the show notes, and we can't wait to help you build your solid foundation in the blog depot. So I am just going to walk you through a few basic steps to get you started on auditing your own website. So if you have a notebook, you might grab that and you can write down these things. And it will just give you a starting point to really look at your website from a different perspective. So like I said, you want to look at your website through the eyes of a user, which can be kind of tricky. But I think it's an important skill to practice and develop. So just keep doing it. Just keep taking that step back and saying, if I was coming to this site to get whatever, whatever it is you offer,

whether it's recipes or workout tips or health advice, whatever it is, just think about how the user is coming to your site and what they're finding. So especially if you're struggling to look at it from an outsider's perspective, another thing you could do is have a friend or another blogger come look at your site as well. Somebody that you trust to give you some honest feedback on your site, that never hurts either, just because those are the kind of people that might actually be using your site on a daily basis. So you definitely want to listen to what they have to say. So some questions that you're going to want to ask yourself as you're looking at your site on a daily basis. So you definitely want to listen to what they have to say. So some questions that you're going to want to ask yourself as you're looking at your site and just trying to picture somebody coming to your site because they've Googled something and

came in on a blog post or they heard about your website, so they came to it. So the questions you want to ask yourself are, is the navigation easy? Is it clear where to click to find the information that I want? Can they find your menus? Can they find your categories easily so that they can get to the information that they need? That needs to be pretty streamlined because people don't really take a lot of time. If they come to a site that's difficult to use, they're probably not going to look around too much. So you want it to be like right there available for them to be able to look around. And you want to look at that from both the desktop perspective and the mobile perspective. Next, to make sure, is it clear what you offer? So if you came to your website and you didn't know what it was about, would it be pretty

clear to you pretty quickly what types of content you can find there? It's really important that somebody knows what they're going to get if they not only come to your website, but stay and look around. Do you have your most valuable content front and center? So if somebody clicks in on a blog post from Pinterest or Google, is it going to be clear to them what other valuable content you have? So do you have a good structure on your sidebar so that they can go to some of that other content? Do you have it in your header? If they come to your homepage, is the first thing they

see your best work? You really only have a few seconds when they come to your site for them to make a judgment. So make sure you're truly your most valuable stuff is right at their fingertips, ready for them to click on. Next, think about what journey does your reader take when they come in on a blog post? Do you give them things that they can do? Say they come, they read it, and they're like, wow, this is great, what else? Is it clear what else? Can they, like I said before, can they find your best top content

right there at the sidebar that they can click on? Or have you linked to other relevant content within your blog post? Make sure that they are gonna wanna stay and they know what to do if they want to find out more. Something basic, but something I think that we can easily overlook is do all of your links work on your site. So click everything, click your social media icons that take them to your Instagram, click on any links you have between blog posts. Click on links you have

to sign up for email. Click on all of your menus, all of your categories, all of that stuff. Make sure all works because nothing is more frustrating as a user than wanting to go look at something and the link doesn't work or it doesn't take you anywhere. It takes you to a dead link. So make sure all of that is working. And then also test this out on different spaces. Test your site, how quickly your site loads. So get on your Wi-Fi and test it. Get off your Wi-Fi and test it. Try it on mobile.

Try it on desktop. Make sure that when you are loading your site, that it's not clunky and slow. Because if it's frustrating you, I can that it's not clunky and slow. Because if it's frustrating you, I can guarantee it's going to frustrate somebody else. So that's going to be really important. So those are just a few things to look at from the user perspective. Just make sure if you were coming to the site, would you be impressed? Would you feel informed?

Would you feel like you got the answers that you wanted? Next, you're going to want to take a look at your actual content. So essentially your pages and your blog posts. Read through some of your top blog posts or your favorite blog posts. Make sure you've done a good job of optimizing those. Have you followed a checklist? Do you have all the important information included? And then take a look at those posts and see if they're ranking. So meaning you're creating all this content. Now what? You don't just want to keep cranking out content after content after content. You want to make sure it's actually reaching the people that you want to reach, that people are able to find it.

So you can use some different tools and there's some free options or some paid options here. So you can go into Google Console and you can look up what key phrases you are getting traffic for. So that is like a basic place to start. If you have never gotten into this at all, I would highly recommend you go into your Google console, you go to your search results, and you look at your queries and your pages. That will tell you if you're getting organic slash Google traffic to your website from specific key phrases. So that will help you start to identify if you are ranking for things

that you want to be ranking for. And then you can also look at the posts and see which posts are getting organic traffic and which are not getting any traffic. Because that's going to be really important to look at. If you have a lot of posts that aren't getting any traffic, we need to look at why. There's also some paid tools

that will give you even more data. I mentioned SEMrush earlier. You can really dive into a lot of specifics there. And another option that's a little less expensive than SEMrush is KeySearch. And you can get quite a bit of information there too. So I would recommend starting with Google Console. And then when you're ready, you can upgrade and start using one of those other tools as well, just to help you dive a little deeper. The purpose of looking at your content is to see, is it doing what you want it to do? And if not, what can you do about it? And I think one of the important things to look at is just what are your competitors doing? Who are your competitors? So put your keyword phrase into Google and see what

pulls up. Or if you're using one of the paid tools, you can also look at some of your competitors that way as well. And then see, are you outranking them? Are they outranking you? What's going on here? And what can you or should you do to improve some of your content so that you have a better chance of ranking? What are they doing that you're not? It's a question that I always like to ask myself. And then I think one of the hard things for all of us as bloggers is to make sure that your content that you've created really fits into your niche or the overall theme of your website. If you have a lot of unrelated content and it's not really getting traffic, let's talk about what we should do with that. You probably either need

to just delete that off your site if it doesn't offer any value. If it's something that you could update and bring it in to your niche and have a really well done blog post on it, then maybe you update it. If it's something that might offer value but could otherwise kind of hurt your site because it's unrelated, then you can also do something called no index that post. So you really want to make sure that the content that you have on your site is fitting within your theme, is niched down, and is optimized. Another thing to look at is to see, are people using the forms that you have on your site? So are they signing up for your email list?

You can look into whichever email service provider you're using. you can look into whichever email service provider you're using. If you've set up your forms in a way that each form goes to a different spot on your site, you can look and see, are people signing up in my header? Are they signing up within my content? You can start to look a little deeper and make sure that people are consuming your content. And then at least a certain percentage of people are wanting to sign up for your email list. Because ultimately the goal would be when somebody comes to your site, you're going to somehow retain that person. So you can either retain them because they sign up for your email list or they stay and click around or they come back to your site later because now they trust you. Or maybe they share some of your content on Pinterest so they have it saved and can come back later. So you're really wanting to

develop that relationship essentially with that person because it sure is easier to get somebody to stay and look around some more than it is to constantly just bring a new person on to look at one page and leave. So the idea of looking at this content is not only to get new eyes on it, but how are you going to get people to stay on it as well? So going into your Google Analytics, you can also take a look and just see if people are staying. It gives you that information under the behavior. If you look at the posts, you can see like your bounce rates and how many people stayed and how many people clicked on to another post, et cetera. So it's important to kind of look at those things as well to make sure that people are

staying around on your site. Email marketing is an essential piece of blogging. Growing your email list is just as important as SEO and keyword research in our opinion. And in order to grow your list, you need a reliable platform that will allow you to connect with your community and turn them into email subscribers. That's where ConvertKit comes in. ConvertKit is the go-to marketing hub for creators like you that helps you grow and monetize your audience with ease. ConvertKit allows you to grow your audience and reach,

put your funnels on autopilot and earn an income with your email list, all with an easy to use platform that is approachable, even for beginners. Click the link in our show notes to learn more about the different plans that ConvertKit has and how it can help you propel your business to the next level. Okay, so those are some just a few things that you can kind of look at from a take a step back perspective. So now we're going to talk a little bit more about some technical things that you need to take a look at. And I'm just going to quickly go through these. I think they're just things to be aware of as you are setting up your site. And if you

are struggling with these things, then it would be time to look into them. So you want to make sure that the theme that you have installed on your website is clean, well-coded and fast. And so we can talk a minute about checking your site speed. We'll talk about that in just a minute, but making sure that you have a good, well-recommended theme that's good for SEO. One of the biggest things that we will say over and over again is make sure you're sizing your images properly. You want to make sure that your images are not too large, and this is going to depend on the theme that you have, et cetera, but you're going to want to resize your images and also optimize them. So you're going to make sure that they're sized for the web

because you don't want pictures to take forever to load when somebody comes to your website. So not only are we going to resize them size-wise, we're going to save them as like a less quality image because they will still display high quality on the web. And then you're also going to want to compress those images as well using a plugin on your website. This is super, super important. It can get out of control very, very quickly. If you have images that you're loading onto your website that are too large, it can cause your site to load too slowly because it's trying to take these huge images and display them when they don't have to be that big. So if there is one thing you learned today, it is making sure you're doing your images properly.

Another thing you need to make sure you're doing is using the best plugins and the minimal amount of plugins that you need to run your site. Plugins can also slow your site down. Plugins add functionality. They are necessary on a WordPress site for so many things. I mean, I've mentioned a couple already. You're going to want to have a plugin to make sure you're compressing your images for one. And there's going to be plugins that you use to help you optimize your SEO. So the plugins are a good thing, but you need to limit those to the ones you

really need and the ones that are well done because a bad plugin can also hurt your site speed or put security at risk or put bad code on your website. So super important to have the right plugins. You also want to make sure you are on a good hosting plan. So we've talked about this before. If you want to start a blog, you're going to want to be on a self-hosted WordPress site,

which means you need to have a good, solid hosting plan. We recommend BigScoots. Many, many bloggers do. We are super happy with them. So make sure that you are on a hosting plan that will help serve your site up quickly and isn't going to cause you problems. Another thing that people don't always think about, and this is kind of tied back with the images a little bit, you don't want to be loading stuff on your site from other websites.

So the best example I have of this would be loading your Instagram feed to your blog. If you are doing that, you are putting yourself at the mercy of how long it's going to take Instagram to send those images over to your blog. And that is going to slow down your blog, which is going to just hurt you in the long run. So anything you can do to avoid connecting things on your website to another website where they have to load, you will want to do. website to another website where they have to load, you will want to do. Okay. I'm going to move on to just a few like more technical things. And this is just, if you really want to dive a little bit deeper, even, and start to look for problems that may exist. So I want you to check and make sure that you have your SSL certificate set up, and this is done through your hosting.

And you'll be able to tell, like, if you go to a website and it says like security risk, that may be because they don't have their SSL certificate installed. This is typically free through your hosting company. And it's pretty much a requirement for your website at this point in time to be displayed. So make sure that you have your SSL certificate set up. Next, I want you to look in Google Search Console. We talked about that before. You have that set up and connected to your site. And I want you to look for errors and issues that might show up in Search Console. If you have those, they should be sending you an email. And you need to start understanding

how to dig into some of those issues. A lot of times you can figure it out by checking with somebody in a Facebook group or Googling or of course asking us. So you do want to be looking for those, but you can also go into Google Search Console and I would check your security and your manual actions to make sure you don't have any errors listed there. You'll also want to use the Google mobile friendly test and make sure that your site

is mobile friendly. If you're using a good theme, like a theme that we would recommend to you, then your site should be mobile friendly. But if not, I would suggest that you check on that, or I would suggest you check on that either way, just to make sure that nothing that you customize or change hurt your mobile friendliness on your site. Because for most websites, I think it's like over 80% of people come in on mobile. So you need to make sure your mobile site is functioning properly. You need to go into Google Console again, and look at your indexing and make sure that Google has only indexed one version of your site, which is your site map that you would submit when you first set up your site.

Sometimes for various reasons, you can end up with multiple in there. So take a look at that and make sure that it's not duplicating some of that. And then another thing that if you really want to start to look at something, it's going to give you a lot of information that may be something you don't understand, but that's okay. I think it's important to start looking at it would be to check your site speed. So there's a couple of tools you can use for this, which would be Google page speeded Insights, or you could use GTmetrix. These are, again, both free tools that you can use. And you put your URL in there and you run it. It takes a few seconds or a minute or two to run. And it will give you a grade or a score to tell you how fast your website is running. And it will give you information down below about why it may not be

running as fast as you want it to. And some of those things you will understand and some of them will be fairly complex, but you can start to look through those things and see what can you control. So it might tell you if some of your images are too large or things like that. So this is a great thing to look at and just to make sure that your site is, again, running quickly, because that is very important when it comes to user experience and just SEO and being able to rank on Google, your site needs to run fairly quickly. And again, you may not understand all of the errors that come back. But as you start to dig in, as you start to get down the road, that's something you can start looking into and perhaps finding where you maybe need some help to get some things fixed on your

site as well. And then finally, if you want to go to one of the paid options like SEM Rush, you can do that. You can run reports in there and it will tell you more information than you ever wanted to know about your website. It'll tell you things like backlinks, things that are broken. It will be more than you can possibly fix, but it will definitely give you some insight into things that are going on with your website so that you start to really get the full picture of how your website is working. So I know this was a lot today, and I hope that you guys are feeling okay with all of this. I just really

wanted to give you the tools to help you take that step back, really just look at your site critically from an objective perspective and be able to start to identify things that could potentially be holding you back or things that you could possibly even prevent if you take a look at this now and know it going into it. What do I need to keep my eyes on? What do I need to know before I start my website so that it runs well, I'm doing the best that I can, and I'm serving my audience as best that I can. These are just things that I think I wish I would have known when I first got started.

And again, these are not things that I look at every single day, but I do try to take a step back every so often, take this look at my site, kind of see what could be causing any issues or holding me back, and just try to fix what I can or get help where I need to. And that's just going to be something that you'll work on over time as your site grows, as you keep working on it. This will just give you the tools that you need in order to take care of your website. We just really want to empower you to know what's going on and where to go for help. So hope you guys found this helpful and I will talk to you next time.

Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you'd like to continue the conversation about blogging with us, please find us on Instagram at spark media concepts. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter where we share blogging tips and inspiration. You can sign up by finding the link in the show notes. For those of you who are ready for the next step and want to start your own blog, join the waitlist for the ultimate blog bootcamp. The link to join the waitlist is also in the show notes.

Go out and make today a great day.