How To Review A Website (A DIY Guide For Beginners)

A website review will tell you how to improve your website and answer the most critical questions you probably have.

How do you get more traffic from Google? How do we utilize social media better? How do I get more conversions? These are just some of the answers a website review can give you.

What Is a Website Review And Why Do You Need One?

A website review is a process for checking your website’s performance against several parameters. It is similar to an SEO audit, with the difference that a website review will cover additional areas beyond classic SEO reviews, such as social media, content marketing, usability, and conversions.

Why do you need a website review?

To say it simply, nobody is perfect, which is also true for websites. There are some classic examples where a website review is needed:

• When you already have enough traffic to your website but no conversions.
• When you suddenly lose your traffic because of a Google penalty and want to know why and how to recover.
• When you want to make more sales from your ecommerce store.
• When you want to know what other channels you can utilize to get more traffic and exposure for your website.
• If you haven’t done a website review before and want to ensure your web property is optimized.

Our DIY website review guide will walk you through the process step-by-step. It is suitable for all types of websites (blogs, e-commerce, information portals, corporate blogs, etc.).

All you have to do is get a cup of coffee and start reading!

Website Review Part 1: SEO

SEO is a vast topic and very important. As the name implies, SEO is about ‘optimizing’ your website for search engines.

Optimization, in this context, means making the job of search engine crawlers easier by giving them the right signals so that they can better understand your website.

When done correctly, you also enjoy the benefits of ranking higher in their index.

Search engines use many factors in their ranking algorithms, and in the majority of cases, SEO improvement is achieved after making many small changes (optimizations) to your website.

The minimum things you need to check when SEO reviewing your website are:

• Your page titles and descriptions (see on-page SEO tips for examples).
• The website link structure and URL format.
• Content formatting and use of H1 tags (see 15 SEO tips for explanation and examples).
• Best practices when using internal links.
• Using ALT text for images.
• Website speed - The faster a website is, the better. The magic number you are targeting is less than 2 seconds.
• Proper configuration of robots.txt so your content is accessible to search engine bots.
• Proper structure and format for your XML sitemap.
• Correct configuration of your 404 page (the page shown when users search for a page that no longer exists on your website).
• Check for broken links (either internal or external) and fix them.
• Use of breadcrumbs and user sitemap files.
• Quality of your About page.

Pro Tip: You can read more details about each item in the SEO Checklist.

Website Review Part 2: Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a set of tools provided by Google to website owners to help them check the healthiness and performance of their websites on Google.

GSC can, among other things, give you information about how Google is crawling your website, how many pages you have in the Google index, what keywords drive Google traffic to your website, and more.

When doing a website review, you need to ensure that you check the following settings:

Enable Email Notifications - Click the 'User Settings' icon (top right corner) and enable email notifications. This way, Google can contact you by email when there is an important issue with your website.

Link Google Search Console with Google Analytics - Linking your GSC account with Google Analytics will allow to analyze your GSC data in Google Analytics.

You can enable this in 'Settings' and then 'Associations'.

Check The Search Results Report - The Search Results Report is perhaps the most frequently visited tool of search console and this is because it gives a lot of information on how your website is performing on Google Search.

After Google removed the actual keywords that trigger impressions or visits to your website from Google Analytics, the only way to get this information for free (and without using any third-party tools) is through the report.

You can use the different filtering options to see your ranking position for different terms, the visits you received from each keyword, the devices users use (desktop, tablets, mobile), the countries they are in, and much more.

If you did not know of the search results report before, this is your starting point when performing a website review.

Links to your website - Another helpful option is Links, which shows the number of incoming links Google has recorded about your website.

You can use this data to identify spammy links or to learn about websites that link to you that you didn’t know about.

Caution: If you see many incoming links that look ‘unnatural, ' don’t rush to submit them using the disavow tool. Google can probably identify and discount them without further action on your part. Use the disavow tool only when really necessary.

Google does not provide historical statistics for incoming links, so it’s a good practice to keep monthly statistics to track changes.

Read How to remove bad backlinks from Google for more information.

Manual actions (Under Security & Manual Actions): When Google imposes a ‘manual action’ on your website, you can see it here.

If this is the case, you should follow Google's instructions, make the necessary fixes, and submit a reconsideration request.

A manual action negatively affects your website’s performance in Google searches (either the whole website or parts of it).

Read How to Check For Google Penalties for more information.

URL Inspection Tool: Use the URL inspection tool to see how Google ‘reads’ a webpage. It is possible that your robots.txt blocks some CSS files and Java scripts, preventing Google and other search engines from crawling your website using all elements.

Sitemaps: Last but not least, you should check the Sitemaps option under ‘Indexing’. This option gives you more details on how many pages from your sitemap are included in the Google index and whether your sitemap file contains errors or warnings.

Website Review Part 3: Schemas and Structured Data

One of the problems search engines face every time they visit a web page is understanding the meaning of the data they crawl.

To solve this problem, they agreed to a common vocabulary described in several schemas.

A schema is a piece of code (JSON script) you can add to your website so that search engines can understand what the data means.

Google is using schema information for its knowledge graph and featured snippets, which you must use for better SEO and more visibility in the SERPS.

When reviewing a website, you should check that you are using all possible schemas suitable for your website.

The complete list of Google supported schemas can be found here and there are also tools to test that your implementation is correct.

For more information, read: What is schema markup and how to implement it

Website Review Part 4: Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is one of the most critical promotional tools available in Digital marketing.

Despite all the buzz about social media in the last few years, businesses still fail to utilize social media marketing correctly, which means they are missing out on opportunities that can generate more traffic and business.

Before discussing what you need to check for social media when doing a website review, let me clear up a misconception about social media and SEO.

Both of these tools are necessary if you want to get the maximum possible results from our online promotion efforts. There is no question whether you need to use one or the other; you need to use both to enforce each other’s values.

Here is your social media review checklist:

• Do you have dedicated social media business pages on Facebook, Pinterest, and Linkedin?
• Do you have accounts on X and Instagram?
• Do you have links to your social media pages in your website’s header or footer?
• Do you have share buttons on your blog or most important pages so that people can share the content with their social media friends?
• Do you post valuable and engaging content on your social media pages frequently?
• Do you use hashtags and images within your social media postings?
• Do you have a Google Business Profile account registered for your local or online business?
• Have you checked how your postings look on social media when somebody clicks the ‘share button’?
• Are you using Facebook open graph tags?
• Do you use social media advertising to increase your followers or promote your products and services?
• If you have video content, did you create a dedicated YouTube channel for your business?
• Do you have a decent number of followers in each channel to win the ‘social proof’ when visitors check out your social media pages?

For more information, read our Social Media Marketing Guide For Beginners.

Website Review Part 5: Content marketing

It is a fact that in today’s competitive online world, you cannot do much without content marketing.

Content marketing will help you differentiate your business from the rest and get more traffic and customers from search engines and social media.

The definition and purpose of content marketing is simple:

The production and distribution of valuable and unique content to gain more online exposure and convince website visitors to become customers.

Here is your content marketing review checklist:

• The content on your website is unique, useful, and up-to-date.
• You have no duplicate content (content that is the same on other websites).
• You use canonical tags correctly to help search engines understand your important pages and to avoid duplicate content issues within your website.
• You post new content regularly.
• Make sure that readers can identify the author of a post.
• Monitor user-generated content (comments) and ensure that they comply with your comment policy (disapprove spammy comments and comments that add no value to the page).
• Monitor the ranking positions for your published content and examine the Click Through Rate (CTR).
• Check and ensure that your titles and descriptions are unique and interesting to grab the user’s attention.
• Organize your content into categories for users to find and understand.
• Add internal links to your pages. This will help users and search engines discover more content on your website.

Website Review Part 6: Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is the process of promoting your website to other online properties.

It is commonly known as link building, although this term has been associated lately with Penguin and Panda updates since it is often thought of as a way to abuse search engine algorithms.

All major search engines still use off-page SEO, which they use as a ‘voting system’ to help them determine a web page's ‘value.’

Search engines use incoming links as a signal of popularity and importance in addition to the content found on a particular page.

Of course, it is not a numbers game, i.e., it is not a matter of which website has the most incoming links, but the number and type of links play an important role in determining which website will get higher rankings.

I am not a promoter of link building; you can still create a successful website without doing so, but the truth is that a carefully planned off-page SEO campaign can help you get better results faster.

Here is your off-page SEO review checklist:

• Use the ‘Links’ report available in the ‘Google Search Console’ (as explained above) to find out the number and type of incoming links. Export the data in a spreadsheet and try to spot websites linked to you that are worth promoting on your social media channels.
• Investigate how you can strengthen the above links by linking to them within your articles or from articles you publish on other websites. You aim to make the existing links pointing to your website more powerful.
• Search for authority websites in your niche that accept guest posts, read their guest post guidelines, and create a long-term plan for getting your articles published on those websites. It is not easy, but it is certainly worth the effort.
• Avoid link-building tactics that can get you into trouble and forget about the old-time motto ‘ a link is a link’; you don’t want too many incoming links but strong incoming links.

Website Review Part 7: Mobile SEO

We live in a mobile World, and this is also reflected in the way users search for information.

Smartphones have become so popular that Internet usage through mobile phones has led to a result many experts have predicted for years: mobile searches are now more common than desktop searches.

Having a mobile-friendly website is no longer a choice, not only because of the volume of users who navigate the Net using mobiles but also because it is a Google ranking factor.

In simple words, if your website is not mobile-friendly, you will receive less traffic from search engines than you could.

When talking about mobile, we are not only referring to people using their mobile browsers to search for information; we should also take into account the millions of users searching/downloading apps through the Google Play Store, Apple Store, and Amazon App Store.

To perform a comprehensive review, read our Mobile SEO Guide.

Website Review Part 8: Conversions and Usability

All the above checks serve one purpose: to help you get more traffic to your website.

Another important factor for website success is utilizing incoming traffic, i.e., whether the actions performed by visitors contribute to your business goals.

All websites have goals, whether making money from advertising, selling products or services, growing an email list, raising brand awareness, etc. When doing a website review, it is necessary to evaluate the website's performance against these goals.

As you can understand, this is a huge topic and specific to the particular website that requires a lot of A/B testing, but the minimum actions you can take during a review are:

• Check your website’s bounce rate. The bounce rate is a number given to you in various Google Analytics reports that shows the percentage of people who leave your website without visiting a second page. As a rule of thumb, the lower the bounce rate, the better. This is related to conversions and usability since the more time a user spends on your website, the greater the chances of converting.
• Make sure that you are using the ‘Events’ feature in analytics to identify the number of users who complete a goal and how they convert.
• Familiarize yourself with the most important Google Analytics report so that you know what your visits are doing while on your website.
• Set Up Event tracking to track which buttons get clicked. Use this information to change the design of your landing pages.
• Find the pages with the higher ‘exit rate’ and try to improve them.

Conclusion And Final Thoughts

I tried to provide as much information as possible and make this guide a real DIY project, but it is almost certain that some things may not be clear to everyone.

For each section outlined above, you need to read more by either following the links provided or searching Google for more information.

This post's purpose was to point you in the right direction and surface the areas that you need to pay attention to. I hope that you found it useful and worth reading.

Don’t worry if some things are confusing or complicated to understand. If this is the first time you attempt to do this, it is expected to have many questions and queries.

Happy reviewing!