WHY SHOULD YOU ASK YOUR WEBSITE DESIGNER TO COMPLETE A DESIGN AUDIT
Just audits don’t provide you results, but a design audit brings a lot of practical outcomes for your brand and product. Design audit includes analysis of each design element in your organization to ensure that the branding is made effective across every outlet and channel. The popularity of the design audit has increased rapidly for the past few years. You need to make sure you have every notable aspect to keep your design look usable and uniform to offer an excellent experience to the users. A design audit helps identify the branding inconsistencies, and therefore you can fix them and make it perfect based on the guidelines. Today in our blog, let’s check in-depth about the Design Audit and why you need a Web Design Company Cochin to perform a complete design audit.
What is a design audit & why do you need it?
A design audit means the analysis of the branding guidelines and design elements of an organization. The main goal of the design audit is to ensure that your branding made consistent across every outlet and channel. No matter if your company is small or large, a design audit is mandatory for your organizations’ evolution and growth. A design audit is considered to be the best idea as it helps to check your written message and visual design, leading to a well-defined brand and identity.
How to perform a design audit?
Conducting a design audit of your own may be tedious, so you can find some Web Design Company Cochin and ask them to perform a design audit for you. The website designers will gather your company data like your business cards, ads, social media posts, logos, style guides, design systems, and more to perform a complete design audit. Below are some practical steps, followed while doing a design audit.
The website design
Vision, Mission, brand identity are some of the best factors that your website design deals with. A design audit for your website design comes up with ineffective and faulty designs that make your brand’s image spoil. Some of them include
- Various logo files which deny your company recognition.
- Having a design that is not responsive or mobile-friendly. It means all types of users cannot access your site.
- Various web page design styles that make your website navigation tedious.
- Confusing typographies that cause readability or recognition problems.
- Mixed tone written messages negatively show your brand.
- Imperfect navigations that confuse the users.
- Imperfect background patterns and designs that lead to low brand identity.
- Pop-ups that refuse to follow the company values and style guides.
- Landing pages with incorrect colors, logos, and style guides.
Competition
The Web Design Company Cochin performs a design audit on your competitors too. They ask multiple questions in terms of SEO to achieve the desired results. Some questions include
- Who are the competitors who have smaller and bigger organic traffic?
- What type of keywords brings results for your competitors?
- How are the competitors making use of the keywords to grab visitors for their website?
- Which competitors of you are ranking first in the search results for the same keyword as you?
- How many monthly search traffic does your competitor receive?
- What are the domain authorities used by your competitors?
- What are the inbound links used by your competitors?
- What is the primary connection between the search traffic value and the root domain of your competitors?
The Web Design Company Cochin web designers use multiple online tools like Ahrefs, SpyFu, SEMRush, Open Site Explorer, and more to make the job done. With these tools, comparing you and your competitor is made easy. The web designers come up with you and your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses and finally prepare a strategic plan.
The look of your website
You should have an attractive and accessible website so that your visitor will feel visually attracted. If you have low speed, 404 errors, or any other long server response time, then you are in danger that you are losing your users. The Web Design Company Cochin makes use of Google’s Page Speed Insight to analyze every accessibility problem. Google Search Console is used to identify the 404 errors and related errors. Web designers use Google resources to fix any accessibility problems and make your website look good.
The content of your website
Content belongs to SEO, but the content is always the King. The web designers will explore the answer to multiple content-related questions to make your visitors to customers and bring profits.
- How are your visitors getting converted once they read your content?
- Is your content optimized for keywords?
- What is the total time your visitors spend on your website?
- Is your content holds everything that your visitor requires?
- Have you used the right keywords in your landing pages and blog pages to improve the inbound traffic?
- Does your website have duplicate content issues?
Exploring the answers to the above questions will help to build the best content and SEO strategy. Also, it’s the guide for the content team to develop engaging and relevant content.
A unique strategy for your brand
The design audit also focuses on the long term goals so the web designers and auditors will analyze the challenges and objectives of your brand, the setbacks, and the strong points. A strategy is mandatory for having a good and simple web design.
Social Media
The design audit should also focus on social media channels. According to recent research, 80% of customers have used social media channels to pick their favorite brands. The Web Design Company Cochin auditors efficiently focus on social media platforms. Here are some of the audit design made on social media channels to ensure that
- All social media channels provide a relevant message to the audience.
- Each content on your social media platform reflects the brand personality and values.
- Check whether the social media channels are error-free.
- Whether a sentence case is used for all your messages.
- Whether the images on your social media include well-sized and well-designed images.
The indexed web pages
The design audit also focuses on the indexed web pages. The Web Design Company Cochin auditors check whether Google indexes all your pages. With the help of Google Search Console, they check the robots.txt file and make sure that all pages are read indexed at the right time based on the search engine guidelines and protocols.
The SEO Strategy
Keywords, internal and external linking, and on-page optimization are three critical factors to focus on the SEO Strategy design audit.
Keywords
Keywords help to deliver good traffic to your website. Keywords are essential to show search engines that you are focusing on the things that the visitors require. The design audit identifies which keywords are necessary to bring traffic to your business. Search Console and Google Analytics are used for keyword analyzation and effectiveness.
Internal & external linking
Both links are required to make your keywords rank on the search engines. You need to provide your users with the necessary internal links and external links. You should make sure you are making use of only the trustworthy sites when performing linking. Google search console is used for finding the links. There are also different SEO tools to highlight the opportunities and for analyzing the external linking system.
On-Page optimization
It helps in configuring the website for both search engines and visitors. You start getting new visitors when your website ranks first in the search engine. Excellent, engaging content will help your page to rank.
The user experience
In case you have poor user experience to your site, then you don’t find any improvement in your rankings. Visitors visiting your website should get satisfied with the site and should see the relevant content so that they stay and check out your products. Web Design Company Cochin auditors focus on mobile-friendliness, secure HTTPS, and other things that provide the best user experience to the visitors as a part of the design audit.
The changes to perform with the acquired results!
Once the Web Design Company Cochin you hire provides the report of design audit, you can find the wrong things, good things, the problems, and the right solutions to perform to acquire the goal in it. You can take this recommendation and start applying those changes to your website. You need to take care of the style guide so that you will not make the same mistake.
Bottom Line
I hope you guys are clear in performing a comprehensive design audit. The essential things you should remember are
- Analyzing the overall voice, tone, and message of your company with visual elements are mandatory.
- Having a good understanding and long-term communication with your customers is vital for ensuring the best user experience.
- Gather both offline and online visual branding elements, analyze them, and create the best design standards for your website.