The beginning of each new year is the perfect time to evaluate how your website is performing for your business in search results. While you should always be monitoring your website’s performance – particularly if you’re investing in SEO services – it often falls off the to-do list until traffic slows down or the phone doesn’t ring quite as frequently. At Rocks Digital we monitor our clients’ website performance on an ongoing basis, driving steady improvements in search visibility.
What Factors to Analyze in a Website Performance Audit
Before looking at the reasons for completing a website performance audit, let’s examine the basic metrics we’re going to analyze.
- Sessions – The total number of user interactions with your website within a specific time period.
- Organic Sessions – The number of visits that come directly from unpaid, organic search results on search engines.
- Total Users – The overall count of unique visitors who have accessed your website at least once.
- New Users – The number of first-time visitors who have never been to your website before.
- Views – The total number of individual pages that have been viewed by all users.
- Bounce Rate – The percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page.
We referenced the importance of monitoring Google Analytics as part of our digital marketing tips for 2024, and it’s still just as relevant today. You’ll also want to consider the following data points, which requires deeper analysis of how each channel or piece of content contributes to overall performance.
- Sessions by Medium – Assess how visitors reach your website by traffic type (organic search, paid search, social media or referral).
- Top Traffic Sources – Lists the specific platforms driving the most traffic to your website.
- Top Traffic Pages – Highlights the most frequently visited pages on your website.
Advanced Strategies for Website Performance Audits
Beyond these fundamental metrics, what matters most is how visitors convert into leads – whether they’re completing contact forms, calling your business, or engaging with multiple pages across your website.
Crucially, Google Analytics lets you drill into individual page performance in detail. For example, when you spot high-traffic pages with high bounce rates, you have an ideal opportunity to optimize these pages and improve their conversion potential. It’s this level of detailed analysis and optimization that underscores the value of hiring an SEO company for your business.
Services pages are a prime example of pages that often receive a fair amount of traffic, yet suffer from a high bounce rate. This typically means that you’re securing traffic at the top of the conversion funnel—however, there’s a bottleneck preventing further interest, consideration or a sale. You might also notice this with blog posts that don’t capture visitor interest. At Rocks Digital we dig deep to find the issue, make the necessary changes and test the outcome.
Reasons to Complete a Website Performance Audit
Here’s why completing a website performance audit is so important.
- Improves user experience for higher engagement and more repeat visits.
- Increases search engine visibility to reach more potential customers.
- Identifies opportunities to optimize conversions and increase customer satisfaction.
- Gives you an edge over competitors with a faster, more relevant and user-friendly website.
Ultimately, conducting regular audits is one of the best ways to bring real-world benefits to your business and your customers. And with the help of Google Analytics setup and reporting services, you can let your SEO partners handle the complexities of data analytics and optimization, so you can focus on the task of delivering for your customers.
Try Our Top-Rated Website Audit & Optimization Services
At Rocks Digital, we give businesses a complete picture of their website’s performance with our comprehensive auditing, tracking and optimization services. You can rely on us for results-driven tracking, SEO and web design solutions for more traffic and better conversions. Call (214) 989-7549 or request a website evaluation today.
