•  Are visitors disappointed and frustrated with my blog?
• Are my calls-to-action and opt-ins confusing or inefficient?
• Why don’t I have more engagement with my recipes?
• Do people get lost trying to navigate my blog?
• Would they recommend my blog to a friend?
• Am I losing new visitors I should be retaining?
• Is my blog hard-to-read and frustrating?
• How quickly do visitors leave my blog?
• Am I losing followers that come from my social platforms because my blog isn’t what they expected?
• How are visitors actually using my blog?
• And more.

The audit will give you an easy-to-understand, prioritized report, with actionable items on how to improve your blog.

Report categories include:

•  Overall user-friendliness. Looks at site flow, site speed, design, colors, navigability and readability. Gives a detailed report on what is working and what’s not. (***Get a mini site audit focusing on just this topic!***)
• Happiness. Measures overall satisfaction. Do your readers feel your blog is working well for them, why or why not? Includes feedback from actual users.
• Engagement. How do your readers interact with your blog? Do they click-through to different recipes, sign-up for your opt-ins or leave comments? Tells you where they experiencing pain points and how can that be improved.
• Adoption. How many new readers are you receiving? A basic look at how well your SEO is working as well as where all your traffic is coming from, why that is, and how to improve.
• Retention. How many of your new readers become regular readers? Evaluates what to change to retain more followers.
• Task Completion. How easily can people visiting your blog accomplish what they came to do? Detailed analysis on how to eliminate the barriers preventing task completion.
• Accessibility & Legality. Is your site accessible for all abilities and complying with the latest privacy standards and legal requirements, such as GDPR? Lists the needed changes to be made.

Will this work for my blog?
I specialize in helping food bloggers, but this audit is a good idea for any blog or website. It will work for a site of any size, but I do recommend you’ve been regularly blogging for at least six months.

How is this different than a SEO site audit?
This audit looks at the whole picture of your blog and tries to narrow down anything that’s a hindrance or deterrent for your site’s visitors. SEO is one small component of what this audit looks at.

Will the results of this audit improve my SEO?
Yes. The goal of Google and other search engines is to deliver the best possible results to their searchers So, improving how much a reader loves your site, stays on your site, interacts with your site and shares your site with others, is a great long-term strategy for improving SEO.

How long will the audit take?
The process takes about 4-6 weeks from start to finish. That allows for time to set up tracking and systems on your site, collect enough data, and time for me to analyze and interpret.

How do you actually analyze all this?
I use several different tools and metrics such as web accessibility standards, Google’s HEART framework, and services like Hotjar. I also take a deep-dive into your Google Analytics to look at patterns and see where you can improve.

I’ve heard about usability and UX/UI design and theory, and this sounds similar, is it?
Yes, this audit takes principles from usability standards, User Experience (UX), User Interface (UI), Customer Experience (CX) and related fields as the foundations for what is analyzed. If you want to learn more about these topics, two of my favorite resources are Nielsen Norman Group and Interaction Design Foundation.