Regular website audits are the perfect way to ensure the continued relevance and usability of your hotel’s site, but knowing what to include can be surprisingly complicated. Although audits might seem like an indulgence of time and resources, checking the health and efficiency of your website is absolutely crucial to enable you to correct problems before they arise.

However healthy and functional your site might appear on the surface, without regular auditing you never know what errors could be waiting to escalate into much bigger problems further down the line. Thwarting these glitches early on is the best way to ensure optimum and ongoing website safety and functionality – while some of the issues discovered during a web audit can also help you to improve the traffic-boosting, custom-converting aspects of your hotel website in the process.

A website audit is also an important practise to commit to undertaking on a regular basis from an SEO standpoint. As Google and the other search engines change their ranking algorithm, auditing web content, landing pages and important onpage factors such as page titles, internal links and anchor text will help to keep your site on the right side of the divide. The forthcoming mobile first index is a very timely example of why regular auditing is an important task. It illustrates how important it is to check your site and make sure you’re continuing to adhere to updated guidelines and requirements.

Your website audit needs a strong analysis of its information architecture, which defines the look and feel of your website. It covers everything from the hierarchy of your webpages to keyword research to ensure the validity of activities relating to your current site, enabling you to make as few changes as possible and avoid wasted time and resources. A great hotel website hierarchy should lead visitors to the ‘big engagement’ pages (your hotel booking engine, for instance) through clear signposting and natural progression.          
                            

How does your hotel website look on mobile? The growth of mobile browsing and most crucially, an increase in the number of hotel bookings made via mobile devices, means you can’t ignore this crucial stage of the auditing process. Whether you have deployed a mobile-friendly design or created a separate mobile site, keeping on top of your hotel’s presence on mobile is hugely important.

A clever hotel website audit will take care of all the little details which could be preventing your site from maximising its potential. This means identifying any technical elements of your website which could be hindering your search rankings, ensuring your locational information is up to date for better local search, and fixing indexing and crawling issues before they spiral out of hand, as well as performing an analysis of your booking engine’s usability and efficiency. A logically structured, speedy website is the end goal of your auditing process – ensuring increased profitability and performance.