What Is An IA Audit?
The purpose of conducting an Information Architecture (IA) Audit is to examine the current information on the website and determine how it can be restructured to enhance the user experience. Additionally, it identifies potential areas where new content can be added to the website. This new content will help to boost organic traffic and enhance user experience.
The aim is to have users land on the site and be able to navigate through the site intuitively. Users should always be able to understand where they are on your site and how their current location relates to the information they are viewing and the information they will view in their next steps.
What To Expect From An IA Audit
During a content audit for IA, there are a few steps involved. In order to gather information and context about the site, we use different processes and tools. These include target audience identification and analysis, keyword volume research and competitor research of both direct and indirect competitors. If you have an existing site, this can also be audited for improvements.
Keyword Volume Research
During keyword volume research, you can determine what keywords and phrases users are entering into search tools like Google or Bing to find products like yours. This can help understand the goals of users visiting the site as well as the content they are hoping to find and engage with. This element also ties directly into improving organic traffic over time.
Direct Competitor Research
Competitor research can be used to determine the industry environment. Direct competitor research is used to identify those that have products in direct competition with yours. That is competitors whose product offering is, at its core, the same as yours. By auditing direct competitor websites, it is possible to understand how competitors structure their content and how they envisage the user journey for their own customers.
Indirect Competitor Research
Indirect competitor research involves researching competitors that have products that offer similar or substitute products to your own product. In other words, they offer a different solution to the same target market’s needs and wants. By auditing indirect competitors, we can identify tried and tested practices for different product areas.
Review Current and Existing Information Architecture
A review of the current Information Architecture for UX is also completed. This provides a benchmark of what your site is currently doing in terms of information presentation on the website.
Recommendations
The last part of an IA Audit includes recommendations for how to improve the way the content on your site is organised. This may include:
- Addition of new pages
- Changes to the main navigation
- Updating heading tags & heading content
- Increasing the depth of current page content (with specific keywords)
- Internal link optimisations
How An IA Audit Assists Marketing
The overarching goal of an IA audit is to provide recommendations for improving the content structure of the website. The goal is to increase organic traffic, improve user navigation and increase goal conversions. After the audit and optimisations are implemented many benefits can be expected:
- Organic traffic to the site will increase over time,
- User experience and navigation will be improved (increased time on site and pages viewed per session)
- Increased conversions due to improved user journeys are likely.
Overall, an IA audit can improve the quality of your site to both your site visitors and search engines. This will positively affect your ROI by increasing conversions.
Not sure if your site needs an IA Audit? Contact us for a chat today!
