Have you ever wondered how your website is doing?
I mean, is it getting any traffic? Is it generating sales leads for your business? Which traffic sources are most effective?
A website audit is an investigation, analysis and report of the data generated by your website with the purpose of answering these sorts of questions and more. The days of building a website and hoping people find it are long gone. With a record 1.8 billion websites reached in 2017 (http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/), it’s become imperative that you know how yours is doing and how it can be improved.
Have you been considering redesigning or restructuring the content of your website? Do you want to do some simple updates but you’re not sure how? Did you get your website designed by someone who, after the development, doesn’t seem to be available to help you create new content or market it? Do you ever wonder if you’re throwing good money towards bad leads? Will the changes you’re considering really make a difference?
These are just a few of the reasons why you might consider getting a professional website audit.
Learn About What’s Happening On Your Website
Using standard data collection and reporting tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, a good website audit will answer questions like:
- How many website visitors are you getting and where are they coming from?
- How much of that traffic are new users and how often do they return?
- How well does your website perform for mobile users?
- How well do your pages load? Are they above or below average in their load times?
- How much of your traffic is human? How much appears to be spam?
- Which media channels are driving the most traffic, and how well are you targeting them?
- Which media sources are driving the most traffic, and how well are you targeting them?
- How well are you using social media to drive targeted traffic?
- Which pages and content are most and least popular with your visitors?
- Which pages are ranking best on Google Search, and how engaged is that traffic?
- Which search queries are used most to find your website, and how well does that match the keyword density in the text content on those pages?
- Is your website sufficiently localized for Google Search?
- How does your website performance compare in Google’s Benchmarking against websites in your industry and similar traffic size?
A good website audit will answer all of these questions by presenting the data, explaining the technical jargon, and providing a written summary with experienced insights into the data.
Does Your Website Need A Tune-Up?
You probably take your car into the shop for a regular tune-up, or if you don’t, you know you should. You probably also update your software on your computer or mobile phone when it tells you OS updates are available. And if not, you’ve probably heard that you should.
The same maintenance standards, if not stricter, apply to your website. It is just software sitting on hardware. However, it’s also more publically accessible than your car or computer. That means it is more vulnerable to breaking down from use and security holes.
When your car isn’t running at its best, it’s probably costing more fuel and on the road to more costly repairs. When your smart phone or computer aren’t optimized, their probably costing you unnecessary waiting time. When your website isn’t operating at its best, promising potential leads looking for your goods and services are probably going to your competitors instead.
A good website audit will assess your website’s health, addressing its general maintenance and security status, along with how that could be affecting your visitor’s experience and ability to find your business in the crowded online marketplace.
How Well Are Your Advertising Dollars Being Spent?
Are you currently, or have you recently thought about investing in digital advertising? You may have considered opening an account with Google Adwords, or spending money on a Facebook Ad. Very likely, you will have several measures of ad responses automatically setup for you, one of which will be a link to your website.
But what happens to your traffic after you spend the money on getting visitors to your website? Do they view more than one page and leave because the content is not explicit or relevant to their needs, or they simply don’t like or have patience for your site navigation or design? How many of those paid clicks are converting to potential leads and sales?
Prior to spending any money on website advertising, I always advise optimizing the website for performance and search first. If your website is not performing well for your existing organic traffic, it’s certainly not going to do any better from paid traffic. In my experience, paid traffic performance is actually much worse. So you are essentially throwing money away at advertising before your website has been demonstrably improved for performance with existing non-paid traffic. And besides, you might discover that there are opportunities to get more people to your website without using paid advertising.
A good website audit will assess opportunities for unpaid sources of traffic, analyze the performance of any existing paid traffic, let you know whether your website is ready to launch into paid digital advertising campaigns, and if not, tell you what you need to do to get it ready.
Plan Ahead!
Whether you are in the process of planning your marketing goals and budget for the year, or thinking about updating your website design, layout or content, a strategic website audit can help you build an actionable roadmap.
A good website audit will take all the data into consideration, then provide practical recommendations for improvements.
Recommendations may include suggestions for:
- Software updates and security hardening methods.
- Improving design, layout or navigation to increase user engagement across devices.
- Additional content to capture more traffic in your target market.
- Content changes to help better target your engaged market.
- Methods for better Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Google Analytics conversion tracking.
- Suggestions for website marketing and advertising options and priorities.
With good information in hand, you can make the best plan to meet your business and marketing goals based on your priorities and budget.
Allegra’s Website Audits
For most small to medium sized businesses in Surrey, we recommend a full comprehensive website audit prior to any major website work, and then annually after that. Technology changes quickly, and so do your markets and web audiences. It’s always best for your business and marketing decisions, and ultimately your sales, to stay tuned in rather than tune out. We want to provide you as much information as possible, making sense of it as it relates to your business and marketing goals so that you can effectively reach people ready to spend their money on whatever you have to sell.
If you’ve never had a general website audit, or it’s been a year or longer since your last, we recommend our website audit report starting at $450. If you have any specific questions, issues, or future plans you’d like us to cover in the report, we’re happy to include those as the focus of our analysis.
Contact Us Today to Get Your Comprehensive Website Audit From the Professionals Who Care!
Quinn has been a certified Google Analytics Qualified Individual since 2004, providing valuable website and digital marketing analytics, as well as effective Search Engine Optimization for measurable performance improvements.
