22 Nov Website Audit 101: The full guide
A deep dive to Website Audit
Having a website comes with great responsibility. A website is your online presence, it costs money (maintenance, hosting, domain, plugins) and it must convert.
There are millions of ways to structure a website but there is only one way that will make you profit. The conversion-channel structure combined with the application of -lots of- user experience best-tactics.
What is Website Audit?
Website Audit is the process of looking through core elements of your website to define if they are optimized or not. A website audit aims to converting your website into a selling machine and consists of the following steps:
- Speed audit: Is your website fast enough? Speed is one of the main ranking factors, but also a variable that can modify customer behaviour and lead to buying decisions. If your website is not fast enough there are some actions that can improve its performance. Image resizing and compression, code optimization, elimination of pages that are poor content-wise or conversion-wise are some of the marketing moves that will improve our stats.
- Conversion audit: Is it easy for someone to convert? Conversion audit is the process of analyzing your customer conversion channels and evaluating the distraction, persuasion and information elements that are placed through your most important pages. If your channels are not strong enough, the consultant usually proposes new channels that will improve your conversion rate.
- SEO Audit: Is your website ranking high? If you have a website that your customers cannot reach when searching for your products or services is like not having a website at all. SEO audit will help you identify your content weaknesses, compare your website to the competitive websites and help you build a strategy to rank higher and increase your traffic -and conversions-.
- User Experience Audit: Does your audience like your website? If your customers leave immediately when visiting your website, without buying or making a conversion, then there might be a serious user experience issue with your website. Growth hacking tools like heatmaps, can show as the points that need improvement in order to satisfy your customers through theiw buying journey.
Let’s have a closer look to your website
Speed Audit
You can easily measure your website speed by using some of the free tools that are available online. Improving your website’s speed is crucial and requires maintenance as web technologies evolve and document types change to adapt to the demanding speed needs.
When running a speed audit you will see a lot of notifications and suggestions to improve performance. A consultant can split those problems into groups -marketing, technical, content etc- and delegate them to experienced professionals who can fix them.
Why speed is important
- Better user experience
- Easier to rank high
- Better website structure
- Healthier website
Conversion Audit
While speed audit is easy to execute by yourself, conversion audit is a little more complex and demands experience and deep knowledge of the consumer conversion channels.
Conversion audit is the most important part of the process as it can easily convert your website into a selling machine. The main focus of the audit is following the user through your website, examining the distracting elements and the places that may attract his attention the most.
A visitor may be in any step of the customer journey, and your website should be properly armed to perform in each of them.
When a customer is searching he needs information and benefits – when he is evaluating he needs to know that your product or service can solve his problem and when he is ready to buy he need an easy way to convert and access to experts that can consult him.
SEO Audit
If your website is optimized and ready to run, you have to make sure that the customers searching for your products and services will be able to find you on search results.
The SEO Audit will help you create a keyword strategy to target keywords of interest and fix any problems that may affect your ranking position.
Your SEO performance is usually measured by your SEO score which you can measure online using several free or paid tools.
You may notice that different tools will give you different score and this is because each tools is taking under consideration different ranking factors.
An SEO consultant will help you measure your website SEO performance based on your own data and your own ranking stats.
User Experience Audit
Last but not least, the user experience audit will help you convert your website from plain information to a highly engaging online channel.
What is user experience? User experience is the colors, the position of the buttons, the way that a customers can buy your product and the ease of navigation in your website.
The user experience audit can be done in two different ways. The first one is through analyzing the competition to find out the best techniques used by industry professionals and the second one is through applying basic user experience tactics for success.
Who can help me with the Website Audit?
Are you ready to audit your website? It is time to contact a marketing consultant. An experienced professional can create a custom audit and strategy according to your needs, and help you execute it to achieve the best results. Contact The Website Agency to start working on your website audit today!
The website audit will be deelivered to you as a documented analysis – which will be an asset for your company and a point of reference for future marketing activities – and as a personalized consulting session that will walk you through the problems and strategies that will help you achieve your business goals.
How long does the Website Audit take?
The duration of analysis usually depends on the size of your website and the number of your pages. It usually takes from 1 week to 1 month. The duration of the analysis may also vary if you do not analyze all four aforementioned factors, but you choose a subset of them to explore specific factors of your website’s performance.