In a recent post, we walked through the process of doing a complete website audit for your business or e-commerce website. An audit can give you plenty of useful insights into how your site serves your objectives and where you could improve.
That said, a website audit is also an intensive process that takes time and effort.
It’s not unusual for more than one person to work on a website audit, so you might find yourself needing to get buy-in before you can move forward.
In situations like these, it’s helpful to know exactly what you stand to gain from your website audit. If you follow our complete website audit guide, you can glean lots of valuable information that will make it easier for you to get your message to the right people at the right time. That ultimately drives all the website conversions, subscriptions, and online sales that affect the bottom line.
Specifically, you’ll learn:
1. Whether Your Website is Simple Enough For Your Users to ... Well, Use.
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If your prospects and customers can’t easily navigate and use your website, it might as well not be there. There are many different factors that influence how people feel about a site and whether they can get value out of it: A website audit helps you track these down and get down to the root cause of any malfunctions, such as slow load times or counter-intuitive navigation.
2. Whether Your Site is Aligned With the Latest Technology and Demands.
As mobile technology has surged onto the scene, it’s brought tremendous change to the way people consume content – and what they expect from companies around the Web. Today, your site will all but disappear from search results if you aren’t offering a full responsive experience complete with end-to-end security. It’s better to check your status with a website audit than to fall behind!
3. Whether Your Site Does Everything Possible to Achieve Search Visibility.
There’s more than one way to bring traffic to your site, of course, but organic search traffic is the Holy Grail when it comes to low-cost, recurring traffic focused around your key offerings. If your content isn’t optimized to make the most use of organic search, you’re missing out on great opportunities to connect with people at the moment when they need you the most.
4. Whether You’re Getting Traction on Social Media and Around the Web.
Ultimately, robust Web traffic depends to a huge extent on others adopting and amplifying your message. Finding the audiences that your perspective resonates with can be just as lucrative for a traditional B2B firm as it is for a blogger. If social signals and links back to your site are lacking, a website audit will help you recognize the problem and become more proactive.
5. Whether you’re On-Message – and Truly Feel Confident in What the Message Is.
These days, a website audit needs to include double-checking your content, buyer personas, landing pages, and sales funnels. These may sometimes seem like abstractions, but they’re truly the structures that let you attract the right prospects and build robust, profitable relationships. Site auditing helps you produce and position the right content for your buyer journey.
6. Whether You’re Getting All the Insights You Can From Your Web Traffic.
A website visitor adds two types of value to your enterprise: What they do and what you learn from it. Sure, it’s always great when someone buys one of your offerings, but it’s even better when that transaction teaches you something you can apply to make your business better. Your website audit should help you learn where the gaps in your data collection are.
7. Whether Your Team Can Deliver on Tough Marketing Targets Efficiently.
With the emergence of ultra-convenient Content Management Systems, it’s hard for most people to remember the days of writing HTML by hand to build a website. Unfortunately, though, many of today’s business websites still suffer from counter-intuitive administration and duplicate work. Your website audit should ensure that your site is meeting your needs for fast, fluid updates.
8. Whether You’re Ready for What’s Next.
Nobody can predict the future, but being ready for tomorrow starts with preparation today. When you conduct and act on your website audit, you’ll shore up areas of weakness and foster new strengths. That means that when the next new thing arrives, you can react right away – not sit around playing catch up while your market rivals go to town as early adopters.
Ultimately, website auditing is about opportunity: It will help you recognize and move forward on the areas where you could be doing even better. Embracing this process will put you far ahead of the pack, pushing your site development efforts from the hazy realm of intuition into the world of data.
Rob Steffens
I am the Director of Marketing here at Bluleadz. I'm a huge baseball fan (Go Yankees!). I love spending time with friends and getting some exercise on the Racquetball court.