You know what they say, first impressions are the most important!
And when it comes to your website, it’s often the first impression people have of your brand.
Your website is your home base and your online storefront. It’s open 24/7 for business. And if you don’t give off the right impression, you could be losing your audience.
Your website should always be growing with your business. In other words, your website is never done! A lot of people build a new website and then launch it, to never touch it again. That’s a big mistake!
Your goal is to always be improving and adding to the website. So, every couple of months you should do a website audit and take some stock into how your website is getting found, performing, and converting your leads. There are some tests and checks you can do during this process to see where you can improve the site.
What we look for during a website audit
The goldfish test
Once someone lands on your website, you have seconds before they make up their mind if they’re staying or leaving. What are they thinking in the roughly 15 seconds (or less!) they may be spending on your site? They should immediately be able to tell who you are and what you do. Your brand needs to be the product and your customer should be the hero.
Supermarket Sweep Test
You need to check how easy your site is to make a purchase or make it through the sales process. Go through the whole process, start to finish. Was there anything that annoyed you? Maybe something was broken or not working right. Or, you could even find something that just looks like crap. Remember, your roleplaying your customer, so think of everything through their eyes.
Play Questions and Answers
Before people are convinced to take a leap and purchase from you, they’re likely going to have questions about your product or service. Your goal is to know those questions and answer them on the website. Start with the big questions, the big concerns, and work your way to the small detail questions through your content, graphics, and videos.
Hide and Seek
Search engine optimization is also a factor. Think in terms of pain points. Someone is looking for your product because they have a problem. First, how are they phrasing that question? Open an incognito tab and use that phrasing to search the problem. Is your product or service showing up? If not, you’re hiding. You’ll need to beef up on your SEO and work on getting to the front page of Google.
Friend or Foe Test
Are you connecting with your friends and like-minded people through your tone and content? Or, are you missing the mark and attracting the wrong audience? Read through the content, look at your images, and watch your videos.
What would a stranger think about who you are as a brand?
Another aspect of this test is looking into the excitement of the site. Is the copy boring and unoriginal? Does it lack the vibrant personality that is your brand and team? If so, you’ll probably want to revise it.
Can we stay in touch?
Once you introduce your brand and answer all the questions people have, you need to have a way for them to get in touch with you or for you to stay in touch with them. So, do you have an inbound marketing workflow in place? Is there somewhere you can collect their email to put them into a drip campaign? How are you going to continue to connect with them after they leave your site?
Can I live without you?
Once people leave your site are they ever going to think about you again? Well, if you have boring content, probably not. But, if you have content that’s well-thought-out, educational, necessary, and full of your personality, then you have a chance of people wanting more of it.
Let’s be honest, the internet is kinda addicting. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and many other sites have content that people literally crave and keep checking again and again. While you don’t have to compete with these huge sites, you should be trying to get to a point where people want to hear from you. They want to see your latest blog post, video, or download. To create such content you need to know your audience and know what they want to see. Set them up in a drip campaign and then send them your stuff. They’ll be excited to see it!
The Speed Test
More and more important in our mobile-first world, speed is a major factor not only in getting found but keeping people on-page. To be blunt, if your website is slow, people are leaving. So run a speed test and make sure your pages load quickly.
8 Tools we use to do a website audit
Google Analytics
If you’re not doing any tracking on your website, this should be the first thing you add. You’ll get data you can analyze to learn more about your customers and how they are using your website.
https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/
HotJar
If you’re looking for a visual representation of what people are doing on your website, HotJar lets you create visual heat maps of where people are placing their cursors and which links they are clicking on. It lets you know what’s working and what can be tweaked!
SEO Site Checkup
Get reports on SEO data, monitor your rank, and get comparisons to your competitors.
Marketing Grader
This tool by HubSpot grades your website. It gives you a score on performance, mobile, SEO, and security. Then, it lets you know what you should do to improve your score.
GTmetrix
Get a summary of key performance indicators, including page speed and load time, page size, and requests.
Built With
Want to know what a website is built with? Found out with this website.
Wayback Machine
The Internet Archive has saved 339 billion web pages and with the Wayback Machine, you can see them. It was started in 1996! See the history of the internet with this tool.
Similar Web
Using Similar Web, you can see how you do against your competitors, get analytics, and online strategy. You can also find opportunities with partners, leads, or affiliates and identify any emerging trends and players.
Have you performed an audit on your website? What tools did you use? Let us know what you found and what steps you took afterword!
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