Perform A Website Audit Like Top Marketing Consultants

Before you decide to go ahead and do a website redesign, you’d be smart to hire a marketing consultant to give your website a checkup. By performing a website audit, you’ll glean invaluable information on how well your current website is optimized, steps you’ll need to take in the new version to better achieve the goals you’ve already set or intend to set and – most importantly – learn what it will take to increase valuable traffic and site performance. 

Did you know? Most companies don’t do website audits before redesign. 

If you know a little bit about SEO, conversion and content, great – but keep reading to ensure you’re evaluating all that you can to help ensure your new website is as good as it can be.  

Website Audit Step 1: Consider Your Content

It should inform. 

Is your site’s content doing all that it can to entice and inform its target audience? Read over your content in its entirety and imagine you are an ideal site visitor. Ask yourself, do I know everything I need to know in order to make a decision? Do I know what I need to do next? Am I left with questions? 

It should cater. 

As we mentioned in the blog post “Marketing Consultants Q&A: How Do I Maximize Lead-Generation”, your content should speak to certain buyer “personas” – those overarching individuals or groups that represent your ideal customer. The content should also be well-written, concise, interesting, easy to understand, valuable, detailed and thorough on any given topic – be it a product you’re selling or a problem you’re solving. 

It should be optimized. 

Every web page should follow on-page SEO best practices. You can consult your analytics to review your keyword performance or ask your marketing consultants to help you. And, make sure keywords are used throughout your page – not just within the content itself, but also in URLs, page title, meta data and image descriptions. 

It should generate leads and convert.

Marketing consultants lean on the calls-to-action (CTAs), landing pages, marketing offers and more in upping the overall performance of a website – and with good reason. This sort of content helps to keep visitors engaged, appeals to the need your product or service is seeking to address, pulls in more qualified leads and helps to capture visitors’ information so you can follow up later with your sales team. 

Website Audit Step 2: Behind The Curtain

Oz The Great and Powerful gained his larger-than-life reputation by creating a mystifying oracle, a machine that lead his flock to believe he was capable of anything and everything. Your website serves much the same purpose for your company – and, like with The Wizard of Oz, if ever there is a technical problem, the curtain will be pulled back, and your faithful followers will be left to see you for your flaws and not for your flare. 

Your site should be responsive and error-free.

The site should be optimized for mobile, easy to navigate, load quickly and be error message free. Speaking of load times, make sure your site doesn’t have so much Flash animation or JavaScript that they’re cumbersome to fire up, boring and obnoxious to sit through, and hard for search engines to make heads or tails of. 

Optimize those URLs

However, don’t overstuff them and make the URLs so long that they’re absurd. Your marketing consultant can help you strike a balance between an optimized keyword and one that’s overburdened with things like dynamic parameters and keys. 

For more helpful tips

SugarBush Inc. President and Marketing Consultant Mark Parent is offering a free how-to guide called “10-Step Checklist For Your Website Redesign”. Inside you’ll find his invaluable hints for making your redesign process well worth the time, money, and effort.