Why are Website Audits Important?

Websites have become a vital part of every business’s marketing and sales strategy, especially now with the importance of online shopping and booking through the pandemic. Recent events have pushed people to online shopping, services and discovering what they need either at home or on their phone.  The  gravitation to online will only increase rather than retreat to traditional thinking and businesses need to be prepared.  Not having an online presence will limit your market but having a bad website can be as detrimental.

Websites have become a vital part of every business’s marketing and sales strategy, especially now with the importance of online shopping and booking through the pandemic. Recent events have pushed people to online shopping, services and discovering what they need either at home or on their phone.  The  gravitation to online will only increase rather than retreat to traditional thinking and businesses need to be prepared.  Not having an online presence will limit your market but having a bad website can be as detrimental.

The problem is that many websites aren’t performing well enough to get businesses noticed or enticing customers to spend enough time on the site to find what they want.  Your website may be the only way customers find you so you need to make sure it’s maximizing your exposure and holding onto viewers  

There are four common problems found on websites that aren’t producing the results business owners are expecting:

Low traffic to Your Site

Searching the internet is now the most common way people try to find businesses and if you aren’t showing up in the top 3 -5 results in Google, people won’t be finding you.  Low traffic to your website is a direct result of where you show up in a Google search.  People don’t want to hunt for a business, they always try the first few results.  Try searching for your company and see where you sit in the search ranking. If you’re not at the top of the list, you need a site audit to determine how to raise your ranking.

Common Causes of Low Traffic

• Content SEO isn’t driving Google ranking a
• No new content
• No backlinks
• Site isn’t mobile friendly
• Poor website performance and load times

Good Traffic with a High Bounce

Rate or Low Sales Leads

Now if you’re at the top of the rankings and you people are finding you but they just aren’t sticking around you’ve still got a big problem.  People are talking about your services or products, but when they get to your site, they just don’t stay long enough to find out more about you.  

You’ve worked to get them to your site so make sure your site is providing exactly what the customer is looking for.  Don’t forget that how your site looks can be as important as to what it says.  A site with brilliant content but looks like it’s 20 years old won’t keep people.  The same can be said if you have a great site with poor content.   

Common Causes of High Bounce Rate or Low Leads

• Too many ads
• Content isn’t customer focused
• Site is hard to navigate
• Call to action is not prominent 
• Incentives aren’t enticing to customers
• Site isn’t mobile friendly

Sales Leads but Low Conversions

Leads are coming through your site but customer’s just aren’t taking the next step to buy your product or service.   Your marketing is working but if they aren’t moving to the next step and becoming paid customers there’s a problem somewhere.  To entice potential customers into the purchasing process you need to make sure it’s easy to buy your products or services.  Maybe your incentive isn’t working or the call to action isn’t clear. Many sites don’t have an easy path to you purchasing or onboarding which discourages customers.  The

fastest way to lose a customer is make the purchasing process difficult or do something that makes them lose confidence in you.  

Common Causes of  Low Conversions

• Navigation is clear for customers
• Sales pages and processes aren’t clean and efficient
• Onboarding sequence is poor
• Transaction emails non-existent or ineffective

Low Sales Retention and High Return Rates

Lastly, you may find that you’re getting sales and things are ok, but you have a high number of people that return their items, cancel their order or appointment.  The fact that you’re getting sales is great but if you’re having a high number of returns or people aren’t returning to buy more products you’re failing to grow your business.  

Providing customers with expectations for what they are getting goes a long way to ensuring they get exactly what they want and guaranteeing they’ll be back or tell others about your site. 

Common Causes of Low Retention and High Returns

• Promises and expectations aren’t what customer is experiencing
• Fulfillment sequences aren’t supporting the customer
• Online support not providing customers the information they need
• Not keeping in touch with the customer

One side effect of all of these issues is that your phone may ring and your customer service staff could be extremely busy. If people can’t find what they want or get the help they need from your website they will pick up the phone and call you. That is if they still want to do business with you.

The importance of a really good website with great content is an asset your business needs to make a priority.  

A site  audit will ensure you know the problems with your website and how they can be fixed.  Without a site audit you may continue to have the same issue and never truly understand why your site just isn’t working for you.  

Audit Process

The process begins with a meeting to determine which of the problems outlined above your business is experiencing as a starting point.  The conversation will root out the issues and help provide a path forward for the audit.  The audit process will include the use of analytics and other tools to determine if there other issues to be resolved. 

A Site Audit includes a thorough review of your site, measuring it against web best practices.  The criteria for the audit is outlined below and covers topics that encompass navigation, content and technical items to ensure the entire site is reviewed and solutions are provided.

User engagement 

• Is the site customer or company focused?  This is very important to customer engagement.
• Examine the content on your website and determine if your content is engaging your audience or just stating information.  Has it been updated lately?  New content is a great way to keep your customers engaged.
• Can customers easily scan your pages or are they a long and difficult read?  Your customers want to easily scan the information and find what they want.
• Does your site look current or does it look like it was built in the 90s?  You need to make sure it looks current, professional.  Give your customer confidence they want to do business with you.
• Do your offers engage your customers and entice them to spend more time on your site?  Your customers need to find something that draws them to your site.  The audit will rate your offers and determine their strength.

User experience 

• Is your site easy to navigate and is the information your clients are looking for easy to find, whether they are new or returning customers?
• A review of the site navigation will include the menu and organization of pages.
• Look at the customer onboarding and ordering process and see if the customer feels secure and confident in your company.
• Is your site built for mobile browsing?  Mobile use has become vitally important and ease of use on a phone or tablet must be a part of an audit.

Traffic 

• How are potential customers finding you?
• Review where the traffic is coming from and how they are finding your site using analytics.
• Determine how long they are spending on your site and if views are turning into leads and actually converting the leads.
• Review competitors and compare them to your site ranking and review keywords in your business niche.

Website Performance and Health

• Is your site loading fast enough?  
• How big is the file size of your images?
• The site will need a review of how your site performs both functionally and technically for your customers to ensure it isn’t causing them to leave your site.
• A review to ensure your site is your site secure and protects your clients data. 

What can you expect after the website

audit is completed?

Advanced Site Exposure website audits provide customers with a summary report containing a list of issues that need to be addressed.  We will include the solutions to the issues as part of the audit. 

 A website audit will provide improved Google search rankings and increase site traffic and performance. Implementing the results of a website audit presents opportunities for online growth for your business.  

Advanced Site Exposure provides a service to implement the solutions to the issues identified in the site audit.  Our team are experts in User Experience, Content Creation and SEO to ensure your site rises to the top of the rankings, generates leads and converts those leads to sales.