When planning to drive traffic and, ideally, capture leads, it’s essential to be certain your website is performing. But besides the typical analytics, how can you figure out what is working and what isn’t on your website? Enter the Website Audit. A website audit can help your online lead generation.
A website audit is an in-depth research process examining your website’s:
- search engine optimization rankings
- target audiences
- messaging
- platform opportunities
- budgets
- timeframes
- conversion paths
- brand
- and key success metrics.
Ultimately, a website audit can serve as a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of sorts for your website.
Access Your Analytics
There are many technical components of your online lead generation campaign that will really impact your results — these include the hosting, your CMS (content management systems), the website and applications and more. As such, you’ll want and need to know how these components are working and if there are any negative impacts. So where should you begin? You’ll first want to get access to your Website & Search Analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Clicky, Cloudflare, etc. These analytics will break down each metric in order to give you a visual marker of what and how these parts are working.
Consider Your User Experience
The next thing to consider is an important and often overlooked part of your website performance — the user experience. How are your customers and potential customers viewing your website? Which parts of your site are easy to navigate? Is there missing information that your customers want to see? You will need to analyze your website user experience and the elements which affect your rankings and visibility. These include speed, content optimization, responsiveness, reviews, etc. Most website audits are built on a scoring model that assigns a score of 0 to 100 or a grade of A-F.
If you want to get an idea of your website’s load speed, check out these tools to run your own page speed test:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Measure Your SEO Results
Any business wants to know if their website is working for them, meaning boosting their visibility online. Search engine optimization is a key tool to help your website rank higher on search engines, and can really be a “make or break” for your website’s traffic. To properly assess how your website ranks across the top search engines, you’ll want to use tools like SEM Rush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Spyfu and many others. These tools will help you gather information on how SERP’s (search engine results page) see your website. The reports will also analyze your current and past website users, how they behave, where they come from, how long they stay on your website, etc.
Other areas of the website audit include:
- Keyword Results
- Content Performance
- Form Testing
- Landing Page Conversion Rate
- Social Media
- Reviews
- Backlinks
- Competitor’s Websites
- Directory Listings
- On-page & Off-page SEO
The bottom line is you need to know how your website is performing. When you conduct a Website Audit, you’ll find hundreds of indicators. Some will show you that your website is performing well and others will show you that you need improvement. Ultimately, you will likely find many opportunities to increase your user’s experience, increase traffic and generate more leads.