If you run an online business, you’ll know how important your website is to everything that you do. From first finding out about your company to making orders, your customers will rely on your website to do business with you.
This means that your website is a fundamental part of your small business. Just as the perfect web page can increase sales, you need to be wary of the damaging effects that can come with even the smallest issues on your website.
In order to have a website that generates the largest possible amount of leads and helps you to grow your small business, it’s important to make sure that these issues are discovered and resolved quickly. The best way to do this is through regular website audits.
What is a website audit?
Everyone has frustrating experiences with technology from time to time. Maybe your laptop is sluggish, or a call keeps dropping. Whatever the issue, it can ruin your experience – and if this is linked to a business, you’ll be far less likely to continue spending money with them.
An audit is intended to prevent your customers from having a negative experience when using your company’s website. However, it shouldn’t just focus on resolving problems. It can also be used to scale up already effective websites.
A website audit reveals how your web page appears in search engine results. It also tests how usable your website is. It should consider how optimized your site is for your targeted audience and whether it is set up to effectively reach your lead conversion goals.
By implementing a comprehensive analysis of all aspects of your website – from SEO performance to usability – you’ll be able to identify any problems and focus your resources on making your website more effective.
How can website audits benefit your business?
You should now know what a website audit is – but why is it so important for your business? Here are 3 of the biggest ways in which regular website audits can help your business to grow:
If your website is sluggish or unresponsive, you’ll quickly drive away your customers. However, without doing a website audit, you’ll have no access to reliable data about website speed or responsiveness.
As well as this, you might have links on your website that aren’t functioning properly. If you are driving traffic to 404 pages or the wrong parts of your website, your customer experience will suffer.
By knowing whether you have any broken links on your website or if your page is slow or unresponsive, you’ll be able to invest your resources effectively in resolving these issues. This can vastly improve customer experience and help you to retain clients.
Any small online business knows the importance of search engines. SEO for niche markets can make or break your company, with 68% of online experiences beginning from a search engine result.
Improving user experience is one way of increasing SEO performance. Search engines such as Google are becoming more effective in identifying and promoting well-designed websites that encourage good user experience.
However, website audits can also specifically focus on your company’s SEO performance. By recognizing the limits to your SEO performance and what you’re already doing well, you can reorient your SEO strategy to ensure that you have a high ranking in search engine results.
Conversions are the ultimate aim of your website. Everything that you do should focus on making sure that users become customers.
By identifying which pages on your website are receiving the most traffic, you can see how you can include more call-to-actions (CTAs) on these pages and encourage more lead conversions.
As well as this, the simple fact is that improving your SEO and user experience will automatically lead to more conversions, as more and more people will use and stay on your website.
Different types of website audits
As we’ve seen, website audits can help your company in numerous different ways. This means that the goals you want to prioritize shape which type of website audit you want to perform. Here are some of the different types of website audits:
This is an audit that evaluates how your website performs in search engine results. Due to the wide range of factors that can affect SEO performance, this will be a comprehensive audit that looks at many parts of your website. Therefore, this audit will examine link performance, keyword usage, metadata, and overall user experience.
SEO audits can help you to identify which tools are best suited to improve your performance, such as by integrating AI SEO software into your online strategy.
While audits are largely focused on the performance of your own website, it is important to recognize what is working for your competitors’ websites. A competitive website audit allows you to analyze your competitors and incorporate elements of their strategies into your website.
This should include thinking about customer experience when using other websites. If you recognize that pages are loading more quickly on a competitor’s website, for example, you can think about the software and technologies that allow them to have an edge over your site.
Niche marketing companies will always rely on their social media channels. Effective use of social media such as Instagram or Facebook can increase leads and improve customer engagement. This means that good website audits should examine how your websites use social media traffic.
You should first analyze your social media traffic and make sure that it is consistent across all channels. Then you can see which social media channels drive the most traffic to your website and generate the most leads.
Doing a social media audit will let you focus resources on the most effective social media channels and improve those channels that have been less useful for generating leads.
This analyzes how effective your website is in achieving lead generation and conversion. You should begin by getting a good picture of how much traffic you receive and where this traffic comes from – this will let you increase website traffic and thus improve conversions.
You’ll also be able to recognize which parts of your website are likely to lead to fewer conversions. These can include usability problems when checking out and visibility issues when it comes to CTA buttons.
Lead conversion audits are one of the best ways to identify ways to boost conversions on your niche marketing website.
While this isn’t directly focused on boosting conversions, your website’s security is integral to any online strategy. Without a secure online platform, you’ll struggle to convince customers to trust you – meaning that in the long run, security can be crucial when generating quality leads.
A security audit simply checks your website for any potential vulnerabilities in your website’s architecture. By regularly auditing your site’s security, you can be confident that your business is safe for you and your customers.
How to perform a website audit
The exact ways in which you conduct a website audit will depend on which type of audit you want to perform. However, there is a basic process that all website audits should follow, which will allow you to identify how your website can boost conversions.
Before starting any website audit, you should identify what you want the final results of your audit to be. Maybe you have certain pre-existing targets for lead conversions that you want to reach. Alternatively, you might want to ask, ‘What is customer orientation?’ if you are trying to establish a more effective orientation page.
By having a clear set of goals, you can tailor your audit to the specific issues that your company is trying to overcome. It means that you can most effectively use your resources, increasing your ROI from the audit.
Beginning a website audit may seem daunting. Fortunately, there are many pre-existing website auditing tools that you can use. These will give you an accurate picture of the analytics and data behind your website’s performance.
It can be as simple as entering your URL into a free online tool, but more advanced options can be used for companies looking for in-depth data and recommendations. You should test out a few different providers and find the best tool that suits you and your goals.
Technical problems can be one of the most disruptive elements to a website’s performance. Using a developer with specific technical expertise can help you to identify these problems, but it can also be as simple as checking loading times or looking for broken links.
It is usually good for online businesses to have accurate and up-to-date sitemaps and internal audit reports. XML sitemaps used by Google and the public sitemaps at the bottom of most web pages are a good way to ensure that you have no broken links on your site.
As well as this, you can use data to see if there are any technical issues on the parts of your website that are most often left by users. One example of this might be usability problems on your checkout page.
Once you have recognized any technical issues, it’s a good time to try to improve your SEO performance. This can be done by checking the parts of your website that are used by search engines such as Google.
You should make sure that title tags and meta descriptions are unique, relevant, and optimized for search engines. By analyzing keywords and content, you can also ensure that every part of your website is perfectly set up for success in search engine results.
Good SEO services boost traffic, so this should be an important part of any website audit that tries to boost conversions.
While solving any problems with SEO performance and technical issues will improve user experience, you should still specifically target how your website is experienced by customers.
Think about the design of your website and how it can be improved to make navigation easier or encourage more conversions. As well as this, if you have a mechanism for customers to communicate with customer services, compare it to apps like Aircall to make sure that customers have the best possible experience when they use your website.
One website audit will undoubtedly help you to boost conversions. But for audits to be truly effective, they need to be repeated regularly. There’s always room for improvement when it comes to generating sales on your website.
As well as this, the criteria used by platforms such as Google when it comes to SEO often change. This means that you should try to keep on top of any changes and change your website in order to keep your high ranking in search engine results pages.
You might also have only focused on one type of website audit. If this is the case, it’s important to remember that security or social media audits are also crucial for any online business lead time.
Website audits – a valuable tool for boosting conversions
This article has highlighted how important regular website audits are for your niche marketing business. By having an accurate and comprehensive idea of your website’s most effective and ineffective parts, you can efficiently focus your resources to produce a website that productively generates lead conversions.
Website audits can target a range of different elements of online businesses, from SEO performance to security to lead conversion. By identifying your goals first, you can choose which element to focus on.
From that point, you can use an online website auditing tool to locate technical issues, increase SEO performance and improve your user experience and website design. By repeating these audits, you can ensure that your website remains at the forefront of the niche marketing industry.
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Jenna Bunnell – Senior Manager, Content Marketing, Dialpad
Jenna Bunnell is the Senior Manager for Content Marketing at Dialpad, an AI-incorporated cloud-hosted unified communications system that provides valuable call details for business owners and sales representatives with the help of online faxing in Dialpad. She is driven and passionate about communicating a brand’s design sensibility and visualizing how content can be presented in creative and comprehensive ways. Check out her LinkedIn profile.
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