As a business owner, you probably remember the excitement that comes from a new website, and watching as all of your hard work went live. For many though, that’s where most of their website efforts end, and that’s a big mistake.
Running a regular website audit – which checks the performance of your website and whether it’s doing the job you meant for it to do – can help you diagnose what’s working well for your website, and what needs to be improved.
Here are four things a website audit can help with.
1. SEO Performance
Google’s search engine algorithm changes all the time, and performing regular site audits can help you identify whether or not your site has fallen behind from an SEO perspective. If you focus on providing useful, valuable content written with readers in mind, you’ll be better protected against changes to Google’s algorithms, since Google typically changes its algorithm to better rewards sites that do this anyway.
That doesn’t mean you can neglect keywords though; the keywords people use to search for information in your industry can change frequently. An SEO audit of your website can help you identify if that’s the case, and what changes to make to get back on track.
2. Website Performance
A website performance audit checks how easy it is for users to navigate your website. After all, what good is having a website if it’s so difficult to navigate that nobody ends up taking the actions you’d like them to take?
A good website structure incorporates the following:
Be Informative
It’s important that your website quickly communicates who you are, what you do, and the benefits they’ll receive using your services, or products, over those of a competitor.
Be easy to access
All essential information contained within your website navigation should be only ‘one-click’ away from the homepage.
Be action-driven
A clean, well-designed structure that focuses users to the task at hand, whether that’s making a purchase, requesting a quote, or signing up for a mailing list.
3. Conversion Rate Optimisation Performance
Another huge benefit of conducting regular website audits is that it allows you to identify any cracks in your path to conversion. If you analyse traffic behaviour on your website you may find that you’re seeing a massive drop-off rate at a particular step in the conversion process. That step could be dramatically reducing your website’s conversion rates. An audit helps you identify which steps in the process need fixing, and which ones can remain intact.
4. Technical Performance
Most businesses benefit from hiring an external expert to assess the technical performance of their website rather than tackling it themselves. It’s an important element of your site audit, and it assesses things like whether your site is mobile-friendly, error-free, and quick to load for users. According to a recent study from Google, a 3-second delay in website load times can increase abandon rates by over 100%. YIKES! – that’s how impatient we’ve become. With more website traffic coming from mobile and rapidly-shrinking attention spans, these technical aspects of your website could make or break your ability to convert visitors into customers.
Conclusion
Business owners who take a ‘set-and-forget’ approach to building their website are passing up on huge opportunities to increase traffic and conversions on their website, potentially passing up significant revenue gains as a result.
By conducting regular, ongoing website audits that factor in all four elements in this post, you’ll give yourself a leg up on the competition and help maximise your conversion rates for years to come. After all, it’s not enough in business to simply have a website anymore; you need to have a website that converts.
When was the last time you logged into the backend of your website? Do you have full admin access? Have you got access to your hosting plan? Make sure to answer these questions as part of your website audit.
