Reviewing your current website
How old is your company’s website? When was it last updated? When did you last give it a decent check-up? Like many companies, it’s possible that you have never audited your website, or it may have been quite a while since you last did.
When your site is first designed and built you take care over all the details, scrupulously checking through the copy and content, making sure the images reflect your business and ethos correctly, ensuring that the UX design is spot on, and that the SEO is working for you. But once it’s live and up and running it’s easy to forget about it and just assume that it worked then so it’s probably still fine now. However, it’s recommended that you perform a full and thorough website audit at minimum once a year to ensure that you’re getting the best from, and really making the most of, your biggest (and in most cases, most expensive) marketing asset.
What is a Website Audit?
A website audit is a critical review and examination of overall website performance. Auditing your website can help to check the performance, security, and health of your website, and determine whether or not it's optimised to achieve your goals. Once completed this can then inform decisions, updates, and changes that need to be made in order to improve it to reach those goals.
It can identify a variety of issues, including duplicate or outdated content, page speed, broken links, SEO gaps or snags, search engine ranking, and much more.
It helps fill in the gaps that are affecting your visibility, user experience, conversion rate, and lead generation.
At a minimum it should:
- Evaluate visibility and ranking within search engines (particularly Google)
- Highlight issues affecting website performance and functionality
- Suggest areas of improvement within design and content
- Increase website traffic and user engagement
- Emphasise gaps in SEO
- Provide traffic analytics
Overall, a website audit helps turn a website that is simply doing the bare minimum into an excellent one that reaches its full potential and maximises return on investment – complete with a great user experience.
Running regular audits on your website is the best way to make sure your site stays up-to-date and working for you and your business goals.
Why audit your website?
Your website could well be (and more and more often, is) the first thing people see of your business. It’s where they go to learn all about you, your products, and services. A company website is often described as a ‘digital shop window’ (whether you have a real shop window or not). A website isn’t just a part of your brand, from an audience perspective, it is your brand. So it’s essential that it is always fresh, up to date, and easy for the customer.
Ensuring that your site is on-brand, updated regularly and designed with great user-friendly interface (UI)/user experience (UX) can help you to increase growth, reputation, and profitability. On the other hand, if it’s old, unappealing, out of date and (possibly the worst failure of all) not mobile responsive, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re losing out on potential customers and opportunities – and therefore, revenue.
What are the benefits of a website audit?
If your site has been live and ticking over for a while, a website audit with a new set of eyes and a fresh perspective can be the perfect way to boost UX, design, performance, and optimisation.
Nothing on the internet stands still, it’s a constantly changing and evolving landscape, and you have to keep up in order to thrive and prosper. For example, core Google algorithm updates (that seem to happen more and more regularly!) can affect your site’s SEO. Updates to plugins or software could affect the performance and useability of your site. Your service or offering may have changed, or the design may now look tired and out of date.
Fall behind on the management of your site and competitors could gain an advantage in the search or keyword rankings. In turn poaching your customers and leads.
Who should perform a website audit?
If you think that you’re ready for a website audit, you have two choices – you can either do it yourself or call upon an expert agency to do it for you. As with everything, there are benefits and downsides to both approaches.
The main benefit of preforming an audit internally is that there is no cost involved, except for the cost of any software that you might need and the time cost. An audit can take up a lot of time, if you’re running a busy company you may need to try to fit it in in between day-to-day tasks, which can be difficult and make the timings spiral. If you’ve never done it before you’ll also need to learn as you go – another time expenditure.
You know your website better than anybody else and so are in a great position to navigate it. However, this could mean that you lack objectivity.
The benefits of outsourcing to an expert agency are that you will not have to get involved, they know what they’re doing and can do it quickly.
As with all things when running a business, what it will boil down to is financial investment and ROI.
However this should be seen as an investment as you will be using the outcomes to increase visibility, engagement, and leads.
What to do after a website audit
Once your audit is complete it’s time to look over all the data and information that has been collected and identify the changes that need to be made, the improvements and updates. You need to ensure that these are measurable, bite size chunks that add up to your site being fully up to date, functioning smoothly and working for you and towards your goals.
It’s vital that you create a plan, timescale, and deadline to get these updates completed. You may want to enlist the help of a Project Manager to help with the task. Small, quick fixes can be prioritised so that there is as little disruption to the site as possible but any major changes will need to be thoroughly planned out and considered.
If you would like to know more about website audits, or any of our specialist services, we’d love to help. Get in touch on 01204 493382 or [email protected]
