Auditing Your Business Website for Better Conversion
Thought of auditing your website? You are about to do the best thing for your company’s conversion. By going through everything, from aesthetics to internal usability, you get to see which part performs best, which needs improvements and which needs to stay as is.
For website auditing to be efficient, let’s look at it as a way to see what’s essentially wrong on your website. Ideally, you’ll need fresh eyes to do this; someone who can professional scour through each pages, sections, sub-sections and elements of your website — a website auditor. But if you don’t want to spend resources and time hiring a website auditor, then you can definitely do it by yourself.
Basically, when you audit, you are not looking for what’s amazing of your website. You are a critic dissecting it, finding its weak parts so you can improve them.
There are 6 essential aspects of your website and its functions that need auditing.
- Content. Content auditing is basically going through existing pieces of content in your website may they be audio, video, text, among others. Audit content by analyzing which: performs worst, have less traffic and have the most bounce rate. By doing so, you are able to see which among them need improvements and allows you to generate idea for future publications as well as eliminate content that is no longer need. Content auditing also lets you understand your website performance to see which among your marketing initiatives are not doing any good for your conversion goals.
- Marketing Effectiveness. Audit your website’s marketing effectiveness to see if you are getting real value for your time, money and investments. Since you launched your website, how is it performing when it comes to your RoI? Are you pleased with results and outputs? How’s your conversion going so far? Which product or pages bring better revenue? Which don’t? Overall, you want to see how effective your website is when it comes to its role as a part of your marketing toolkit.
- Goals. Depending on how old your website is, is it able to perform according to your expectations and goals? Does it help improve your exposure to your target market? Have you seen sales figure spiked? Think of your goals and reasons why you invested on building an online presence. Does your website do its part?
- Re-think of design. Audit typography, iconography, photography and everything else that is a part of your website’s aesthetics. You know the basics: balanced graphics and text, straightforward navigations and an overall website design that delivers the overall message of your brand. Go through the aesthetics of your website once more and see which needs improvements.
- Ease of Management Is the website easy to manage or does it takes too much time for you and your team? Whether your website is build from raw codes or the modern drag-and-drop, ease of management should be taken consideration. Recall how many downtime errors you had in a cycle of a given time or how much time it takes to fix certain bugs. If it takes more resources just to manage your website, then you might consider shifting to another platform or migrating to a better provider.
- Usability. User experience is very important. Put simply user experience as the kind of emotion your website visitor gets when they access your website. They should be able to go to the most important parts of your website and navigate with ease. They should feel confident with their online security. Improved user experience gains customers’ trust. Audit the following usability functions of your website:
- Homepage/Landing Pages
- Functionality & Features
- Navigation
- Contact & Feedback Pages
- Language & Consistency
- Error Prevention & Correction
- Visual Clarity
- Security
Take notes which needs improvement by labeling priorities: high, medium or low. And before reconstructing, take consideration of your budget as you need to re-invest for these changes.