WEBSITE SELF-AUDIT KIT

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE WEBSITE SELF-AUDIT KIT

 

 

This audit is designed to help you:

• Identify areas of improvement with your website
• Know the 7 big picture questions you should ask before a website project
• Get a practical and tactical checklist to work through
• Know your best way forward with your website
• Walkthrough how to secure a website project budget
• Get a website that will make you money

Almost everything on your website can likely map to one of these five categories.

As a rule, every B2B website should have pages to cover these five categories, especially a page for potential customers looking to speak with sales. The depth at which you cover each of these five areas will vary depending on your business. 

For example, a software company may have a robust knowledge base full of articles and tutorial videos, whereas a consultant will likely only have a Contact Us page. However, both of these pages suit the needs of offering existing customers support. 

Once you have identified how you want to leverage your website to help with the growth of your business, you will have a better understanding of the potential needs and scope associated with a website redesign. 

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Is Your Website Technically Optimized?

You want your website found on Google. If your website doesn’t appear in Google search results, you are losing easy opportunities for revenue.

Your website health and technical optimization dramatically impact your ability to appear in search. Yet, many companies don’t have a healthy website.

According to SEMRush, the average website has a website health of 74% to 80%. However, the top 10% of websites have an average website health of 92%.

THATS A 12% TO 18% GAP.

That means if you have an average website with an overall 77% health and you cleaned it up, you would see an increase in your search ranking. Better search rankings will result in revenue.

The health of your website is a non-starter. If your website has a slow loading speed, your amazing brand message won’t mean a thing. People will disengage before your website ever loads.

Most marketers don’t code. As a result, they don’t know how to ensure they have a technically optimized website.

If you don’t have a developer on staff, you should likely use a website template or theme that has a team of developers behind it. A good website theme should have developers that ensure the foundation of your website is technically optimized.

From there, ensure you are implementing on-page SEO best practices like your heading tags and alt-text on your images.

With that said, this area is more difficult to identify than something like your website navigation. Here is a free technical audit to help you identify some of the potential SEO issues you may have. This technical SEO audit will crawl the first 25 pages on your website to give you a general idea of your website’s health today. Submit the form below and get access to a free technical SEO scan.

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Do You Have Page Templates For Fast Content Creation?

Your website should provide you with templates you can use to streamline your production process. A library of page templates helps you easily create new pages for anything on your website and can create a more cohesive customer experience that encourages content binging. 

To help your marketing team streamline their product process, start by identifying the pages you would need to have templates for. 

 

• What are your repetitive marketing and sales activities?
• Do you constantly have new products, services, or additional features?
• Do you have partner integrations you want to highlight?
• Do you have a podcast you host on your website?
• Do you frequently host webinars?
• Are you publishing weekly blogs?

These are some of the most common pages you would need to create templates for, so all you need to do is change the copy and publish the page. 

Templates also create a better experience for the website visitor. When your similar pages have a similar page layout, your website visitors won’t think much about the transition from page to page. 

When you have pages that look entirely different, the change to a new web page pulls the website visitor out of their exploration of your website. 

If you want to encourage website visitors to binge your content, ensure your website has templates built to create a cohesive website experience for the visitor.

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Do You Need A Developer To Do Everything on Your Website?

Most internal marketing teams don’t have a developer on staff. A lack of a developer can often cause a problem for internal marketing teams. 

Many websites are completely custom built and significantly limit the abilities of a marketing team to change their website.

Your website is the first point of contact for most potential customers. You need to control your website. 

Unfortunately, some marketing agencies will intentionally sell completely custom websites to ensure you need to keep going back to them to make any changes.

This causes two significant problems:

1. You are now tied to this agency.

You could always find another agency or developer, but they will likely recommend doing another website overhaul. Especially if you had a custom website built, you spent quite a bit of money. No one on the team will like the idea of essentially throwing away all of the money you just put into your website.

You should not be forced into working with an agency. An agency partner should equip you and train you on the tools for growth. That includes the ability to make changes to your website.

2. You have a major bottleneck in your process.

If you have to go to an agency every time you want to make any changes, agencies serve numerous clients. Your requests will get added to their capacity, and they may not get accomplished for weeks. If you have minor requests, you should have the ability to make those changes yourself. 

Even if you have a developer on staff, a marketing team that produces a high volume of content will experience a bottleneck every time they need a blog uploaded. Blogs should be able to be uploaded without the help of a developer. 

With the technology available today, most companies won’t need the help of a developer to custom code their website. Most companies will only need a website theme to create a website they love. Your website theme should provide the flexibility you need to have a developer work in it for some very specific use-cases but provide the functionality that your marketing team can accomplish their day-to-day activities without the need for a developer.

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Does Your Website Provide a Foundation for Developers?

Some websites will need the help of a developer at some point. If you are hiring development talent or have an in-house developer, you want to maximize their time. You need a website with logically organized and clean code. You also want a website with the least amount of code needed to get the job done—the heavier the code on your website, the more detrimental to your page speed. 

Your website should provide the foundation for a developer to get new digital assets on your website quickly and efficiently.

For example, you may sell a service that has a complex pricing structure due to numerous variables. You want to help people understand their costs should they move forward with your product, so you want to create a pricing calculator. 

This pricing calculator is such a specific use case you aren’t likely going to find a website theme with the right calculator module already in place. This calculator concept is a prime example of when you would need a developer to help you develop your website. If your website theme is restrictive to developers because it was designed with strict guardrails for non-technical marketers, your development talent can’t build the digital assets you need.

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Do You Have Seamless Integrations With Your Other Technology?

Your website needs seamless integrations with your entire technology stack for two main reasons.

You want to create as seamless a customer experience as possible and you need to leverage your website to collect data for marketing and sales.

When website visitors land on your website, you want to serve them exactly what they are looking for as quickly as possible. With the appropriate integrations, you can create a completely seamless customer experience to sell to potential customers and serve your existing customer more efficiently.

When your website isn’t integrated with your sales CRM or your customer support ticketing system, you have wasted time and lost opportunities. Potential buyers that don’t connect with your salespeople quickly will go with your competitor.

The Four Approaches To Overhauling Your Website

After reviewing a technical audit, understanding the high-level questions you should consider with your website, and walking through the checklist above, you may have come to the point where you realize you need to make a few changes to the website. If you are looking at a few simple changes on your website, fantastic. Make those changes internally and start cashing the checks. 

If you are looking at a complete overhaul of your website, you need to have a serious conversation with your team about which approach you should take. You have a total of four options. 

 

Option One: The DIY Website Approach

This approach will be the most budget-friendly. This option is a viable option if you have the right internal team to support this effort. 

To take the DIY approach that will accomplish everything outlined above, you will need:

• Strategist
• Content writer
• Designer 
• Developer

If you are looking to build a website internally, you will likely want to look at using the HubSpot CMS or a WordPress website. A Wix or Squarespace website isn’t advisable to build the enterprise website you need, as you don’t truly own your website. You are building your website on a platform you can’t transition away from unless you build a new website from scratch. Like mentioned above, your website is the digital face of your company, and you need complete control over it. 

If you are trying to decide between the HubSpot CMS and WordPress, HubSpot offers an in-depth comparison guide to walk through which option would be best for you. 

Once you have decided what platform you will build your website on, you need to ensure you walk through the questions and checklist above. Please use the audit tool to ensure your new website is healthy. Again, building a website on your own is completely a viable option. You just need to ensure you have the internal staff to support the endeavor. 

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Option Two: Working with A Freelancer

If you aren’t interested in taking an entirely DIY approach but would still like a website for a more budget-friendly price range, you might be tempted to explore a freelancer. There are plenty of freelance marketers and web designers that will happily help you create a new website. 

Many of the online freelance options will provide you with a genuinely beautiful website. Unfortunately, most freelancers focus specifically on designing a website with little thought to lead generation and generating sales opportunities.

If you are going to try to hire freelancers to help your website project, you should almost think about this project as a DIY project. The freelance help you hire should fill a specific role of strategist, content writer, designer, or developer. This option works well if you are confident you have the right people on your team and really just need to hire a specialist for a specific piece of the project. 

You may run into a problem with freelancers following the project. Many freelancers want to get through the project and move on to the next. Most solo freelancers don’t have the capacity to provide ongoing support. If you don’t have someone internally that can own the maintenance of your website, a solo freelancer may not be the best option for you. 

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Know What You Need

This concept goes back to the fact you are negotiating. You can’t negotiate well if you don’t know what you’re asking for. 

If you need time, you need to communicate clear expectations of your timeline. If you need additional budget, bring a dollar amount and tie it back to projected ROI. If you need to outsource pieces or the entire project, bring a shortlist of potential partners.

Having a shortlist of partners helps you in a few ways. 

• You can ask for a budget more confidently. If you have the facts, you don’t have to guess.
• In conversations with an agency, they may offer valuable insight into other potential areas of improvement you can bring to your leadership. 
• As you speak with an agency partner, they can help coach you through the process of selling a website project. They sell website projects for a living, and they want you to succeed. 
• Once you have approval, people don’t want to wait. If you’ve already started the conversation, you can get started more quickly.

You know your leadership. You are far more likely to succeed if you are able to come with a time frame, anticipated results, and request budget amount.

The more information you have going into this conversation, the more likely you are to succeed.

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What To Do If Your Website Project Isn’t Approved

Be prepared that the project could face rejection.

Almost every marketer looks at the website and says it needs an overhaul. 

The website is the most crucial marketing asset your business has, and most websites fall short of their potential. It makes sense why marketers want to fix them, but your leadership has probably heard they need to fix the website countless times. 

Know that if you have clear evidence that your website is underperforming, keep referencing the data. When you are asked to report on data, show the facts that the site isn’t working. When asked why leads are down, reference the website. When asked to improve your marketing efforts, say you can’t because your website isn’t working.  It may take some time, but eventually, it will click, and you will be off to the races.