If your sales and/or marketing campaigns aren’t having the impact you expect, it might be worth putting your website under the microscope to see if there are any issues that might be preventing your hard work from reaching the right people.
Whether it’s a technical issue, search engine optimisation (SEO) or user experience, there are many factors that could be affecting your website’s performance – and all are very common! We advise regular performance reviews and maintenance to ensure your website is working to its true potential.
Here we provide some key pointers for what to look out for when auditing your b2b website.
What are we looking for?
A full website audit should be the first step you take before jumping into SEO work or doing a re-design. By taking a thorough look at its existing performance, you will be able to understand how well your site is meeting your needs and where there may be opportunities for optimisation. You need to understand:
Website performance:
- Are you getting a high volume of visitors? If not, why not?
- Where are users coming from?
- How are they accessing your site?
- Is your content optimised for search engines?
User experience:
- Does your website take users on a journey?
- Is information signposted clearly enough?
- Are you leading users to take the desired action?
Lead generation opportunities:
- Are your landing pages effective in terms of lead generation and conversion optimisation?
- Are there any opportunities to improve the pages to secure more leads?
Technical issues:
- Even the most well-maintained websites will have some technical improvements that could be made – updating plugins, removing bad code, and taking action to improve page speed are all areas for investigation.
Competitor analysis:
- Part of the audit can look at your competitors’ web presence and where there may be opportunities for you to out-perform them.
How to conduct an audit:
Here at TSP, we regularly conduct thorough audits of client’s websites and would be happy to talk to you about how we can help with auditing your website. If you want to get a head start with seeing how your site is performing, you can take the following steps:
- Use free online tools to get a top-level view of your site’s performance – we like the HubSpot website grader. These tools provide basic steps for technical improvements that you can make and should be simple for anyone trained up on your website platform.
- Audit your content so that you get a feel for where updates could be made to help with SEO and user experience – could you add more links to the pages? Have you included your keywords within the page text? Has the information been updated recently and/or checked for accuracy? Content optimisation is an important factor for marketing and sales so we’d recommend spending some time on this.
- Review your website design and user experience – for instance, is the font colour easy to read against your website background? Is the navigation bar obvious enough to help users find what they’re looking for? Have you got enough calls to action to direct them to get more information?
- Create a checklist – love a list? Us too. Put all of your actions into a plan to help you execute all of the changes you need to make. You could use a traffic light system to assign priority level and make it more manageable for you and your team.
Is it worth the effort?
100%. Think about how many times you’ve visited websites looking for an answer to a specific question, only to leave frustrated when you’ve not been able to navigate it, or you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for. If your site isn’t meeting your audience’s needs, quite simply, they will go elsewhere. So many improvements can be made with small changes, so it doesn’t have to be a large or expensive undertaking. Start now and you’ll be on the road to a better b2b website in no time!
The tips provided here should help you to make a start on reviewing your website performance, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of website auditing within this blog. If you need help with your website, drop us an email on business@scottpr.com or call the office on 01477 539539 and we’d be happy to help!
