Website health check

Is your website working for you?

In the current online era, It is no longer enough for a business to just have a website. In order to be effective, your website needs regular attention.

Challenging and Confusing

This can sometimes be a challenge for small and medium sized businesses, especially those without a dedicated IT department.

Whether you need help with updating content, optimising performance, adding functionality, layout and design tweaks or making sense of analytics data – our website management services can help.

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Great website, high hopes

So many businesses start life with a great website and high hopes but lack the time, resources or skill to give it the ongoing attention it needs to maintain its effectiveness. If you think about a website as being a bit like a car, you have an initial investment (creating the site itself) and ongoing running costs (hosting, support and maintenance). You would not expect to continue to run a car without making the occasional repairs, ever replacing the tyres or regular re-fuelling – the same is true of your website.

To extend the car analogy further, a car which is regularly serviced is less likely to break down, will hold its value better and be more reliable. A website which is regularly updated is likely to be more visible on google, offer a better user experience and be better optimised for conversions.

Website and SEO audit

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The first step in identifying any issues with your website is to undertake an audit. A website audit is undertaken in stages to look at different parts of your website.

Initially, a technical audit looks at what is going on behind the scenes to make sure there is nothing which is harming you from an SEO perspective technically. Broken links, slow page loading speeds, crawl errors, poor mobile friendliness, duplicated content and missing meta data can all have a negative impact on how your website is viewed by Google and will therefore impact ranking.

According to a SEMrush study, more than 80% of websites checked had broken link errors and over 65% of sites had some duplicated content. Once identified, these types of errors are pretty easy to fix – left unchecked they will have a detrimental impact which will worsen over time.

Keywords and Content

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Arguably, the most crucial element of your website from a user perspective is the content. It is the content on your site which will lead people to it. It will also decide whether or not they stay, and ultimately, whether they want to buy what you are selling.

Whether the purpose of your website is raising awareness, lead generation or physical product sales – the content is all important. At the most basic level, how well your content is optimised is what will determine whether your website ranks well on Google. The quality of that content is what will determine whether or not those visitors turn into customers – whatever that means for you.

Our content audit can look at your site from a outside perspective which can be difficult when you are too close to it. Looking at your own content objectively can be difficult. A third-party content review can reveal gaps in your content and highlight areas where information or required action is not clear enough for someone who is new to your website. Our blog post ‘How to write SEO friendly web copy’ has more information and advice.

Keywords Review

Keywords are the cornerstone of your SEO and should be at the heart of your online content. Performing a keyword audit on your website can help to identify those keywords which are working well, those which are under used and perhaps those which you are missing out on completely.

As well as looking at the keywords which are driving traffic to your site, we can also analyse the keywords which are proving successful for your main competitors.

Identifying longer tail search phrases or low competition keywords can be a good strategy, especially where competition is stiff or you are up against companies with a much larger web presence than you. There are a number of tools we can use which will help to discover which keywords will be difficult to rank for, enabling you to focus on those where you are more likely to get a result. Your content can then be optimised around them.

Content Review

In recent years, Google has been moving away from simple keyword matching in terms of search results to trying to match the results they provide with the search intent. The days of stuffing your website content with as many keywords as possible and hoping are gone. This means that Google now looks the quality of the content you are offering in terms of relevance to the search undertaken as a ranking factor. Whilst we don't know the precise details of Google's search algorithm, there are several factors which are known to be indicators of quality.

Dwell time – the length of time a visitor spends on a particular page of your website indicates how useful/relevant that page was to their search.
Bounce rate – a high bounce rate could indicate that the search intent was not fulfilled by the search result. A low bounce rate shows that the information on the page is relevant and what the searcher was looking for.
Site authority – The number of referring links to a page is an indicator of the quality of the information provided. Generally, the higher the number of sites linking to your content the better.
Word Count – whilst length, in itself, is not an indicator of quality in all cases, we do know that Google penalises ‘thin content’. In-depth pieces, pillar pages and long form content are all thought to be positive ranking factors. For more information – read our blog ‘The Benefits of Long-Form Content for SEO’
Multi-media content – image and video content on pages is engaging and Google uses the presence of visual content as a measure of quality. Making sure your pages are engaging with a variety of visual media like images, video and infographics helps to ensure your content is considered to be high quality.

Conversion Optimisation Review

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If your site is not delivering the results you want, it may be time to reconsider your conversion optimisation strategy. Getting visitors to your site is one thing, converting them once they are there is something else.

If you are struggling to get visitors to take the action you want when they are on your site, it is necessary to look conversion paths and how easy it is for website visitors to take that desired action;

Sometimes, making small changes to the wording, layout or placement of call-to-action points can have a big impact on the success of your website. Part of a conversion optimisation review would be to look at key pages of your website and consider possible changes which could be made to increase the number of users who take your desired action.

Strategies for this include can include adding social proof in the form of reviews, endorsements or certification, using multi-media explainers, adding lead-capture forms and adding links to blog posts or downloadable content. You can achieve an understanding of the likely success of changes by split testing.

For more information and advice, have a look at our blog posts 'Social Proof Explained', ‘what makes a landing page which converts’, ‘Getting started on Conversion Optimisation’ and ‘Split testing – what is it and why should I do it?’

Making small changes to wording and layout can help

User Experience Overview

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Click the link below to download our free Buyer Persona example and template

Download Free Persona Guide

There is no doubt that user experience has a huge impact on website performance. There is a lot of cross-over between user experience and conversion optimisation.

Over time, websites can become become cluttered and messy and that can be a real turn-off for users. A website which is simple to navigate, has a defined purpose and fulfils the search intention of the user is the ideal. It is also very important to ensure that you are giving multiple opportunities for website visitors to convert in the form of sign-up forms, content downloads or other offers.

An overview of user experience from the initial landing page through to conversion will help to identify those areas of your website which are falling short and how to put them right. In order to do this, a thorough understanding of your customers needs and desires is also essential. When you understand what drives your customer, you will be better able to empathise with them and give them the information they need to move them through their buying journey. Undertaking a persona exercise is a crucial first step to understanding your customer and is well worth doing. This understanding will help you to improve user experience on your website.

Finally...

If you think your website would benefit from a once-over, get in touch to arrange your free website health check and SEO audit. For more information on the range of services we offer, including copywriting, help with social media, email marketing, online advertising and ongoing website management visit our services page or just get in touch for an initial chat.

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