Following on from our post on “Benchmarking Website Performance” we have collated some fantastic questions to help to start kick the process off. If you have any questions about how you might find some of the answers out feel free to ask…
Visitor behaviour:
- What questions are new visitors asking in search engines to get to your site?
- Are you answering those questions sufficiently within the landing page copy and is there a clear next step for them to take?
- How long do visitors stay on your website for?
- From which pages within the site do most people exit from and is this page an important page within the user journey?
- Which sources are your new visitors coming from?
Search and Content analysis:
- Is the level of search traffic over the past 12 months rising? same? or dropping?
- What is the current user journey? (The visitor flow report in Google Analytics is awesome for this)
- What type of content or information might keep them on your site longer?
- Are you allowing loyal customers to refer others easily? (Relevant post: Increasing traffic by adding social sharing buttons)
- Have you explored user journeys on competition websites?
- Are your pages built correctly to allow for optimisation? (Relevant post: SEO for construction companies)
Landing Pages (remember: Not everyone enters your website via the homepage, which means every page on your website is a landing page!):
- Is your positioning statement available on every page to reassure visitors they have come to the right place?
- Have you understood your key landing page activity (not your home page although that is a good place to start)
- Are your landing pages reassuring, proving capability and building credibility?
- Are your pages providing enough clear calls to action? Downloads/phone numbers/email/sign up to newsletter etc.
- Do they have ‘Thank you’ pages or ‘Confirmation pages’ set up after each individual call to action? (Relevant post: Measure what matters using Google Analytics)
- Do you have goals set-up in Google analytics to measure these call to actions? (Relevant post: Measuring lead generation)
Customer Interaction:
- What is your current website enquiry level and what is the quality of these enquiries (researchers, awareness or ready to buy/specify)?
- Are there ‘get in touch’ forms alon all pages or just on the Contact Us page?
- How long is the form? Is it a sales prevention tactic? Can you shorten the forms and use progressive profiling to capture other data?
- Where do enquiries from the website go? To whom!
- Are they followed up? Are they followed up by the right people? Don’t forget they are on the web so more than likely they will have submitted the same enquiry to your competitors.
Sales integration:
- What pages do your sales team use to refer customers to? (if any?)
- What pages would they like to refer customers to?
- How can you arm the sales team so the website is a fundamental part of the selling process?
- Do your online and offline marketing materials communicate the same message?
- Do they back each other up?
- Does your printed material send traffic to your website?
Current site build:
- Do you have a blog or updateable resource centre (not news area!) where information can be shared on social platforms?
- Do you have social profiles, are the accessible and are they updated regularly?
- Do you have a mobile version of your site?
- Do you have sites linking to your content?
- Do you have a Link building strategy?
- Do you have any other questions to add to the benchmarking list? If you do then add them to the comments section.
The Pauley Creative – Profit Hunter Program:
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, our own benchmarking process hardly ever stops at just auditing the current website and it’s performance, not least because the outcome of the program is clear insight and actionable recommendations to take your construction business forwards.
Our ‘Profit Hunter Program’ is 100% geared towards one goal: attracting qualified leads into your business ahead of your competition. Asking great questions at the outset is just the beginning.
