Auditing your digital footprint, mainly your website, is an extremely valuable and necessary project for a business’ success.
Assessing a website in detail from all angles and scenarios, including priority products, services and key target audiences, will ensure that it is fully optimised.
So what should a successful construction company or building product manufacturer website aspire to present?
- A strong company identity and brand presence
- Clear corporate, sustainable and ethical messaging
- High product brand and sub-brand visibility
- Clear product category and sub category visibility
- An easy and intuitive user interface
- Useful functionality that appears simple (it may be incredibly complex but it shouldn’t appear to be)
- Clear call to actions on all pages including but not limited to landing pages
- Meaningful information for new and returning visitors
Auditing your site is the only way to be sure all these touch points and messages are working hard for your business.
So, with this in mind, ask yourself ‘what is working?’
Always align your current position alongside business needs and goals, before implementing any further strategies into your marketing process.
1. Evaluate your SEO website content
A crucial part of performing any kind of diagnostic research for your company’s digital presence is to assess all your content through a range of data and analytics.
If you’re a product manufacturer some, or all, of your content might provide architects and specifiers with key information.
Your pages, posts and articles might cover such topics as product recommendations and considerations, or cover current technical issues within the industry, like PartL or BS5534.
This is likely to leave your customers satisfied or inspired enough to recommend and share your website’s content (and any meaningful functionality) to others through social platforms for example.
There are many tools that can help you with this information. The key ‘Free’ tools to use for analysing such data are Google Trends and Google Analytics.
When implemented correctly these tools will show you how relevant the content you are providing is and most importantly, whether you are factoring key word performance into any content strategy.
2. Define online identity and brand messaging
Relevant, engaging content ultimately leads to improved online identity.
Assess where your website is currently ranking in popular search engines such as google and yahoo for specific search terms and phrases.
Your research might answer the following:
- How many pages rank #1 in google for your identified key search terms? Moz.com can help with this.
- How many pages are indexed in google for your website? Screaming Frog can tell you this.
- How many pages are viewed over a 12 month period? Google Analytics is your man for this.
Analysing small amounts of data allows you to gain a clearer understanding of the impact that your website is currently generating, and where any potential gaps lie for quick win opportunities.
3. Assess your website’s functionality
It’s not all about where or how you rank in Google but critically how the overall website functions.
One of the key drivers for a marketer requesting a new or improved website is often down to usability, both from a customer and a content management perspective.
There are many great questions to ask here:
- Can you optimise your URLs properly?
- Is your website mobile friendly?
- Is your website free of code errors?
- Does your web app (such as a U-Value calculator) work for you and your customers?
- Are you generating qualified leads or just spam from your forms?
- Are your product specific landing pages effective for search and users?
In order to assess the efficiency of your website we might start by reflecting on all the minor, time and cost consuming jobs that the website throws up over a three or four month period.
Take that time and cost incurred and turn it into a figure that’s easy to measure. This can give perspective to other stakeholders of the business.
This could be a figure that takes into account time spent on the phone to the development agency, invoices from agency repairing issues, uptime lost during maintenance, internal time lost figuring out the issue, brand credibility lost by prospect through poor experience and so on.
In order to assess the performance of your website, see our post on benchmarking website performance.
4. Ask a customer or prospect to review the site
The best way to get a true idea of visitor satisfaction is to ask them directly.
Go through the motions or, even better, get someone who knows diddly about your products to go though the site; give them specific tasks to carry out and seek feedback on how easy it was.
Setting up online surveys is a quick and easy way to make key discoveries – typically, given the opportunity, most frustrated users will happily tell you where you’re going wrong.
These can be carried out through either Qualaroo, Poll Daddy or Survey Monkey, which allow you to ask the right questions at the right time directly to your target audience.
Questions may include…
- What attracted you to enquire about our product?
- How would you describe us as a brand and our position within the target market?
- Are you aware of our blogs and eBooks?
- Are you aware of our U-Value calculator or product selector tools?
- How could we improve our current website in terms of usefulness?
By doing this exercise regularly, say every six to twelve months, you will quickly gain an idea of how many visitors are satisfied with the experience you are providing and where recommendations need to be made.
Read our post on how people like to be asked.
5. Set key milestones and deadlines
Ultimately, a website audit will drive the business in the right direction by ensuring that it performs to the best of its ability.
The research and data gained will enable you to accurately optimise areas of the website in order to boost conversions.
Using this acquired research, schedule key milestones and deadlines in order to generate a clear digital marketing strategy.
This involves establishing roles and responsibilities within your business so that objectives are consistently met.
An audit should take place every 12 months; it may seem like hard work at first, but this is the only way to ensure that your website is not missing any vital opportunities to convert visits into leads.
To find out more about the tactical approaches we provide for our clients, view our Digital Profit Hunter Program.
