It's that painstaking task you've been dreading, but can't put off any longer. Your website is due for a check up and you don't even know where to start. Whether you're planning on a website redesign or you just want to assess its strengths and weaknesses in order to optimize your marketing strategies, a content audit is vital to your website's success.
Before you take a good hard look at your website to assess what works and doesn't work, it's important to have a clear understanding of your business goals, products and services to tailor your marketing efforts to your target audience. So if you haven't already, create buyer personas to paint a clearer picture of your prospective customers and their buying behavior.
Why perform a website audit?
Your goal in performing a content audit is to analyze your website to ultimately improve its performance, to meet customer needs and your organization's goals. Right? Is your content relevant and consistent? Are your inbound marketing practices effective? Is your content prioritized based on metrics (number of visitors and conversions)? Here is a list of 10 tips to performing a website content audit for the purpose of maximizing SEO and conversion results.
- Content analysis:
Take inventory of all the pages of your website so you can evaluate your content for quality. Are you generating content that speaks to the needs, interests and problems of your buyer persona? Are you answering your reader's issues/problems and providing them with resources relevant to your subjects? Determine which pages need to be updated and made more current or removed all together. - SEO:
As Google's algorithms are constantly updating and improving, re-evaluate your web pages for SEO best practices to stay on top of these changes. Identify which content generates more traffic and which pieces performed best. - Keywords:
Review pages for keyword performance and identify which keywords are leading the most traffic. Are you factoring in relevant keywords into your content? Stay current on keyword trends by conducting research on the latest terminology your prospects are using. - Analytics:
Collect all the data and analytics available regarding your website content including traffic, keywords, referral traffic, etc. Find out how visitors are using your website. You can create a heat map to see where visitors are looking on your site with HotJar.com or using the HubSpot events tool in HubSpot's Enterprise package. By creating a heat map, you'll optimize your website content for lead generation and conversions. - Contact form:
A contact form is your window to quality lead generation and conversion. Ask yourself if your contact form is compelling enough to set your prospects up for future relations. Check for broken contact forms and make sure it is mobile responsive as much of today's communication and transactions happen on smartphones. - Calls-to-Action (CTA):
Perform a website content audit on your CTA for effectiveness and clarity. Don't miss out on opportunities to include them on various pages to keep your visitors engaged with your content and your brand. - Technical support:
You may want to add an extra brain to the task and get your website technically assessed by a developer or someone from your IT department. With their help and expertise, the goal is to have a responsive website design and to improve overall user experience. - Page speed and page loading:
There's nothing more frustrating for a user than waiting for a page to load completely. Optimize page speed and loading so you don't turn your visitors away. That means compressing and optimizing your images accordingly, removing unnecessary JavaScript, and minimizing HTTP requests (the download of Flash, scripts, images, etc.). Your site's improved performance and speed will lead to higher traffic flow and conversions. - Market grade:
You can measure your site's online presence against key metrics by checking your marketing grade. HubSpot provides Marketing Grader, a free tool that analyzes all your marketing and compares your site to competitors. - Landing pages:
Landing pages are the backbone to a website's lead generation efforts as they capture a visitor's information through a form. Make sure you're using best practices for your landing pages to increase conversion rates:
- Consider proper form length to generate quality leads.
- Follow-up action: make sure the lead is redirected to a thank you page after completing the form.
- Add supporting images and video to add value to your offer.
- No clickable links in the menu, logo, footer, anywhere.
- Social share buttons
A great website is the heart and soul of your business online strategy. It's your marketing brochure. If you're looking to optimize your website with best practices for conversion results and revenue, download our free guide and learn 25 website must haves.
