- July 6, 2023
- Posted by: Featured
- Categories: Blog, Expert Roundups
How a Website Audit Can Help You Achieve Your Marketing Goals
To ensure your website redesign contributes to your marketing success, we’ve gathered insights from marketing professionals and business leaders. From focusing on your target audience’s needs to performing a user experience audit, here are the top eight steps these experts recommend when redesigning your business website to achieve your marketing goals.
- Focus on the Target Audience’s Needs
- Prioritize Website Copy and Messaging
- Make the Website Accessible and Inclusive
- Double Check Your Links
- Obtain User-Centric Feedback
- Conduct a Visibility Audit
- Monitor Competitors’ Websites
- Perform a User Experience Audit
Focus on the Target Audience’s Needs
An essential step in redesigning your business website is to fully immerse yourself in your target audience’s world. Every design choice must reflect their preferences and needs, not your own personal taste.
Remember, you’re not building a website for yourself; you’re building it for your audience. This perspective shift makes all the difference in creating a site that resonates and motivates them to take action.
Kevin Hall
Marketing Operations, Webserv
Prioritize Website Copy and Messaging
For first-time visitors to your site, website copy is the NUMBER ONE conversion driver. It’s TWICE as effective as good design.
Don’t get me wrong—that doesn’t mean design isn’t important. Great design and awesome copy are INSEPARABLE.
You need both, and that’s what most businesses forget. They’ll spend all their time and money on how a website LOOKS, and precious little time on what it SAYS.
Your messaging needs to STAND OUT from the messaging of your competitors. The only way to do that is to use words, phrases, and visual imagery that’s DRAMATICALLY DIFFERENT from others.
The basics of your messaging are:
- WHAT do you do? (the market category)
- WHO do you do it for? (customer profile)
- WHY should they care? (your differentiation)
Unless you’ve answered these three basic questions to the buyer’s satisfaction, you’re going to get sub-optimal marketing performance—and you may not even know it.
Gee Ranasinha
CEO, KEXINO
Make the Website Accessible and Inclusive
Incorporate accessibility features for people with disabilities when redesigning your business website to help you achieve your marketing goals. This includes adding alt tags to images, ensuring clear and legible font sizes and styles, and providing closed captions for videos. By making your website more accessible, you increase your website’s potential reach and inclusivity.
For example, a person with a hearing disability may greatly benefit from closed captions on a video highlighting a product or service, increasing the chances of that person becoming a customer.
Ben Lau
Founder, Featured SEO Company
Double Check Your Links
One of the biggest mistakes companies make when redoing their website is being unaware of what links exist for what pages. Changing your website structure, content, and design can cost you valuable links.
Always perform a link audit as a part of your website audit and be sure you are keeping the pages where links are pointed and ensure the content on your page speaks to the anchor text from the backlink.
Jason Vaught
Founder and CSO, 805SEO
Obtain User-Centric Feedback
Invite some of your loyal customers or even prospects who didn’t convert and have them go through your website while screen-sharing with you. Ask them to voice out their thoughts as they navigate. What confuses them? What makes them interested? Which part made them want to leave?
By watching and listening to real-time feedback, you get to “see” your website through your customers’ eyes. It’s like having a mirror showing you what works and what doesn’t, what engages and what repels.
This step is crucial because you can have the most aesthetic website, but if it doesn’t resonate with your audience or address their needs, it won’t help you achieve your marketing goals.
It’s a bit of an unconventional approach, but it can lead to a more efficient, user-centric website redesign.
Simon Niklaus
Founder, simonniklaus.com
Conduct a Visibility Audit
Often, we see new websites launch without any consideration of the impact on current search visibility. It’s great to launch a shiny new website focused on your end user, but if that comes at the cost of losing site traffic, then you will be starting again from zero. This means achieving your marketing goals will be even harder.
At the start of the web design process, conduct a visibility audit of your existing site. You can do this in SEMRush or many other ranking tools. Understand what page 1 rankings you currently have, and which pages rank for those terms. Identify the key rankings that you MUST NOT lose, the pages driving those rankings and the content on those pages.
Armed with this information, you can preserve the content and pages you need. Even if you restructure the site, add 301 redirects and keep the content. This means you can keep your existing traffic while building on it when the new site launches.
Ben Foster
CEO, The SEO Works
Monitor Competitors’ Websites
One important step when redesigning your business website to achieve marketing goals is to track changes on your top competitors’ websites using automation tools like Pagescreen. These tools allow you to monitor competitor websites in real time and receive alerts whenever changes occur.
By tracking your competitors’ websites, you can stay up-to-date with their design updates, content additions, pricing changes, or new features they introduce. This information provides valuable insights into their marketing strategies, allowing you to identify opportunities, learn from their successes or failures, and adapt your own website redesign accordingly.
By keeping a close eye on your competitors’ activities, you can stay competitive, make informed decisions, and ensure your redesigned website effectively supports your marketing goals.
Irina Poddubnaia
CEO, Founder, TrackMage
Perform a User Experience Audit
One of the most crucial steps when redesigning your business website to meet your marketing goals is to conduct a thorough “user experience audit.” In essence, this means stepping into your audience’s shoes and walking through your website as they would. After all, it’s their experience that ultimately decides the success or failure of your marketing efforts.
The process should be comprehensive, taking into account factors like site navigation, loading speed, mobile optimization, content relevance, and call-to-action placement, among others. Utilize tools like Google Analytics, heatmaps, and user recordings to gather objective data about how users are currently interacting with your site.
But don’t just stop at data—get qualitative insights as well. Conduct user surveys or interviews to understand what they liked or didn’t like about your website, their pain points, and what they feel could enhance their experience.
John Cammidge
PPC Trainer, Jcammidge
Submit Your Answer
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