In today’s global economy, a business website is imperative to gaining leads, converting customers, and engaging new audiences. Your website functions as a wing of your marketing, advertising, customer service, sales, and product development departments. It can even be thought of as a living, breathing extension of your company — it needs regular attention to remain healthy and active. Without proper attention, your website will fail in its goals and your company will lose potential profit because of it.

How do you know when your website needs improvements? One way is through a professional website audit. An audit will reveal the performance of your site in comparison to optimal standards. There are several key areas that will be evaluated in a website audit: content, coding, media and images, titles and headings, meta-descriptions, and mobile site.

Engaging Customers and Leads

The primary goal of your business site should be to engage customers and develop leads. The visual atmosphere of the Internet now demands that sites use images to achieve this goal. Website content with a relevant image is 94% more likely to be viewed than a similar article without.

Images on your website make your content more enjoyable, dynamic, and easy to share. For example, a page with no photo cannot be pinned to the popular bookmark website Pinterest and are more difficult to share on Facebook.
A website audit will closely look at each page of your site to determine the presence of images. An auditor will also make recommendations for important technical features that will improve the image’s coding and compliance with US ADA laws.

It is also recommended to offer site visitors at least one video presentation of your products or services. A video that is valuable to your customers is not only a great tool for communication, but has potential to become viral. A video could be about any of the following topics: demonstration of product use, infomercial about the benefits of a product, testimonials of satisfied customers, inspirational quotes from company founder, and the list goes on! An audit can show whether your site has a video and how easy it is for visitors to find the video.

Reaching Audiences on Many Devices

Depending on your industry, a mobile website may be more or less important to customers. A simple analytics search can show how frequently site visitors are accessing your pages from various devices. However, in all cases, a new algorithm from Google will soon mandate that all relevant business pages offer a mobile version.

Google recently announced that they will begin placing more emphasis on sites that offer a user-friendly mobile version in addition to a standard site.

Does your business site offer a mobile version? If so, how accessible is it? A website auditor can detect mobile features across a variety of platforms to show you the current effectiveness of any existing mobile site.

Improving Page Rank

All of the above measures are important considerations in your site’s Google page rank, as well as with other leading search engines. If your site ranks wells for many of the top key words and phrases pertinent to your company’s products and/or services, then customers will be more likely to find your page.

Essentially, the bottom line is this: a professional audit can open your eyes to reality of your website’s effectiveness. Taking the recommendations from an audit seriously will give your site an advantage over competitors, hence helping you gain more customers and better brand awareness.

Not sure if your website needs an audit?

Read our previous article on Website Makeovers and 5 Common Small Business Website Mistakes to find out more.

For only $99, click here for a comprehensive website audit to learn how to drive more traffic and sales to your website.

If you’re struggling with any other website related areas like content development, business blogging, social media management, maintenance, updating, marketing, and more, check out our services at Social Spice Media.

For more information on how we can help improve your business website, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Please call us direct at (805) 482-8312, or, email us at info@socialspicemedia.com for a one-on-one consultation at our office located in Camarillo. You can always link up with us on your favorite social media channel–we’d love to stay connected!