In our digital world, your website issues are often the core of your online presence. It is a storefront, a platform, and a key to gaining leads and sales. While the website itself may be a mess of invisible website issues, leaving it unchanged may decide the failure of your audience’s journey, causing frustrations with potential clients, limiting your growth, and so on.
This article looks at a two-part method to tackle this problem:
- 1. Finding Website Problems that Distort Growth: We will discuss why a website audit is important, and we will identify common problems that sabotage conversion rates and/or user experience.
- 2. Growing Your Business with Approaches to Website Optimization: We will discuss the components of important optimization functions such as conversion rate optimization, search engine optimization, and user experience optimization that can help you maximize the impact of your website and grow your business. Visualize a website audit as a complete health check for your online presence. In a website audit, your website’s health is analyzed, and ailments and improvements are discovered.
Table of Contents
Discovering the Untapped Potential: The Importance of a Website Audit
- Identifying Conversion Blockers: A website audit can help identify website issues that deter visitors from completing desired actions like purchasing a product or subscribing to a newsletter. Elements of the website audit can include assessing website analytics and/or users’ behavior, along with identifying the last point of abandonment in the conversion funnel.
- Discover Technical SEO Challenges: Technical SEO challenges can interfere with how search engines can index your website issues and effectively decreasing organic traffic. Elements of an audit may include identifying broken links, slow loading speed, mobile-friendliness issues, etc., that could affect ranking in search engines.
- Assess User Experience: An audit can disclose usability problems that thwart some aspects of the visitors’ user experience, like frustration. Other aspects of an audit could include analyzing user behavior data, such as identifying elements that made it difficult to navigate the website, or language of website content that is too technical for greater understanding.
Typical Website Issues to be aware of
The following are typical problems that we found in past website audits, which could harm your business growth:
- Slow Page Loading Speed: With everyone having multiple choices, slow page loading speed will likely cost you a visitor before they ever see what your offering is. Studies have shown that even a one-second delay when the page loads could have a major impact on your conversion rates.
- Unresponsive Design: With the growing number of mobile devices as a way to connect to the internet, not having an adaptive website design can lead you to have a potential customer alienating you without ever viewing your content. Your website needs a responsive design to ensure that your website displays well across all devices, from laptops to tablets to smartphones.
- Poor Navigation: a confusing navigation menu or overly complex navigation leads to your visitors never finding the information they need. Visitors quickly grow frustrated and abandon the site, costing you a potential lead. Simplifying the navigation will improve the overall experience of your visitors.
- Lacks Adequate Quality Content: Content that is thin and does no help with increasing the potential brands authority in the niche, forcing the visitor to quickly abandon, should not exist. Quality content that meets the needs of your visitors, when targeting your audience, is essential in order to keep your website relevant.
- Weak Calls to Action (CTAs): Confusing or misplaced CTAs may leave visitors unsure of what to do after browsing your website. Strong CTAs numbers that spell out the action you want your visitors to take, can improve conversion rates significantly.
These are just a few ideas, and a full website audit will show you a much larger list of issues specific to your website.
Increasing Business Value: Strategies for Website Optimization
After you conduct an audit and discover website issues, now it is time to start using the strategies to optimize your website for success:
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): CRO will optimize your website to convert visitors into customers (or Leads). This can involve many things, including A/B testing of elements of the website, optimizing your website copy, and optimizing the placement of call to actions (CTAs).
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO will optimize the copy and the technical aspects of your website to increase visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) and ultimately generate organic traffic to your site by attracting people who are searching for qualified products and/or services.
- User Experience Optimization: UX optimization is about creating an overall positive and easy-to-use experience for your visitors. It can be improving the navigation, site speed, overall site design, and anything else directly related to user interaction.
Also, you may want to use a strong content marketing strategy. Awesome and informative content that adheres to the principles of search engine optimization (SEO) creates visitors, develops your brand into the thought leader category, and ultimately converts visitors into action.
Final Note: Website Optimization is not a one-and-done effort. Check your website performance regularly through analytics tools to find website issues, and changes you are initiating based on the analytical information you are gathering will always keep your website a vibrant contributor towards your business growth.
Free Website Audit: Discover Your Growth Potential (Limited Time!)
Is your website working behind the scenes to sabotage your business? We can manage insights into your website’s health, and that’s what drives us at VA Talks to offer you a free website audit (limited time!). Our team of website experience experts will conduct a complete analysis of your website, including uncovering possible website issues, and reporting back with recommendations to solve those website issues.
