Your 4-step website evaluation

In this virtual workshop, Thomas Young critiqued several business websites live, helping business leaders find ways to improve their presence and grow their sales. Learn some very specific, tangible tactics that you may be able to apply to your own site.

Your website sucks! This is what you are likely to hear every time a marketer looks at your website.  But is it true? Does your website really suck? Probably not, but a solid website evaluation will tell you for sure.

Most websites have many good things going for them. The right question to ask is this: how can we properly critique our website to find areas for improvement and make the changes needed to drive results and growth? Your website may not suck, it may need a proper website evaluation.

Let’s take a look at how to critique and evaluate your current website, so it can start driving sales and leads without a major overhaul. We’ll start with strategy.

Website evaluation: Strategy tells a story

What does your website say to your target market? Is it focused on how great your company is? Or, is it focused on the value your company brings to website visitors? This is at the heart of website strategy and the first step in your evaluation.

Your website’s tagline and main banner image are critical. These online marketing elements must connect with your target market by clearly identifying how your products or services solve their pain and enhance the quality of their lives. All the content on the website drives towards this goal.

Your website is the visual representation of how you build value with your customers and prospects. This must be very clear and simple for your website to drive growth and lead generation.

Here are the key strategic questions to ask during your critique:

• Does the website clearly communicate value?
• How can we add more value-added content?
• How can we remove content about the company from the home page?
• What messaging and content is getting in the way of more leads and sales?

Design is the visual strategy

No other marketing channel carries as much of a punch as your website and digital marketing. This is best seen in your website design. Your website design must relate to your target market, be easy to use and translate very well the benefits provided to visitors. Here are the questions to ask when critiquing design:

• Does the website translate what the business does well?
• Is the website too cluttered and busy?
• Is the design appropriate for the target market?
• Is the navigation no more than seven main sections and written in terms the customer understands?
• Have we watched how are visitors use the site?

Getting feedback from website users is a fantastic source of ideas for improvement of your digital marketing interface. But don’t ask their opinion, watch them interact with your website for the most powerful learning and to get the best ideas.

How is your traffic?

In today’s competitive and cluttered digital marketing spaces the key to website traffic generation from a variety of sources is excellent content. Your website traffic is only as good as your content marketing plan and schedule. Here are the questions to ask:

• Is the website an excellent content resource?
• Is the website Google friendly and optimized?
• Do we have a content marketing schedule in place?

All roads lead to Google Analytics

Digital marketing works because it can be measured. The metrics in Google Analytics and the Google Search Console are the ultimate indicator of success. Everything you critique and review on your website can be measured in Google Analytics.

• Is the website getting sales, leads and other conversions?
• What data improvements can you expect from website updates?

Use Google Analytics to see where your website falls short and get ideas to fix it. This is the best tool to provide the direction needed to turn your website from average to excellent. This data must also be used to measure ROI by tracking leads and their conversion into sales. It’s the only way you will know if the website is worth what you paid for it!

An effect website review and critique will help you find out why your website is not performing better and what to do about it. The proper website analysis can turn it into a revenue and growth machine. Feel free to reach out to me directly for advise and help on getting improved results from your website and digital marketing efforts.

Learn more about inbound marketing

5955 views