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How to Audit Your Website

How to Audit Your Website

Written by Katie Petersen

A website review, or audit, can seem daunting, overwhelming, and paralyzing. Where do you start? How do you know what to do? What parameters do you measure? Thankfully, a website audit does not have to be stressful or overbearing – it just has to be something that you get yourself organized for and then actually do it. 

Below are a few tips for prepping for a website audit, followed by potential items to have on a checklist as you review different areas of your website. 

Prepping for a website audit

The number one advice I can provide to you in conducting a website audit is to be as prepared as possible. What do you hope to accomplish with the audit? Where do you want your website to go in the next 5 years? Is there a specific product or service you offer that you specifically want to drive people too? Most importantly, don’t try to do too many pages at once! Pick your five most visited pages, or the five pages that best drive your business goals, and start with those! Making sure these pages are where you want them will help you adjust the additional pages on your site in the future.

Web Design

Next, take a look at your web design. Is your website design easy to read? Research has shown that websites that are too complex actually turn off potential clients. Simple, cleaner website designs actually help drive customers to your business! Make sure your pages’ structure – headers, body content, footers – are all easy to distinguish and help a visitor navigate your pages correctly. Do you include photos to break up the text? Do you have CTA (call to action) buttons throughout that make purchases simple? Does the design of your website align with your company’s brand? Does your website also show up well across all devices – computer, laptop, mobile? Looking at all of these design elements will help you showcase your products and services to visitors in a way that successfully aligns with your mission.

Lead Generation

Does your website convert your visitors into leads? This is the most crucial step when designing and auditing your website. Make sure your pages have clear CTA buttons that are positioned in a visible way and easy for the visitor to understand. If you have a potential visitor who begins filling out a contact or purchase form, but ultimately abandons the form, do you have some type of retargeting set-up to reach back out to them? Many times, companies will automatically send a “Looks like you forgot something…” email to remind the visitor to finish the form. If they happen to try to click out of the form, pop-ups offering an incentive or free consult are another great way to grab their attention and entice them to continue filling out the form.

Content

The content on your pages is also as important as your potential lead generation. Does your content make sense? Is it concise while still providing visitors with the necessary information to move forward with your business? Make sure your content is structured correctly – with the most important information at the top. Ensure there are no grammatical or spelling errors on your site; this is an incredibly easy fix that companies often overlook! Finally, the content should complement the design of your website. If you use blocks, bullets, white space, photo dividers, make sure these all align with your brand and vision!

SEO Generation

Finally, audit your SEO! SEO is a MUST to have your website to rank well on Google and ultimately have your website seen by visitors. To start, set up a tracking tool to find out what is going on with your site – audience, traffic, clicks, etc. Use tags, meta descriptions, keywords and phrases throughout your site. Ensure that you have outbound (links to outside sites) and inbound (links to your own website) links throughout your pages. If you use WordPress for your website, Yoast SEO is a great tool to help organize your SEO – plus, it helps make SEO less overwhelming!   

Auditing your website can seem daunting and overwhelming. However, by breaking it down into simple, easy to follow steps, that mountain is not insurmountable. Being prepared ahead of time and understanding what you want to accomplish will help you complete the audit and put you ahead of your competition.

If you need help with a website audit or your sales and marketing techniques, contact ArboRisk! Our Sales and Marketing Thrive Risk Management Package will help you create the appropriate marketing message to land more of the jobs and customers you want.

5 Simple SEO Tips

5 Simple SEO Tips

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” – Maya Angelou SEO. Search Engine Optimization. If you’re anything like me, it makes you shudder just to see those words in print. But, because I realized I am immersed in the world of digital and traditional marketing, I knew I could not let that fear overtake me. Rather, I decided to tackle SEO day-by-day, to learn as much as I could to do my best for our clients. I started my journey by attending a seminar that revolved entirely around digital marketing strategy and maximizing your website to its best potential (Thanks, Top Floor Marketing!). The main takeaways from the class involved avoiding website and marketing disasters and best practices for SEO. But the one thing that really stuck out to me was how simple some of the steps were to update the SEO on your website. SEO does not have to be scary or difficult. I attribute learning about SEO to learning how to be a successful tree care service owner: in the beginning, it was scary because of the unknown, but once you learned more, those scary thoughts went away, and were replaced by confidence and knowledge that would help you make the correct decisions for your business. SEO is the same way! Below are a few simple tricks and tips to get started in updating your website’s SEO: Meta Data: SEO Meta Data is what appears on search engine results pages and includes the page title and the description text below the title:

You want to make sure your pages are clear and optimized, while not being too brief or too spammy. There are four categories of Meta Data, and how you adjust them can impact your SEO. Below, I use the example of “ArboRisk Insurance” and the page title of “Who we serve:”

Automated: ArboRisk | Who We Serve | Arborist
Somewhat vague, does not give a full picture of what you are about

Spammy: ArboRisk | Arborist | Tree Care Industry | Grow Trees | Plant a Tree | Tree Care Best Practices | Wisconsin Arborists | Insurance services | Insurance for Arborists
Overabundance of words, many of which do not have anything to do with the specific page

Non-existent: Home – ArboRisk Insurance
Nothing available, does not provide any additional information about what the page pertains too

Optimized: ArboRisk Insurance | Protect Your Tree Service with ArboRisk | Tree Service Insurance
Clear, concise, and lets Google know exactly what the page is about without going overboard

Crawl Errors: 404 Page Not Found. Crawl errors occur when Googlebots try to access your website, but something prevents them from doing so. Crawl errors may be caused by faulty links, DNS failures, server connectivity, or issues with your robots.txt file. What does this mean? Check the links on your website regularly to ensure all are working. Contact your web master to help resolve any server issues or to fix broken links.

Indexing: In a nutshell, indexing lets you know if Google can find your webpages and shows you the URLs on your website that are getting the most visits. In other words, indexing is incredibly important because if your website is not in Google’s index, it will not show up when people search for a query. A simple way to check indexing for your website is to type Site:your website URL into Google. (Example – Site:arboriskinsurance.com) Be sure to use your EXACT website URL! If your site does not show up when indexing, and you are using your exact URL, it’s time to make some updates! Add a blog, update a few pages – the more copy you can change and edit, the more likely Google will be able to find your pages.


URL Structure: The best types of URL structures write for both users and search engines, use specific keywords and file path structure, and utilize hyphens over underscores. Don’t be generic, avoid keyword repetition aka spammy structure, minimize URL strings (URL’s that have too many numbers or incoherent letters), and make sure that the user can understand what your page is about by looking at the URL. An example of good URL structure is:

Traffic Analysis: Are you analyzing your website traffic on a regular basis? Do you know which website pages are getting the most hits? Analyzing your traffic is an essential way to maximize your SEO. Make sure you are looking at which pages get the most organic entrances (meaning people are finding them by simply searching in Google, rather than clicking on an Ad), organic bounce rate and time on site, and what organic traffic is branded (words that mention your brand name) vs. non-branded (words that do not reference your brand name).


SEO is always changing. It is always something that needs attention. But if you do your best to schedule in time each month to analyze and update your SEO, you will find your website will be more optimized and you will save yourself future headaches and frustrations down the road.

Written by: Katie Petersen