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Website Evaluation Checklist

How Thorough is Your Website Evaluation Process?

As time goes by and your business grows, it is important to continuously evaluate your website and make sure you have the foundation to not only support your brand, but also the traffic you are working to drive to it. 

Evaluating your website can seem like a daunting task — especially when you don’t know where to start. Use this questionnaire to think about the best areas to improve your site to increase engagement, leads, and conversions. 

Technology is continuously advancing, so your website should play a large role in your strategic tool box to help your business reach their goals. Constant changes in your customer base and in marketing trends makes regular website evaluation and maintenance a vital component of any business.

Unsure if you need to conduct a website evaluation? Read Does Your Website Need a Revamp or Rebuild to help you decide!

Does Your Website Reflect Your Brand Strategy?

Defining your brand strategy is important in showcasing your brand personality, establishing how you will provide your customers with value, and ultimately measuring your business goals. 

With the ever-increasing influence of digital technology, your company’s website will likely be a resource for potential customers, so it should accurately reflect your brand strategy. 

To ensure the right people understand your company’s overall strategy, you need to provide a positive user experience (UX) that is tailored to exactly who you want to market your products and services toward. Creating this positive experience involves proper content, accessibility, and offers that represent your brand and are tailored to adding value for your target audience across multiple platforms. With so many different ways of digesting information, it is important to remain consistent with the information you provide and the message you are trying to convey throughout your site. 

Scheduled website evaluations are helpful in maintaining a proper representation of your brand’s strategy for your prospective and current customers. Your brand strategy showcases your brand and how you are working to help your visitors, so you should make sure it is conveyed clearly and effectively throughout. 

Related: Fine tune your brand image and create a brand story that resonates with readers. Learn to create your company’s own brand strategy by building a brand strategy using the essentials for long term success.

Are You Attracting The Right Clients?

During your next website evaluation, consider your audience. Whatever your company sells is a solution to help someone solve a problem. That specific someone is who you would define as your target audience, and who you should cater your website to.

In order to properly tailor your website to that specific audience, you need to understand their desires, preferences, and tendencies by developing buyer personas that reflect these qualities. Buyer personas are key tools in helping you have a deeper understanding of your target audience — their motives, their desires, and what they expect from you. Having these personas defined allows you to tailor your messages and content to different target segments.

Once you have a solid understanding of the primary audience you are targeting and the information they are looking for from you, evaluate your website to make sure that your content is useful, relevant, and digestible for that group of people. This gives your website value. 

Having established yourself as a credible thought leader in the eyes of your visitors, create different landing pages that offer gated content or services in turn for their information to generate leads and ultimately, conversions. 

This information will provide you with crucial data about your current and prospective customers. Being able to cater to their needs establishes a more personalized relationship with your customer base and helps you better evaluate your website with their needs in mind. 

Do You Need To Decrease Your Bounce Rate?

If your website’s bounce rate is higher than you’d like, a website evaluation is a great first step in solving this problem. If people are leaving your website without interacting with your content or offers, then your customers are likely not finding what they are looking for.

There are a few common practices that have shown to decrease a website’s bounce rate. Start by making sure your website is visually appealing and consistent, both with brand strategy and content. You should look to create clear headers and subheaders, accompanied by detailed and useful meta descriptions. Try to avoid pop-ups that could disrupt the visitor and create a less positive user experience. Regular UX audits should be conducted within your website evaluation for a more comprehensive look. 

You should also look to improve SEO to increase searchability. Effectively using SEO can increase your brand awareness and provide a competitive advantage, especially in regards to domain authority and search rankings. Optimizing your search engine results directs traffic to your website, increasing the likelihood of both leads and conversions. 

Related: For more information on SEO, look at Introduction to SEO: The 5 Basic Steps and 6 Reasons Your Business Should Invest in SEO. Or, take a closer look at how SEO and UX go hand-in-hand with User Experience and SEO: How They Work Together.

Are Your Call-To-Action Buttons and Landing Pages Effective?

One goal of any website is to increase your company’s engagement with your current and prospective customers. While evaluating your website, ask yourself, “does this serve as a medium that fosters a useful, personalized experience for visitors to interact with your brand and the products and services you offer?” 

In order for visitors to fully engage with your content, you need to maintain a clear path to conversion. This should be a straightforward, and enjoyable, step-by-step process. Start with creating compelling content that provides solutions to your audience’s problems. On these pages, design CTA buttons that stand out and entice the visitor to click. Then, focus on making sure the landing pages they are taken to are appealing and simple — only include fields for the information you need. 

Clear solutions, compelling and accessible CTAs, and simple forms transform your website into a valuable tool in generating leads, driving conversions, and increasing relationships with your customers. 

Related: For more information on driving conversions, read The Best Conversion Strategy to Encourage Customers to Take Action.

Ready to Evaluate?

Website evaluation should become a regular part of your business routine if you want to stay competitive in your industry. 

Download our Website Refresh Workbook as a tool in helping you effectively evaluate your website. 

 

This post was originally written in November 2017, but was refreshed in July 2020.