From first making sure there are no tech problems to examining how strong your copy is, here are 13 answers to the question, “What are your most effective tips for auditing a website to improve performance and lead generation?”
- Identify and Prioritize Technical Issues
- Include More CTAs
- Audit Your UX With Real Users
- Embrace the Scroll
- Examine Orphan Pages
- Optimize the Hero of Your Website
- Do a Comprehensive Analysis
- Generate and Analyze Heatmaps
- Prune Your Content
- Find and Optimize High-traffic Articles
- Ensure Mobile Friendliness
- Conduct Regular Website Maintenance
- Sharpen Your Copy
Identify and Prioritize Technical Issues
One tip for auditing a website to improve performance and leads is to identify and prioritize technical issues, such as page speed, navigation, mobile optimization, and broken links.
Technical issues can negatively impact user experience and search engine rankings, so addressing them can improve the overall performance of the website and attract more leads.
Additionally, analyzing website analytics data can help identify areas where the website may be underperforming in terms of lead generation, allowing you to make targeted improvements to those areas.
Brenton Thomas, CEO, Twibi
Include More CTAs
You could have excellent content, but without encouraging your visitors to take action, they may be less likely to do so. While you don’t want to be too pushy, you still need to make people feel inspired or motivated to invest in your business.
Marilyn Zubak, Marketing Lead, Snif
Audit Your UX With Real Users
This includes evaluating the website’s design, navigation, functionality, and content to ensure that it meets the needs and expectations of its target audience.
To start, consider conducting a user survey or focus group to gather feedback and insights from your target audience. This can help you identify pain points and areas for improvement, such as confusing navigation or slow load times.
Next, analyze your website’s traffic data and user behavior metrics to understand how visitors are interacting with your site. This can include analyzing bounce rates, time on site, and conversion rates to identify areas where visitors may get stuck or losing interest.
Once you have identified areas for improvement, prioritize them based on their potential impact on performance and leads.
Luciano Colos, Founder and CEO, PitchGrade
Embrace the Scroll
I’ve been around long enough to remember when websites were a series of separate and distinct pages—sometimes, the more the better! But these days, it’s all about the endless scroll.
If you’re still using a splash page with little pertinent information (or even worse, a lone photo), now is the time to update. Younger generations are viewing websites on their phones, which makes clicking on tiny links difficult.
Instead, rank your content in order of importance and put it all on a single homepage that users can scroll.
Every time a visitor clicks a link (or the back button) you risk losing them to a competing website. Make it easy for them to stay on the page by keeping information centralized and mobile users are more likely to stay around.
Linn Atiyeh, CEO, Bemana
Examine Orphan Pages
One of the most effective strategies for auditing your website to enhance performance and lead generation is to start by examining orphan pages. These are web pages with no internal or external links pointing to them, making it difficult for visitors to discover them. Evaluating these pages is crucial, as they may lack essential content that could improve user experience and search engine optimization (SEO).
To identify orphan pages, consider using a tool like Screaming Frog. This application will analyze your website’s structure and report any detected orphan pages. Once these pages have been identified, you can decide on the course of action. Options include redirecting them, updating the content, or completely removing them if they are no longer relevant.
Burak Özdemir, Founder, Online Alarm Kur
Optimize the Hero of Your Website
Far too many businesses have “Welcome to our website” in the top hero portion of the website. This is a huge mistake that negatively impacts the business’s bottom line. This is the most valuable website real estate that they have—where the business could drive to their offer with a direct call to action.
How do you optimize this section of your website? The first step is to decide on what the main offer is for your business. What does your audience come to you for? This is the offer that you should include in the hero area.
For formatting, you will want to briefly describe your main offer, a striking image that shows the offer in action, and a call-to-action button. These components should be visible on the page before you scroll down to the other content.
Making this change will help businesses see an uptick in leads and sales.
Megan Gersch, Owner + CEO, Megan Gersch
Do a Comprehensive Analysis
Auditing your website is an essential step toward improving its performance and generating more leads. One effective tip for conducting a successful website audit is to start with a comprehensive analysis of your website’s user experience. To achieve this, you need to evaluate your website’s design, content, and functionality to ensure that they are user-friendly, easy to navigate, and engaging.
Begin by assessing your website’s loading speed, which has a significant impact on user experience. Slow loading times can negatively affect your website’s ranking and result in high bounce rates. Next, evaluate your website’s content and ensure that it is concise, informative, and relevant to your target audience. Above all, ensure that your website’s design is visually appealing and easy to navigate.
Michael Lazar, Executive, ReadyCloud
Generate and Analyze Heatmaps
Website heatmaps give you a general idea of how visitors interact with your business website, which pages or areas cause a lot of friction, and where there is a lot of bounce.
Using website heatmaps to audit your site will help you gain insights into what needs to be optimized to improve site performance and boost leads. I recommend using Mouseflow to generate heatmaps for accurate website auditing.
Liam Liu, Co-founder and CMO, ParcelPanel
Prune Your Content
Publishing regular, helpful, keyword-optimized content on your website can move the needle for your business, but this requires a logical and organized approach, with regular auditing.
First, audit the internal linking between your pages. If you get this wrong, you are missing out on some easy SEO wins and could put good content at risk of being overlooked by search engines.
Second, there is content decay. If there is content on your website which isn’t evergreen, always ensure those pages are updated with the latest information. The same goes for previously successful content – just because it has performed in the past doesn’t mean it always will.
Finally, there is keyword cannibalization. If, for example, your service page and a blog article are providing like-for-like information to the user, how will the search engine know which to rank? This can, in turn, jeopardize the rankings of both pages.
Delete, update, and merge content regularly!
Joe Cowman, Head of SEO, FATJOE
Find and Optimize High-traffic Articles
Top-performing articles are those that are driving the most traffic and engagement to your site, and optimizing them for conversion can help you capitalize on this traffic and generate more leads.
Some ways you can optimize articles for conversions include:
- Adding in-text CTAs
- Adding a mid-article CTA banner
- Adding a pop-up banner with a special offer
- Running retargeting ads with a special offer to anyone who read the article
Nick Zviadadze, Founder, MintSEO
Ensure Mobile Friendliness
As someone who has audited hundreds of websites, I can confidently say that one of the single most impactful tips I’ve collected over the years is to ensure mobile friendliness.
Mobile users now make up an overwhelming majority of web traffic, and a website’s performance on mobile devices must be a top priority to optimize the user experience and keep leads engaged. Optimizing navigation menus, adjusting font sizes, and incorporating responsive design are all steps that can drastically improve your website’s performance on mobile devices.
Daniel Pfeffer, CEO, Scrape Network
Conduct Regular Website Maintenance
Monitor your website’s loading speed and site structure regularly to identify and address any technical issues. Optimize page content and titles to ensure they are SEO-friendly and relevant to target audiences. Additionally, ensure that all contact forms are working correctly and are easy to use.
Ranee Zhang, VP of Growth, Airgram
Sharpen Your Copy
I try to read my website copy from the eyes of the customer I am targeting. I have to be hypercritical of the words I choose for my website and read them back to myself from my customer’s eyes. It’s tough to be critical of yourself.
So, read the copy slowly and aloud and check off the following questions with a yes or no:
- Did you address what it is you are selling/offering at the top of the page?
- Did you explain what it is you are offering in a way that makes sense and is easy to consume?
- Did you tell the person what it is you want them to do AFTER reading the copy?
Many times, websites will write fancy/clickbait content. That is not what the consumer wants.
If you can describe your product/service like an honest and compassionate human, you will increase your leads greatly.
Don’t forget to have clear call-to-action buttons that say exactly what you want the person to do.
Make your website the easiest thing that person consumed that day.
