What Can You Learn from a Website Audit?

by Kyle David on April 13th at 2:01 pm EST

Website audits have been a mainstay of the marketing strategy of large corporations for quite some time.  However, they are gaining in popularity across all sizes and sectors given the increasing focus on websites as business critical elements.  A website audit is performed to assign a quantifiable metric to the efficacy of a website as well as an overall qualitative evaluation of the site.  One of the most common questions we are asked pertains to what a website audit really consists of and the answer is not always the same.  From provider to provider there are different aspects of a website audit that can be covered in different levels of detail. 

Below are the three parent tiers for which an audit is based as well as the individual items that we (The Kyle David Group) would analyze to determine how well the site is performing in each of these three tiers.

• Efficacy– What is the website designed to do, and how well does it do it?  Where are opportunities being missed and where are successes being made?  This may be applied to a large website globally, or to specific sites within a larger site.
  • Content Efficacy – Is the content on the site being read?  Is the content answering the questions that the visitor has?  If not, how could it be improved?
  • Navigational Clarity – Can the user intuitively find what they are looking for?  Are their multiple options for accessibility?  Given the amount of content in the site and how it is organized, could the navigation be reconfigured for better accessibility?
  • Interface hurdles – Are there technological barriers that are preventing browsers from interacting?  Is proper skip logic/location logic implemented into form submissions?
• Website Traffic– Where is website traffic coming from?  Is it the best source of traffic?  Could there be more opportunities or more economical opportunities?
  • Analytics – Is a true drill down analytics system installed on the site and is it properly measuring traffic?
  • Search Engine Marking Efforts – Is consideration being given to the indexability of the website?  If SEM techniques are being implemented, are they effective and economical?
  • Hard Advertisements – If the website is being advertised through a non-internet medium (i.e. print advertisements), how are they translating to traffic on the website?  Is that traffic effective?
• Competition – How does the website compare to others that are in the same space?
  • Aesthetics – Is the design and design technology of the site comparable to its peers?  If not, is it inhibiting the overall fidelity of the site?
  • Information – Is information being presented consistently with other sites in the space?  If not, is there an advantage to being an outlier?  If so, is there enough differentiation to create stickiness?
  • Positioning – Are other sites in the space positioning themselves for differentiation?  If so, why, and is it beneficial or detrimental to your site?

Answering these questions is critical to understanding how your website is either helping or hindering your organization as well as highlight simple changes that could be made to further the goals of the site and the brand of your organization.