It is a commonly accepted fact that when purchasing a vehicle, it is a good idea to get a pre-purchase inspection.
One of your most important marketing assets, your company’s website, needs to be inspected as well to ensure that everything is running smoothly and that your time and money spent on it is worthwhile. Here are 5 key points that will guide an inbound marketing inspection on your website.
Pre-Inspection Website Strategy
Taking a step back from the website for a minute, think about two critical questions first:
- What is the business objective of your website? (generate leads, build membership, etc)
- What primary action do you want a website visitor to take? (purchase something, sign up for free consultation, etc)
Answering these questions guides the success of the rest of your inspection, because you won’t be ‘blinded by love’.
Step 1: Inspect the Outside of Your Website
How does the website look visually on the outside? Think of the common phrase, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The trouble with that mentality when it comes to the web is that your website should hopefully be whirling across the eyes of thousands of people. These are people that spend on average 5 seconds looking at your web page before determining if they are going to read on or click the back button. After all 76% of website visitors want a website that makes it easy to find what they want!
Mechanic’s Tip: A website design should be visually appealing, sure, but more importantly functional for the people actually using the website!
Step 2: How Is Your Website’s Engine Idling?
This is an easy one, but one that surprisingly I encounter often. You must have website analytics reporting installed on your website.
How can you know if your website’s engine is purring or roaring if you don’t have a baseline? Now, don’t get caught in the analytics trap, however. Just because you have analytics running and you are viewing them, doesn’t mean you have established the correct inbound marketing baseline.
Mechanic’s Tip: Coordinate your website traffic goals with the baseline and some real set goals, marketing and sales goals.
Step 3: Check the Book Value of Your Website
How do your website and blog stack up against other ones in your industry? How about your competitors? There are so many different variables, but the most important to focus on when ‘valuating’ your website are:
- Indexed Pages – The number of pages from your website that are stored in a search engine. Usually, the more the merrier! Think ‘more exposure’
- Linking Domains – How many other websites link to yours? Search engines give you priority in search results based on your inbound links. Think quality.
- Optimized or Not – Have you done some of the basics like use titles for the pictures on your website and put in descriptions for the pages and good titles to help search engine know what the content is?
Mechanic’s Tip: It can be easy to get hung up or become obsessed with website reports, grades, assessments, but one thing is for sure, you need to have an idea of where you are really at. You can explore new business opportunities by strengthening areas of weakness.
Step 4: Checking the No Brainers “Tires”, “Brakes”, and “Steering”
A good mechanic wouldn’t skip checking the tires, brakes, and steering system. After all it would be consider crazy not to. It’s basic.
There are a few website basics that often get overlooked.
Go back to the questions pre-inspection (strategy), and ask yourself, do I clearly ‘guide’ my visitors to the expected thing they want, or the desired result I have?
Mechanic’s Tip: Place clear call to actions prominently on your page that make sense.
Step 5: What Reliability Rating Would You Give the Website?
Not reliability in terms of uptime, although that is important too! Reliability in terms of: can your customers or clients rely on your website giving them exactly the information they need to do business with you? Are your prospects able to fully rely on the content you’ve published online to accurately portray how you do business? Enough with the long boring about pages and on to who you and your company really are.
Mechanic’s Tip: Put your best foot forward and invest in clear content marketing where necessary.
Post-Inspection: Website Goals
An inspection isn’t always designed to point out the bad. Often you can find better during the process. But don’t neglect things that are important. Just as it wouldn’t be wise to ignore what your mechanic suggests, especially if it relates to your brakes or steering, it doesn’t make good business sense to ignore making your website the true marketing asset and sales tool it can and should be for your business.