Dan Moyle — October 14, 2019 Go ahead and ask yourself:
How does my website perform for my business?
Does my website actually generate revenue?
Is my website drain on expenses?
If you don’t have the answers to these questions, you may need a checkup. Find out the health of your website (and your marketing efforts) with the Impulse Creative Website Health Check.
We’ll help you discover where your efforts are paying off, and where you can improve. We want to show you how the design of your website and digital marketing can pay off for your business with real growth.
A website should:
- Raise brand awareness
- Generate leads
- Generate sales
- Help current customers
Curious about checking the health of your website? Here are six questions to ask to see how does your site stacks up.
1) Website Health Check: How Much Traffic Does Your Site Get?
Sure, a lot of marketing thought leaders say website views are a vanity metric. We don’t disagree. But you have to start somewhere.
If no one visits your website, does your site really exist?
So, we start with website views. There’s no hard number, as it depends on your industry, your potential customer base, and other factors. And certainly we don’t want 1,000,000 monthly visitors that bounce in a few seconds and never convert. But if you are measuring views/sessions and they’re increasing, then you’re on the right track.
From there we suggest looking for some comparables. Do your competitors get 5,000 monthly views? 10,000? 50,000? How do you rank?
Once you’re measuring and have an idea on the industry standard, you can begin to assess the health of your website and see where you need to improve.
2) Website Health Check: Do You Get Leads that Turn Into Customers?
Back to views, if you have millions of viewers but zero leads, and your goal is leads and customers, then your website is terminal. It’s time to do something about it.
Conversion rate optimization is a critical component of modern marketing. Great content alone can’t get you more customers. The right people have to see it at the right time.
It takes smart strategy to deliver the right message to each of your buyer personas well. And that message has to be customized for every stage of their buyer’s journey: awareness of their problem, consideration of a solution and finally, a purchase decision.
When that content delivery strategy creates an airtight map leading from stranger to customer, it’s an effective conversion path. Convert leads for less by developing conversion paths for all of your buyer types, ensuring every lead has the right information and opportunities in every stage of their buyer’s journey.
Are you measuring your conversion rates?
3) Website Health Check: Does Social Media Send Your Site Traffic?
Even outside factors like using social media, and the effectiveness of said strategy, can impact the health of your website.
Are you posting consistently, while linking back to your website? Do you use more than one platform, testing the traffic and conversion rates of each?
If you’re doing this, your website is likely on a healthy track.
If you aren’t … or you only have a business page on one platform … then the health of your website may be at risk.
We humans are spending more and more time in social media (thanks Captain Obvious), so as a business it’s vital to understand how your ideal clients are using social, and which platforms they may see you on and engage with you.
4) Website Health Check: Does Your Site Use Video?
Let’s be clear: Video is not the future of marketing.
Marketing without video means you’re in the past, because video is the current tool taking marketing strategies into the stratosphere. It’s not the future… it’s the NOW.
So if your website has little-to-no video strategy baked into it, it’s likely a pretty anemic and unhealthy website.
We suggest finding place to use video where it makes sense – explaining things like services/products, welcoming viewers and bringing them into your world, offering insider information. We also love adding videos to our blog articles when we’re able.
We also use a mix of video hosting services for various reasons. From Wistia to 23 to YouTube, you’ll find different experiences in each. Test what works for you, and plan to use video if you want a healthy website.
5) Website Health Check: How Does Your Site Rank in Search Results?
How does your website perform in search results? This is one of those common sense “No $ h!t Sherlock” moments. If no one can find your site using Google, does it really exist?
Knowing the keywords you want to rank for, including your branded terms like your company name, is the beginning. From there it’s thinking strategically on how people might find the solutions you’re offering, and working backward.
Tools like SEMRush and Moz help in the research and planning phases.
So does actually going to the search engine and typing in different phrases. Does your brand show up? If not, it most likely means your website is unhealthy. It may be time for some attention.
6) Website Health Check: Are You Using Smart Content on Your Website?
It may seem advanced, but smart content will lead to a healthy website that not only serves your customers, but wows them.
Whether it’s showing them content based on their industry or job title, or it’s using their name or past purchases to drive more engaging chat features, smart content should be part of your website design today.
Make Sure Your Website is Healthy and Performing Well
Whether you’re the business owner or the head of marketing or somewhere in-between, the health of your website is crucial to conducting modern business. If you don’t perform well in this area, and people either can’t find your site or bounce as soon as they arrive, in essence you don’t exist.
As consumers, we’re asking Siri, checking Facebook, going to Google and more before we ever decide to business with a brand. It would follow that it’s the same for your customers.
Sick photo by Hush Naidoo on Unsplash
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