Website Assessment
A website assessment is the process of analysing a website’s technical, visual and structural properties to unveil aspects of the website that could be revised and/or implemented to improve the overall site performance.
As the owner of a website, your idea of site performance may vary. For small to medium businesses with an online presence, the crux of your site performance may involve conversions in sales, and return on investment with your online efforts. If you are a not-for-profit organisation, the main aim of your website may be to increase the awareness of what you do through driving more traffic to your site and increasing subscriptions to online newsletters for example.
The point I’m attempting to illustrate above is that each website is different, and each has different goals. A website assessment can help put you and your website in good stead to achieving those goals.
At the outset of any project that Paramount Search Marketing undertakes, a website assessment is the first and foremost task that we undertake. It assists in developing an understanding of where your site may be corrected which immediately identifies opportunities to begin an SEO, social media, link building or video marketing strategy to leverage your site, based on its aims, to its full potential.
What We Assess
Design and Navigation
There’s no good having a website if your visitors can’t even get around it. Navigation and visual design are key elements to making sure that everything you need to say online is being absorbed by those who land at your domain. We will assess navigational aspects such as the placement of menus, internal linking, and the implementation of forms. We’ll also assess crucial design elements such as colour schemes, branding and identity and the use of graphics. It’s important to note that even Google are putting the spotlight on website design by implementing page previews in search engine result pages, so by having this right from the get go you’ll increase click throughs from Google and reduce your bounce rate while you’re at it.
Site Structure and Technical Elements
If you’ve ever heard the term SEO-friendly then this is what we’re talking about here. Every website needs to ensure that their site runs technically well in terms of no broken links, no 404 error pages, correct use of siloing, and proper display of images and video. We will assess aspects of your website such as the hierarchy of pages and their internal links, optimising URL structures, not diluting themes, leveraging the flow of PageRank throughout the site and making sure nothing is broken on site. At Paramount Search Marketing we use a combination of our own knowledge and Google Webmaster Tools to analyse the structural and technical elements of your website.
Conversion Goals
As stated previously, your site may have specific goals. These may be anything like:
- Increasing leads to your business
- Driving subscriptions to newsletters or mailouts
- Boosting on site sales and orders
- Increasing awareness of your brand
- Increasing reservations/bookings or handling of other arrangements
- Directing traffic to social media platforms
During our website assessment we can assess how your site has approached reaching these goals, and recommend the implementation of conversion steps and multivariate testing to drive more traffic to dedicated areas of your website.
Analytics and Reporting
If you’re attempting to improve something or have it perform better you need benchmarks. By being able to track visitor data, site traffic, bounce rates, top pages and content and referrals you will have a much better understanding of what is and isn’t working for those that turn up to your website. During a website we will assess how to go about implementing analytics tracking code for your website. For all projects, Paramount Search Marketing uses the Google Analytics service to track visitor behaviour.
For more information, see how we identify your websites competition.