Looked At Your Site Lately?

If you haven’t looked at your site lately, has anyone else?

If you don’t know if anyone has looked at your site, it may be time to conduct a site audit. At the very least, it’s clear you need to get some sort of analytics installed, so you can be sure that you’re not the only one ignoring your site.

This assumes, of course, that your site is part of your marketing arsenal and plays a significant part in meeting your business objectives. If your site is simply there to add to the approximately 21 billion web pages in English and to serve no business function whatsoever, please ignore the rest of this post.

What is a site audit?

In its most simple terms, a site audit ensures that your site is fit for purpose. And ‘purpose’ here means its ability to attract qualified visitors/prospects – and convert them to customers or leads.

Why bother?

If your site was built with no optimization included as part of the design process, a careful audit will lay the groundwork for creating an optimization strategy. Even if your site was optimized during the build, there’s every chance that search engine technology, your customers, or your business goals have changed. An audit can still point out areas that could be improved to meet those changes.

A series of posts – yippee!

Over the next few weeks, I’ll cover some of the things to look at when performing a site audit. This is all stuff you can do for yourself, with a little help from on-line resources and free (or cheap) tools. The results may surprise (or dismay) you. Either way, you’ll learn something about optimizing sites and bringing your web site in line with your business strategy.

With a bit of luck, you may even start reaping the benefits of increased traffic and higher search engine rankings. But don’t hold me to that.