SEM

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.

The economic climate has pushed the long-term problems of the ‘other’ climate off top spot as far as the news is concerned. However, many businesses are finding the triple whammy of rising energy costs, cash flow squeeze, and global warming a reason to increase their use of internet marketing.

A good example is Foneshop.com, which is one of the UK’s leading online mobile phone retailers. When they launched their web site in 2003, they managed about 10 orders a day, according to the company’s Group Marketing Director, David Hyett. Their goal was to reach 100 orders a day. By using an AdWords campaign in conjunction with SEO techniques and landing page optimization, Foneshop.com has seen its total orders rise by about 56% and, more importantly, the average value of each order has risen by 54%. They invest about 60% of their monthly advertising budget in AdWords. The result? Over half of their customers find Foneshop.com through Google and the conversion cost per customer has decreased by 29%.

In stark contrast to this, research by Microsoft last year estimated that UK small businesses are spending £3 billion annually on invisible web sites. In a survey of 400 UK SMBs, the research uncovered that

“44% of SMBs not doing search marketing think it is too time consuming; 56% think it is too expensive; and 33% too complicated. However, 76% of SMBs promoting their website on search engines see an immediate increase in sales.”

It’s no surprise, though, that companies that do ‘get it’ are choosing to switch from paper-based advertising campaigns to online marketing. And those that do are reaping the benefits, not only of being first to exploit the potential of reaching a wider market for less cost, but also of grabbing the kudos of being environmentally friendly.