You might hate to hear this, but your website is never finished. Yes, you can be happy with the designs and improving SEO performance, but that doesn’t mean your other marketing efforts are reaping the benefits.
Maintaining your website should play an essential role in your marketing. Today, people are using websites as a way to build trust in brands before making decisions to take action. And when your website gets left in the dust, so does your audience.
Let’s make your website a priority in your marketing strategy.
How to maintain your website for marketing
The traditional way of looking at website maintenance is by ensuring the technical end is working and users do not see errors. And this should not be overlooked. But don’t ignore the branding and marketing messaging too!
Creating a routine check-in with your website to make sure the copy is engaging, call-to-actions are working, and you meet your visitors’ needs is a must.
It’s key to remember that when people land on your website, you’ve made it easy for them to build trust and want to work with you.
Technical website maintenance should be handled routinely by your website creator or in-house tech team. But, when it comes to the copy and optimizations on the website, that is a function of your marketing team (or you!).
Taking time to do a website audit doesn’t have to be a time-consuming chore. All you need is a critical eye and your checklist. Later, we’ll talk about how to build a strategy to tackle your improvements.
Let’s go ahead and get this started!
Website Audit Checklist for Marketing
Click here to download and print the PDF.
Turning your audit into strategy
With your audit complete, you can now prioritize changes to your website. As a busy business owner, you have limited time to spend updating your website, so I expect this could take several months to complete.
But I encourage you to focus on your customer’s experience and how your refresh can provide the much-needed trust and deliver the value you provide to win them over.
Start with the no-brainer tasks. Fix broken links and correct copy errors.
Next, find the big-hitters. What is going to make the most impact to move your business forward.
There are several ways to determine this. I suggest looking at your goals for the year or quarter and focus there.
➡️ If you struggle with growing trust online, adding testimonials and reviews would be most powerful.
➡️ If confusion on your product or service comes up again and again, you need to take the time and work on your hero copy.
➡️ And if you lack conversions on your site, spend time with your call-to-action.
Once you’ve gone through and made the changes, I suggest you do it all over again! The next time around, you might make new notes on user experience or testing opportunities. And asking a colleague or trusted friend to complete the audit will bring a fresh perspective.
