A 4-Step Website Audit Checklist for Small Businesses and Non-Profits
You may have scoured the internet for a website audit checklist to help you optimize your site.
As a business owner or non-profit manager, your website is one of the fundamental ways that you advertise to consumers. When a potential customer or donor wants to learn more about you, the first place they will look is your website. When a current customer decides to place another order or a donor decides to give a gift, they want to use ecommerce so it will be fast and easy.
If properly optimized, your business or non-profit website can serve your organization in many important ways.
Unfortunately, many websites fall short of this goal. To make sure that your website is marketing for you 24/7, as it should be, follow our website audit checklist.
Step 1: Conduct Interviews or Focus Groups with Target Audiences
The best way to know how your website is performing with your target audiences (i.e., current customers, potential customers, current donors, potential donors, etc.) is to talk to them face-to-face and to see what they think of your website. You’ll learn valuable feedback that you’ll be able to incorporate as you work to make your site more appealing to the people you’re trying to reach.
Step 2: Complete a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Audit of Your Website
Although word-of-mouth advertising and traditional advertising or still valuable ways to grab people’s attention, the majority of consumers are going to discover your website through search engine results. You need to find out what keywords these consumers are using to find organizations like yours. Then you can incorporate those keywords in the headings, subheadings, meta-descriptions, and links on your website to optimize your chances of rising to the top list of results.
One good source of keyword information is Google Search Console.
Relate article:
Being the Top Search Result on Google: Local vs National SEO
Step 3: Copyedit Your Website Content
Like it or not, consumers will judge your business based on your website’s grammar, spelling, and punctuation. And though tools like Grammarly can help you catch and correct quite a few errors, you still need someone with professional editing skills to edit for things like tone, style, and voice.
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Step 4: Evaluate Your Design Choices
You want to ensure that your website design enhances the message that you are trying to communicate about your business or non-profit. The colors in your logo should complement colors in your home page’s background, text, borders, images, and icons. If your business is a party supply store, for example, it would be more appropriate to use bright, bold colors rather than neutral earth tones as part of your design scheme. This kind of color scheme wouldn’t work for most businesses, however.
You should also check your website a variety of browsers and devices. Consumers won’t necessarily be using a computer or smartphone that is the same as yours. At the very least, you should look at your website on Google Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, and should also load it on an Android device and an iPhone. If your website looks inconsistent across browsers and devices, you may need to patch your website or make it mobile-responsive.
Next Steps After You Complete Your Website Audit
After completing your website audit, you should have detailed answers to how well your website is performing for your target audiences. From this information, you can create an action plan to improve your website so that it is optimized for those audiences.
Of course, not all organizations will have the necessary skills to fix the issues you uncover in your audit. You may need to hire a competent web design agency to help you.
