How to Conduct Your Own Website Assessment

Wondering if your company’s website is up to par? Have you been to the competition’s site and are left feeling a little down on your luck? Do you even know how to conduct your own website assessment before seeking the help of an experienced digital marketing agency near you?

Don’t worry. There are lots of ways that you can address the issues with your website beyond aesthetics. But first off…

What’s Website Assessment?

Website assessment or evaluation is the process of assessing the quality of information share on a given site in terms of their accuracy, currency, coverage, objectivity, public perception and authority. It also borders on the design of the website compared to what top competitors in the niche has, performance metrics and everything in between that will help the site generate more sales for the owner.

We’ve put together this checklist to help you facilitate your own website assessment and determine where the gaps (slowing site and sales) might be. It will teach you everything you need to know on how to evaluate a website content like a professional.

You can use this checklist to help you build a more robust website online. One that will keep your competitors wondering what’s wrong with their team.

Checklist for Conducting Your Own Website Assessment Today

1.  Start with the Easy Stuff

Before you start worrying about your website knowledge, consider that you don’t have to go far into your website’s backend to look for issues.

Start on the homepage. Does your website have the following:

• A clear call-to-action?
• A clear description of the product or service you offer?
• Images that aren’t broken and are appropriate for the product or service?
• Headings and subheadings using keywords that identify your business or service?
• A meta title at the top of the web browser describing your business – it should say more than just “home” in the tab.
• Is your contact information visible and accurate?

2.  Move on to Assessing the Content

If each of the above are in place, accurate and recent, then you can move on to the next phase of the website assessment: checking the quality of the content.

It wasn’t that long ago that the amount of content was much more important than the quality of the content.

These days, quality trumps quantity, but you still need a good amount of new content being cycled through your website on a regular basis in order to stand out.

Read through your content and see if it is outdated. We have talked about how to create valuable content every single time and can’t stop telling you how important repurposing your content is.

Are the content you share on your website still relevant to the audience you are serving?

Has your product or service changed any?

Do you want to update the offer at the end of a blog?

Do you talk about the same things all the time or mix up the topics?

How important is this information to your audience?

Other things to consider include:

• Checking for spelling and grammar mistakes.
• Checking for formatting on both laptop and mobile phones – some websites still don’t convert for smaller screens and it makes it really difficult for customers to see what you have on display.
• Checking to ensure all links work on your website, including menu items and those in the footer of the website.

3.  What’s missing?

When conducting your website assessment, take some time to consider what is missing from the overall themes and information pieces.

What do you take for granted about your audience that you shouldn’t? What are your competitors offering in the education and information that you aren’t? What are they also missing?

Talk to some customers and potential customers to find out what else they’d like to see.

If you share a coworking space with someone, show them your website and find out if they have any suggestions for making your website more robust.

Don’t make any assumptions – that’s the point of an assessment, right? Be open to any help that others offer you and remember that a fresh set of eyes can really help with your website’s content.

4.  Look at the Tools You Use and Offer Online

As a final step, be sure to take some time to consider how the tools you are using to run your website might be impacting your ability to be found online.

If you offer free coworking management software but it’s impossible to find the link to get access to it, you need to reorganize your information.

If you run a WordPress site or other content management system, you should stay up-to-date on the latest versions and ensure that your website is running properly with a decent hosting service, preferably, Siteground.

Whether you run a large organization or small one-person operation, your website is the window to the world for your business. Without a recent and relevant website, your business can’t flourish and you miss out on a number of opportunities to leave your impression on a potential customer.

Conclusion

Conducting your own website assessment should be done on a regular basis. Some professionals have gone as far as examining a million websites in USA alone.

You should schedule an assessment once every 4-6 months to ensure that your content and presentation are relevant and still important for what it is you are trying to do.

If the content has become outdated, remove it or rewrite it so that it is more relevant to the times. If you aren’t sure where to make changes, consulting with an expert is always a good idea.

Sometimes, knowing what to change and actually changing it are difficult for business owners who are too close to the product or service they offer. Sometimes, it’s a great idea to get a different perspective and point of view on what you offer.

Regardless of the route you take to update your website, be sure to conduct regular assessments to ensure that your website is doing the best job it can.