I'm Christopher Lara with TheeDigital joined by Kerry Giordano
our director of operations and Rob delory all around SEO
Enthusiast. Today.
We're going to go over web site Audits and what are some of
the things we look for when auditing a website.
Carry, Rob,
Thank you for joining me.
Hey Christopher.
Thanks for having us.
Why would someone audit their website was the point of one?
Well, if I could jump in Keri, if that's all right. Yes please
do. It really comes down to what is it that you're looking
for your website to do and what are you auditing it for and
what I mean by that is are you looking for technical elements
for search engine optimization, you know, why is it not performing
as well in the actual Google search results or are you looking
at your website from the standpoint of hey I get it.
On a traffic to the website.
Why is it not converting as much why are people not taking
the actions that I want them to so it really starts with
understanding as you're approaching the project of looking
at it from the standpoint of what is it that I'm trying to
accomplish here and that will lead you down the road of how
you do or why you would conduct a specific type of audit
Yes, I totally agree with you Rob.
When I look at a website, you know, if the client comes to us
looking for an audit.
I'll look at a site and try to put on my user cap and try
to think of myself as you know, if I were a user coming to
this website and I knew nothing about this company and I
went to the home page or any page on the website because
you don't always enter a website from the homepage.
Remember. I, if I go to that site.
Do I know what I'm looking at?
Like what what company is this?
What do they
do? You know, is this an e-commerce store?
Is it and like if your eCommerce store and that's not obvious
when I first come to the site then you know, that's an issue
or if I'm looking for a plumber and I come to your site and
it's not obvious that you do plumbing.
Then that's an issue.
So I just like that's kind of the first thing I look for
is it is it obvious?
What the point of the site is and what they do.
From a usability side of things, I agree with you Keri.
You really do want to start thinking more in terms of the
visitor their mindset when they show up you've been looking
at your website for a long time.
But as you're saying, is it obvious? It really is remarkable
to look at some of the websites and then have conversations
with the person who owns the website and determine.
Well a lot of the things that you want people to know about
your business aren't even on the front page that the really
primary things about your company and it's always surprising
to me.
Yeah, and I think as business owners were really proud of
our logo and really proud of our products and all of our
accomplishments and things like that.
But you know, when a user comes to your site for the first
time, they don't really care about that stuff if you have
a really beautiful abstract logo, but they don't know what
you do or what you can.
Offer to them then they're not going to care.
They're just going to bounce.
So yeah, I think it's really important to to keep the user
in mind that that you know users have - you only have like
three seconds of their attention.
So they, they need to get to your site and know what's in
it for me.
Is it worth my time?
Because time is so valuable and people are so distracted.
So you need to serve whatever need.
They have, as soon as they get to your site in some way and maybe
it's a call to action that answers the question that that
most people ask when they're coming to your site or you know,
also, is it easy for them to call you or contact you if they
have a question there's nothing more frustrating than going
to a website be really interested and then not being able
to find or figure out how to contact these people in if you
want their service or their product.
And sometimes it's as simple as the phone number so many
websites for some reason.
Let's go ahead and put it on the contact page.
What? For me why wouldn't you have it on every page?
Why wouldn't you have it predominantly displayed at the top
again if that is important to your company.
There are some very few companies but e-commerce, for example,
the phone number isn't the priority for them.
But a lot of service companies.
I'm really surprised every time I go through the website.
How often they'll go ahead and just have one instance
of the phone number on their website and it's in small type
somewhere on the contact page.
It's one of those first things that you look at and say,
well here's a big opportunity.
Right and there's nothing more frustrating than finding the
contractor that you need on your mobile device and you click
on their phone number in the teeny tiny print in the footer
and it doesn't call.
For that user experience, please put your phone number in
a button and so that they can call and immediately call the
person and not have to copy and paste it.
I mean - a lot of people don't think about that.
But since we you know do this every day, that's something
that we look for when we audit a website.
I'll take it even one step further carry because you know,
even some of the small mobile browsers are getting pretty
good at identifying that this is a phone number.
But how many websites I've gone through and the phone
number is part of an image.
Okay, I can read it.
Right.
You're right.
It's still out there.
I've still seen that happening out there.
So yes when you do and conduct a website audit, those are
the types of things you're looking for.
Okay, fine.
The text isn't in an image.
It's just sitting there on the website.
However, if it's not actually click to call, you know the
technical Term for it if it's not click-to-call you're missing
out on the opportunity of seeing how often times people are
actually clicking on it because you're right.
If somebody goes ahead and sees the text there in the web
browser for your device is picking up on it.
It still doesn't mean that you're getting that information
in your analytics.
You got the call.
But you don't know where these calls are coming from.
So again, that's where we started digging down into in a
website audit.
Determining all of these things, right?
Yea some other things.
So that's kind of the first past that I do on a website audit
is just kind of you know, think of the user and think it
just the user experience just basically the basics but then
you know, you dig a little deeper and we start looking into
page speed, you know, there's several tools that we look
at to see is the site loading more than a second or two.
Was it getting stuck on maybe you have a plug-in that's
out of date that's making the website, you know choke and
keep trying to access a script that doesn't exist anymore
because your site can be, you know, great when you launch
it and then six months later.
There's there's some kind of code change and a plug-in that
you're not even not even aware of particularly, you know
in a word for any of the CMS sites that have plugins, you
know, those plugins are developers are all over the world
and are making code changes every day.
To improve their plugins.
And so your site could be fine one day and then next week
all of a sudden it's slow.
So we run it through a tool to identify what could be causing
the hang up.
Maybe there's some images that are too large.
So there's a lot of simple things that that you can do to
make a site faster and easier to navigate.
Another thing that's been coming up a lot lately is ADA compliance,
so you know, there was - there were laws passed, you know
a couple of years ago and it's taken a little while for the
websites to catch up.
You know, everybody knows that, you know, retail businesses
have to have ramps for a wheelchair and you know, there was
a time where people had a just the sinks in there in the
bathrooms and you know, that was a big change and now websites
were discovering their some Basics that Websites needs to
have so people who are visually impaired can see whether
it's you know color blindness or if they have use a screen
reader to read off what's on the page.
So there's a lot and a lot of people are just not even aware
that that's a thing and that's its there's - if you federal
agencies and anybody who Services a federal agency has to
be ADA Compliant and that's including their website and I'm not
a lawyer but that's that's what I hear and that's what we
do, but it's actually becoming more and more important for
all websites and in some countries.
It's actually the standard that it doesn't matter what industry
you're in they have to be ADA Compliant and it might be a
different term over there.
But here I think you know upcoming years it's coming.
So we need to keep that in mind and some of the things you
can do to help people.
Access your website is to make sure that your you have good
color contrast, you know, you don't put, you know, red text
on a blue background where you can barely distinguish the
difference between the colors make sure the font sizes are
large enough and one thing that you might not even think
of is alt tags on your images.
There's actually some code you can put in all of your images
that describes what the image is, so A visually impaired
person is looking at a webpage and it's reading off all the
content on the page when it gets to a picture.
If you don't have an ALT tag on that picture, it'll just
say image.
But if you have an ALT tag on there, it might say girl with
red balloon, at least it tells them what is in the image.
So that is something that we would look for in an audit as
well. If all the images have alt tags and for the ADA compliance
and I mean it is a law that's out there and you are starting
to see quite frankly lawsuits have been coming up over the
last few years for different organizations that are out there.
So it's something that people you're right have to start
becoming mindful of these things and making sure that they're
at least taken care of very simple things as you're describing
because I think it's going to be a bigger topic moving forward.
Yeah, exactly.
There's there's different laws out there and there's the
it's not just the Ada laws but there's also gdpr well.
Yep.
There's the GT at the privacy laws.
The Discrimination laws to that.
There's there's different laws into play.
So you read the information on one law and you think oh,
well, I don't have to do it because my I'm not in that industry,
but you might Not realize that there's a lot like if you're
in healthcare field, even if you have nothing to do with
federal agencies, it still could be that you're discriminating.
If the only way you offer appointments for instance is through
your website, then you're basically discriminating people
who can't schedule online.
If you don't make the scheduling accessible to somebody who's
visually impaired that's just one example, but yeah, I but
if you it's an interesting topic if you there's a lot of
lawsuits out there and they people can get you from Angle
so it's just best to just be mindful of and it's also just
being a good citizen to make your your website accessible
to everybody.
You know, I was wondering is there a frequency in which you
guys recommend that a business get their website audit or
certain situations in which one is recommended, you know
for me.
I don't try to burden businesses.
Too much with things like that so I can honestly say if you're
at least doing it once a year, that's probably good practice.
If you're a company in your website is getting massive amounts
of traffic and you rely upon it to be able to go ahead and
you know provide leads or sales or whatever the case is.
It really comes down to how much of a priority is the website
to your business.
I'm I can think of some very large companies that probably
are auditing it because only because they have full marketing
teams that that's all that they're doing today.
They are in s it's running audits on there's constantly just
because you know, they've got an entire team that surrounds
it but for most of your small business owners, it's probably
a good idea, you know, right at the beginning of the year.
It's usually a good time getting ready for the next year
evaluating your content running a website on Audit, you know
checking in on those things that that's that's pretty good
rule of thumb if you ask me what you did.
Yeah, I would agree but I would say just to expand slightly
if your business completely depends on your website, then
I would do it more often maybe quarterly and and if your
if your business is completely web-based.
Hopefully you have an IT person or some kind of team that
is maintaining your website on a regular basis anyway, but
I would say maybe quarterly it minimum.
I mean obviously some some businesses don't change a letter
on their website in a year.
So, you know, right right.
I mean it's still a good idea to do the audit anyways, because
you know, you may not be up to date with best practices things
of that sort.
But it really is a good idea to at least put it on a schedule
of some sort and you're right Carrie for the more company
depends upon it the more it should be analyzed.
Let's say I'm a small business owner and I don't want to
work with an agency and I just want to kind of lightly self-audit
a website myself.
What are some of the things that I would look for?
Well again, are we talking about from an SEO?
Standpoint?
Are we talking about from a conversion standpoint?
You gave the example?
What would be just one like one thing that you recommend?
So we'll look for when self-locking their website.
One example that I think of is the small business owner that
had their family member perhaps update the website and unbeknownst
to them.
The site has been made don't index.
So pretensions came across them.
But we've no definitely had business owners come to us before
because all of a sudden they don't understand what's going
on. So it is a matter of SEO we want to talk about right
now and that's what this a business owner.
That's the whole purpose of your site right to get found.
Yeah Google your company.
What is Google showing up for your company name?
Okay, great.
Now I can go ahead and look at that and see how the web presence
is. Then go ahead and Google whatever your main service or
product or whatever it is that you think you should be ranking
for very simple to do Google that and see if you're showing
up for that and I say, See if you're showing up for that,
you know again going into a website audit, there's things
to keep in mind that if you've Googled your own company enough
times, you know Chrome and the rest of them already know
what you're trying to go ahead and find and they may put
it up a little bit higher.
That's when you want to go ahead and search from other browsers,
but it really comes down to the first thing to do is just
start googling it and seeing how the search results are representing
your company.
Probably the second thing that I would do no matter.
ER what the website was is I would run a quick mobile-friendly
test through Google as well you Google that Google mobile
friendly test.
They'll come up with their own little thing you put in your
website address and 30 seconds later.
It will give you a yes or no, you are mobile-friendly according
to the search engines.
You know what that looks like is a different story you'll
be able to visibly see that but at least, you know, you're
compliant with them and that really makes a difference not
just for You know search engines but it also makes a difference
on you know, is it easy for people to look at on their phone?
I'm on a roll here.
But again, a lot of people will go ahead and look at their
website on their computer all the time because that's where
they are.
Not really realizing that 75% of visitors are visiting their
website on cell phones.
So, you know, sometimes people just don't think outside of
what they're used to to doing themselves.
Yeah, I would to expand on that.
I would say whatever it is.
You want your clients to do on your website, whether it's
called them call you or submit that contact form or buy a
product or request a consultation go through the motions
on your phone and on your computer and maybe ask a friend
to do the same and make sure that everything happens at supposed
to like it did when you filled out the form.
Do you get the note?
Patient as both the user and the website owner and if you
try to call does it connect or does it?
Is it not going to the right place?
You know, I would just whatever your user flow is or your
desired user flow make sure that it's able to happen from
beginning to end and that you're notified about it until
you are 100% Correct?
I can't tell you how many people I've sat down with and well
how many contact forms do you get?
Well, I don't know I and then we go in we find out that the
contact forms were never coming to them and oh my goodness.
That was something so basic.
It's as simple as just put in your name and info submit it
and see what happens it.
Maybe it's not even going to your email address and you've
been missing out on opportunities, but you're right is so
simple little things if it's an e-commerce website go ahead
and make a purchase and send something to your house.
Do you know this small purchase but may never it's not just
the website that the whole process is set up.
You know, I know I know we're stepping outside of the website,
but really that's just the first step sometimes in all of
this. This when what was the movie there with Tom Hanks in
Castaway? I think it started out him working for FedEx and
in the very beginning he shows up and he had sent a package
to the facility itself and you open it up and he had a box
with a timer on it's showing how long it took for it to make
it there.
Sometimes you have to utilize the actual product or service
that you are providing on the website to get that full understanding
of how It's working through your business.
I hope I explained that okay.
Yeah, that was great Rob.
I think we achieved our goal to explain why someone would
want in a charger the website and what the point of one is
as well as give some tips on how to sell followed yourself.
If you don't want to use professional agency any last words,
you guys want to share Before We Say Goodbye as far as all
of that's concerned.
Sometimes it's as simple as just taking a look at your website.
Does it look outdated?
Are you in an industry that your competitors are really keeping
up-to-date and that makes a difference to the visitors to
your website to your customers, you know, does your website
provide information that is useful to visitors.
It's you know, we can get into technical details of web site
audits. Sometimes it's as simple as taking a look at it as
a whole.
Is this a useful resource?
And that'll be my final thing right there.
Yep, and call us at the digital if you'd like a more technical
audit. Yeah.
If you have a business and you're looking for a website audit
get in touch with our web experts at TheeDigital.com for
a free website audit.
Have a good day.
Bye guys.
Thank you.
Bye.
