The global economy is on a knife-edge.
Businesses are closing at an unprecedented rate. And in light of repeated lockdowns and a shift towards remote working, the ones that remain are being forced to adapt to a digital approach in order to survive in these turbulent times.
According to Mastercard, in May of this year alone ecommerce spending increased by 93% in the US year on year.
With the digital landscape becoming so much more competitive, it goes without saying that you need your website to be performing well.
In this series of blog posts you will learn how you can give your website a health check.
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You’ll discover the steps you need to take to make sure your site is as profitable as it can be. And what you need to do to remedy it if it isn’t.
You’ll also learn about the different tools you can use (many of them free) and the strategies you can adopt to achieve this.
Health check post 2: The importance of a competitor analysis
In the next post you’ll learn how to run a competitor analysis, and why it’s so critical that you do it.
An analysis of your direct and indirect competitors’ websites is crucial. It can serve as a benchmark for how well your site is performing against others.
Buffer outline a number of quantitative and qualitative benefits from running a competitor analysis. These include:
- Help in developing and validating your Unique Value Proposition
- Improving your product by capitalising on competitors’ weaknesses
- Providing benchmarks to measure your growth against
- Uncovering market segments that aren’t fully served by competitors
To carry out a competitor analysis you need to know who your competitors are.
You also need to find out what keywords they are targeting, and what metrics you should include in it so you can track success.
By following the steps in the post, you’ll understand how regularly you should be running one, and who should do it.
Then, you’ll find out about a framework you can use to give yourself the best chance of success, before I run you step by step through a real-life competitor analysis.
Health check post 3: Running an SEO audit
In the third post you’ll learn how to get your website to attract a rich stream of high quality visitors.
To start off you’ll get to see a number of industry-leading tools you can use for free to run an SEO audit of your website.
I then run through in detail exactly how you can use them to identify issues on your website.
And then, when you have a full snagging list of things you need to fix, how you should go about fixing them.
Armed with this knowledge you’ll be in a great position to boost your domain authority, your keyword visibility and your backlink profile. This in turn will help your website to rank higher in the search engines for the right keywords.
Health check post 4: Checking how well your website converts visitors
Getting lots of visitors to your website is crucial for survival, no question.
But it’s no good if those visitors leave your site as soon as they arrive.
That’s why in the fourth post of the series I cover how to review how good your website is at converting its visitors into valuable customers.
Each page on your website plays a subtly different role in nurturing visitors towards a conversion point. In the post I focus on these different areas
- homepage
- blog post
- landing page
- checkout process
and show you how you can optimise each one for conversions on your website.
For each of these pages you’ll see a simple analytics report that highlights any general problems. This is a great way to find any areas where your visitors are struggling.
It’s a good idea to revisit the metrics, or KPIs, that you want to measure the success of your site against.
What’s more, you’ll discover some of the most important and valuable ones, and how you can benchmark your site’s performance from month to month.
I then focus on common elements on each of these pages, and show you other websites that are following best practice in these areas.
By implementing some (or all) of these strategies I’m confident that you’ll start to see your own conversion rates increase over time.
Conclusion
With the global economy in its current precarious position, there’s never been a more pressing time to give your website a health check.
Companies are closing down at an alarming rate. Those that survive are going to be the ones that can adapt to changing consumer behaviour. More and more people are buying online now, and the opportunity for servicing them digitally is clearly growing.
However, competition is fierce. So you need to be on your A-game if you want to be able to thrive in this environment.
Look out for the next post where you’ll learn how to carry out a digital competitor analysis to get ahead off the pack.
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