As a kitchen remodeler, you need an easy-to-navigate website that helps you reach your target audience and turn potential customers into qualified leads. But what’s the first step you need to ensure that your website drives sales? A good kitchen remodeling marketing agency would tell you that you need to start with a website audit.
What Is a Website Audit?
A website audit is a complete evaluation of your website, including your site map, interlinking pages, calls to action, and content scores. Examining these parts of your site can help you determine which aspects of your site are working to help your site rank highly on Google and other search engines and which might be working against your page rankings or customer conversions.
Once you complete a website audit, you can refine your digital marketing strategy to incorporate website changes to address any issues you discovered in the audit.
Benefits of a Website Audit
As a business owner, you need to target a few results from your website audit. Your first goal is to help your site rank on search results with high-quality search engine optimization throughout your site. You then need to be sure your website is functional and easy to navigate for visitors who find your site. Finally, you want users to have a good experience on your site and find the information they need.
There are several benefits to auditing your kitchen remodeling website. Besides search ranking, a proper website analysis can identify and help you address:
- Irrelevant content
- Site navigation clutter
- Poor call-to-action implementation
- Broken links or redirects
- Mobile site functionality
- Style and branding
- Site map duplicates and dead pages
- Images without alt text
- Non-secure forms or pages
- Other issues that could affect your site functionality
Common Website Issues
Kitchen remodeling marketing isn’t always straightforward. Trends change over time, and if you don’t update your website to keep up with them, you can fall behind. Common issues that many kitchen remodeling company websites suffer from include:
- Not having an updated gallery of before and after pictures
- Not having professional pictures taken when the job is done
- Not having testimonials throughout the site
- Not having a separate testimonials page to collect reviews from multiple platforms
- Only having a phone number and not an easy-to-use contact form
- Not having a kitchen design blog page to discuss important kitchen design tips and education
These issues can negatively impact the user experience when visitors are on your site. They want to know that you’ve done work in homes in the area. They also want to see both what you started with and what the final result was. Finally, your site visitors want to know not just that your work looks good in pictures but also that previous customers were happy with their experience.
Elements of a Comprehensive Website Audit
If you contact a kitchen remodeling marketing agency to perform a website audit, what should it include? A useful website audit should target five areas of your website. The five audits marketing companies should offer include:
- SEO Audits: An SEO audit analyzes your site’s content for search rankings, including keywords, interlinking, metadata, conversion rates, and site visitor behavior.
- Content Audits: While your marketing agency should review content during the SEO audit, that’s to measure ranking metrics. A content audit focuses instead on the tone, relevance, and usefulness of your content for human users to determine what makes site visitors contact you for a quote.
- Technical Audit: A technical audit examines the coding, linking, XML, redirects, and other background functionality features that make your site work. Technical issues can prevent your site from ranking or make it difficult for your customers to interact with certain parts of it.
- Design Audit: Your site needs to be visually attractive and intuitive for users to navigate. A design audit will review your colors, branding, page layout, structure, and images to ensure that users have the best experience on your site.
- Competition Website Audit: Competitors in your industry are also hiring marketing companies to update and manage their websites. With a competition website audit, you can determine where your competitors have shortcomings in their services and how you can meet customer needs better.
An experienced marketing agency for remodeling contractors also knows the specific areas of your site that require a second look during an audit. Kitchen remodelers rely on their online scheduling service, customer reviews, and photo galleries to convert site visitors into quality leads. Your marketing agency should ensure that these site pages and forms are attractive and function correctly.
Conducting a Website Audit
While you should hire a kitchen remodeling marketing agency to perform an in-depth analysis of your site with a website audit, you can begin checking some factors yourself.
One of the first things you can do to begin identifying issues on your site is to review your competitors’ websites. To find the top-ranking remodeling companies in your area, use Google’s incognito mode or another private browser extension to search for relevant keywords like “kitchen designer near (city).” See where your company ranks among your competitors and note the top three results.
You should always perform research using private browsing so that previous searches don’t affect your results. Search engines track previous searches to predict what information will be most relevant for you, skewing your results to place your company higher than a potential customer would get in their search results.
Once you determine who your top competitors are, visit their websites. See what commonalities they share, as well as other factors like pictures, testimonials, and if they have blog pages for SEO ranking. Then visit your website. How similar is your site to theirs? Can you use your competitors’ sites as guidance to make changes on your site?
Working with a Professional
A website audit is a major undertaking. It’s only the first step in developing a new digital marketing strategy or improving your existing strategy. A kitchen remodeling marketing agency has the necessary tools to complete all aspects of a website audit and design a plan to address any issues.
Your agency will have access to the most relevant tools, including keyword analysis tools, coding experts, and certifications, as well as experience working with other kitchen remodeling contractors across the country.
Conclusion
If you’ve never conducted a website audit on your company’s site, or haven’t performed one in a while, it’s probably time to review your site’s functionality and design. A professional kitchen remodeling marketing agency can perform a five-point audit on your website to ensure functionality, security, relevance, appeal, and ease of use. Your new customers will appreciate your efforts. Reach out to ApexKRM if you’d like to get help with your audit today.
