Guest Blog- Website Audit

Read our latest guest blog from Squamish Chamber member, Christian Thomson of Marwick Marketing, a Premier Google Partner Agency. 

Your website should be your best salesperson. It should be the busiest store you have, even if you have a brick and mortar business. Your website should be friction-less for potential customers. Your website should be make you proud.

The Importance of a Website Audit

by Christian Thomson

If you had a store on a busy street but no one stopped to look in the window, you’d probably review your window display. You might even put a couple of new signs out the front. You might go one step further and hire someone to stand outside giving out flyers directing them into your store. 

 

Yet for many business owners, their store window is their website. With hundreds and thousands of virtual customers walking right past your website, never seeing what’s “on the inside” and if they do happen to visit the website many don’t make it to the checkout.

 

In fact, according to Geckoboard only 2.23% – 4.31% become a lead for business to business websites, e-commerce stores sell at an average conversion rate of 1.84% – 3.71% and home service companies have a conversion rate of 8% – 12%.  

 

Frightfully only 3.4% of small business owners surveyed said they invest in an in-depth SEO website audit to understand how to “improve their shop window” a.k.a. their website. 

 

The issue lies in business owners not understanding the shifting dynamics of the digital online world. Just this year Google updated its algorithm 8 times more than 2018 – that’s a lot of changes, the way Google finds your website changes almost daily. Google performed a number of core updates this year, focusing on finding better content for the end user. These may have been older less popular pages but with better content and information on them

 

But it’s not just Google a website audit can help with. A website audit will highlight any technical issues a potential customer might encounter when visiting your website. Just like a car goes to a mechanic once a year for a tune up, marketing experts suggest running an SEO audit at least once every 18 months. 

 

Your website should be your best salesperson. It should be the busiest store you have, even if you have a brick and mortar business. Your website should be frictionless for potential customers. Your website should be make you proud. 

 

Finally many businesses thrive off of their Google My Business listing (GMB also known as Google Maps), while it is possible to optimize this listing there is strong evidence that a well SEO optimized website can influence your companies position on Google My Business. 

 

We found that out of 315 company profiles that place high within the Google Map / Google My Business listing that 235 of these companies also had a high ranking website. This indicates that a well optimized website can also influence your placement on Google Maps / Google My Business

 

For business owners not quite ready to undertake a full SEO audit, there are a number of basic free tools that can guide your search engine optimization into 2020. For example a free website tool provides a simple downloadable report based on any keyword you wish, your competition and your website.

 

Christian Thomson

Christian Thomson

Christian Thomson is the CEO of Marwick Marketing Inc. A Premier Google Partner Agency in British Columbia and ranked 18th Fastest Growing Company in BC by Business in Vancouver Magazine. Marwick Marketing specializes in search marketing (SEO and Google Ads) and was founded in 2012.
Views and opinions expressed in guest blogs are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or advice of the Squamish Chamber of Commerce.

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