Local Web Co.
Submit your website URL and your email address below to receive your complimentary in-depth website audit.
The audit will show you how your site is running under the hood, just like you might have a mechanic take a peak at how your car engine is doing.
Expert
There are thousands of different approaches to building on the web and not all of them are designed to give you optimal results. Some are there to look pretty. Some don't even do that.
There is much more going on under the hood of your website than most people realize. If you are not totally sure what the role of your website even is, than this article is written for you. Your website has a long list of both technical and more user-oriented metrics that need analyzed in order to assess the state of your website.
Websites should be designed and built with your potential customers in mind. This is why metrics like speed, accessibility, mobile responsiveness (read about what that is here!) and user experience are extremely important to your website's success.
The 4 technical website metrics we analyze are:
Website performance really means how quickly is the website loading on your screen. This can be drastically different across different devices on different networks.
What loads very fast on your desktop computer may take a minute or more on my mobile device. 5G wireless is being rolled out now, but the reality is that 82% of the internet users still visit websites on a 3G connection.
Website Accessibility refers to the ability of disabled people to use your website despite their disability. Blind and Deaf people, to name a few, are often not considered during the website design process but they need the web to be accessible to them just like you! There are specific ways that web developers need to build websites in order for them to be usable by all audiences.
Website development best practices are industry standards that ensure that a website is maximally secure, and built on solid technical principles that make it stable and reliable. We take these best practices very seriously at Local Web Co.
Search Engines are the heart of the modern web. If you aren't familiar, you can read this article on what exactly they are and how they work. Technical SEO are the low hanging fruit of the SEO world and ensure that your website is set up to communicate optimally with major search engines. This ensures that your website, and thus your business can be found!
This wraps up the technical Website Audit Metrics, so let's move on to the more difficult metrics - User-Oriented Metrics!
The technical side of audits are only half of the equation. User experience and Brand Messaging are extremely important to the success of your website in its business role.
88% of users are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience.
So what is user experience exactly?
Here are a few questions we ask when we look into how the user experience is for a website. These should give you some insight into how we think about user experience of a website here at Local Web Co.
Is the site easy and enjoyable for your customers to use?
Does the site make me want to leave? Or Stay and learn more?
Does the site scale across all possible platforms it will be viewed on?
How does the site look and feel?
a. Does it convey the brand’s values?
b. Does it make me want to buy your product instead of your competitors?
Does the site give me lots of value as a potential customer?
At Local Web Co., we prefer to use Google tooling as it is the industry standard for website development tools. Since Google has over 90% of the search engine market share, we use their Lighthouse web auditing tool to do our in-depth audit.
This ensures that any recommendations we can make for your website will get you closer to satisfying Google's requirements and put you in the best possible place to dominate local search results.
Performing a website audit on every single page of your website gives us a look at how the site as a whole is functioning- not just your home page. This is important because it lets us more closely gauge what the typical user experience will be like.
Over 50% of web searches take place on mobile devices. The odds of potential customers viewing your website on a wide range of devices is very high. It is imperative that your website visitors have a great experience on the smallest cell phone and 3G network just like the visitors who are using high end desktop computers and ethernet connections to visit your website.
Its important that you know what to expect from a Local Web Co. In-Depth Website Audit. The results are exported to a PDF document that shows the technical website audit metrics - performance, accessibility, best practices, and search engine optimization - for each page in a nicely formatted table that makes it easy to identify the problems with your website.
If you set up a free consultation, we bundle this information up into a nice powerpoint where we have collected screenshots of the user experience of the site from our user-experience portion of the website audit. This includes the mobile responsiveness testing. During the consultation, we go over each of these metrics in detail and walk you through the recommendations. We really suggest scheduling a free consultation!
You should use the information in the website audit we provide to make a detailed plan of attack for fixing the website. There are options for making website improvements that range from "learning to do it yourself" to "hiring an expert to do it" but this is a decision that you will have to make for your business.
If you would like to partner up with your Local Web Experts, we specialize in implementing the recommendations found in the report with urgency and precision.
If you don't have a website, we can instead schedule a consultation to review your specific business needs and talk about how exactly we can fully leverage the power of the web for your business.
