Today, more than any other marketing touch point, a website is the digital soul of an organization. All roads lead to it. As a leading website design and development agency for manufacturers, industrial companies frequently come to us to perform website audit so they can develop a plan to improve it. These are the ten dimensions of our website audit:

1. Brand Audit
First and foremost, we ensure that your brand essence and brand values are infused into the entire website experience. We evaluate consistent application of brand identity, color and typography.

2. User Experience Audit
User experience is important to both human beings and search engine bots.

Great websites are intuitive, easy to use, readable and engender trust. Their persistent navigation and prominent calls-to-action systems put the buyers in control. The Sitemap (org structure) and Wireframes (page schematics) – not just design and copy – create a logical content hierarchy and make a compelling argument. Balancing logic and emotion, stories and facts, they progressively disclose the information to create brand preference. All this is done in service of knowledge that buyers are mitigating the risk of choosing your brand.

The winning user experiences are usually created by heavy lifting by front-end and back-end developers. They hold the tension between these two opposing forces. The prospective buyers are delighted with judicious deployment of carousels, slideshows, progress bars, accordions, filters, auto-completes and facet searches.

We evaluate to ensure your website lives up to these criteria.

Not just buyers, but Google and Bing bots also reward websites with superior user experience, information architecture and page architecture.

3. Content Audit
For each target buyer group or persona, we analyze and determine if the content is using best practices in argument construction, persuasion architecture, influence and delight. To mitigate buyer’s risk, we ensure the business credentializes itself, tells customer stories, conveys thought leadership and exudes expertise.

Since blogs are one of the most effective means of securing and lifting Google and Bing page one rankings., we evaluate its goal, structure (categories and tags) and its content.

For international audiences and search engines, we ensure that persuasive, translated copy exists in country-specific languages.

We finally rank your content on scales of clarity, brevity, simplicity, focus, posture and salesmanship.

4. Photography/Video Audit
Iconic photography shows the manufacturer’s product in action or in use in complex applications. Because the website is managed by distributed content owners with uneven appreciation of the power of photography as a story-telling and reputation-building tool, iconic photographs, if they exist, often are buried deeper in the site than they should be. The best photographs must be orchestrated in service of storytelling and support argument construction so they too help realize the website goals. After evaluating all this, we determine if additional photoshoots are desirable. Ditto for videos.

5. SEO Audit
Although Google uses over 200 factors to rank websites, they can be grouped into the following six buckets:

• Technical Factors – We begin by testing site load speed, mobile/desktop performance, and secure certificate. We ensure that all pages are indexed, robots.txt files are present and rational, XML sitemaps and 404 pages are present.
• On-Page Factors – We evaluate website domain names, sub-domains and URLs to ensure they are rational, descriptive and hierarchical. We validate that meta-data is filled with intelligent copy. We ensure page copy is not only focused and persuasive but is also infused with appropriate keywords. We evaluate the quality of HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which are instructions to browsers to determine characteristics of web page elements such as text size, position of elements on the page, etc. We test if it meets ADA WCAG 2.2 standards for accessibility compliance for various special-needs audiences.  We size up internal linking. For blogs, we audit their categories, tags and content to reveal areas of improvement.
• Off-Page Factors – We review conversations taking place on other website and evaluate quality and quantity of inbound links back to your website.
• Social Factors Audit – We ensure that social sharing buttons and open-graph (OG) tags that facilitate content sharing are omnipresent because they are a Google, Bing and international ranking factor. We evaluate the quantity and quality of social conversations going on about your brand.
• Location Factors Audit – We ensure that locations signals are embedded for the geographies manufacturer serves or wishes to serve.

6. Revenue and Conversion Architecture Audit
Since a website is a manufacturer’s #1 salesperson, we evaluate if it’s efficiently constructed to maximize lead and e-commerce order generation. We ensure that users are not only able to signing up for newsletters and webinars, but are able to access thought-leadership content behind registration walls. And since websites are a manufacturer’s service extension, we ensure it efficiently steers customers to  after-sales service and knowledge base portals. We evaluate if it serve all channel partners with efficiency and grace.

7. Visual Design Audit

People are inherently very visual. All the hard work of strategy and planning is wasted if the website isn’t beautiful, uncluttered and distinctive. We score your design on a ‘Wow’ scale.

8. Mobile-First Audit
Since half of all website traffic comes from mobile devices, we ensure yours operates perfectly on popular browsers on commonly used mobile devices.

9. Business Strategy Audit

A company can neither fulfill its mission nor grow without money. A website should protect your core business, and liberate new prosperity by expanding into new markets/segments with new or existing products. It ought to foster selling higher-margin products and services to strategic buyers while not alienating tactical buyers. We look for all this during our audit.

10. Human Centricity Audit

Too many manufacturers fall into the trap of focusing only on products and technologies. To manage their risk, buyers are also buying people’s expertise and the rational processes they follow.

Armed with the audit, manufacturing and industrial company marketers can decide if they should simply streamline their current website or redesign a new one.

If you are a busy manufacturing company marketer seeking a smart manufacturing marketing agency which can use its expertise to help you join the elite group of manufacturers growing their company’s share of mind, voice and market, please contact us.