Website Audit Agency for Manufacturing and Industrial Companies

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 and industrial companies, we frequently perform website audits to help them develop a plan for improvement. Our website audit examines ten dimensions, from brand and buyer experience to business strategy, conversion and AI visibility:

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 matters to buyers, search engines and answer engines.

Great websites are intuitive, easy to use, readable and engender trust. Persistent navigation and prominent calls to action put 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 to give buyers the knowledge they need to find, compare and act while mitigating the risk of choosing your brand.

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

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. We evaluate the following content elements:

• Products and Services Pages: We audit to see if the website meets the needs of both strategic buyers and tactical buyers, answers technical questions, supports product comparison, helps find part numbers, showcases certifications, and offers prominent quote paths. We evaluate if products are easy to find through configurators, faceted product search, and auto-complete site search. 
• Custom Solutions Pages: We evaluate whether custom solutions pages illustrate the custom process.
• Markets Served Pages: We ensure that markets served pages are persuasive and thorough.
• Project Galleries and Case Studies Pages: We audit the project galleries and case studies as proof points of the brand promise.
• Blogs: Since blogs are powerful engines of search and AI visibility, we evaluate their name, purpose, categories and tags nomenclature, content and content structure.
• International 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 solving a problem 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/GEO/AIO Audit
We evaluate SEO, GEO and AIO across six dimensions:

• 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 whether it meets WCAG 2.2 accessibility standards 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 websites 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 are properly implemented to facilitate content sharing and control how pages are represented when shared.
• Location Factors Audit – We ensure that location signals are embedded for the geographies the manufacturer serves or wishes to serve.
• GEO/AIO Factors Audit – We evaluate how well the website’s content – products, services, applications, industries served, specifications, facilities, experts – and technical foundations can be understood, discovered, retrieved and represented by AI-powered search and answer engines. We look at structured data, entity clarity, topical authority, factual consistency, original research, quotations, statistics, content comprehensibility and other factors that can influence how a company is discovered and represented in AI-generated answers.

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 generation and e-commerce orders. We ensure that users are not only able to sign up for newsletters and webinars, but are able to access thought-leadership content. 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 serves 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
Because buyers increasingly research manufacturers on 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. Buyer 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. We look for evidence of expertise, quality, reliability, responsiveness and process throughout the website so buyers can feel confident choosing your company.

The audit gives manufacturing and industrial marketers a clear choice: streamline the website they have or make the case for a new one. It gives them a roadmap for turning their website into a growth engine.

If you are a busy manufacturing company marketer looking for a smart manufacturing marketing agency to grow your company’s share of mind, voice and market, let’s talk.