The more interesting points to come out of 10 Site Audits

A number of business owners sought assistance in determining just how well designed their websites really were and why they failed to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Though not an exhaustive list this does show up the more common shortcoming in many of the sites reviewed and are common problems with many websites.

The preliminary audit conducted examined only the home page for each of the sites and looked at the page from two perspectives:
a) The quality of site design by way of layout and compliance to good presentation standards for maintaining visitor interest
b) The degree to which the site was optimised around some base criteria being quality of the meta tags, effective use of keywords, site popularity in the search engine indexes.

By way of background to the businesses concerned, they all had been in business for several years at least and each of them, bar one, had a website that was more then 1 year old. The businesses were a mix of distribution, retailers and service based businesses with annual turnovers from in excess of $150K to $1M. All were for small to medium sized businesses privately owned.

The key observations that came out of the exercise were:

• Most offered little more than a “brochure” site that told you about the company, its products / services and the people. Very few actually articulated and achieved any real purpose by way of building business growth.
• Most failed to have any mechanism for capturing details of their visitors into some form of customer contacts database for later follow up.
• Listing of the websites in the leading business directories such as Google Maps, Yahoo or DMOZ was virtually non-existent.
• One site owner had spent almost my years salary on his website by an overseas developer only to realise that his whole site was written in Flash and can not be found in the search engines at all (He had no other sites in place to capture traffic to be redirected to his main site). This site also took almost 2 minutes to load the front banner page over broadband connection and to then find I had to click to load the next flash page.
• No site listed in the first 2 pages of Google for their key search phrases.
• Apart from one site all had very poor links to their home page form other sites and the links they did have were from pages with a PR score of 0.
• Only 1 site had implemented Google Analytics or any other traffic analytic tool for measuring traffic.
• 2 sites made no use of meta tags at all.
• Use of keywords was poor with most using the same keywords throughout their site. A couple of sites had long lists of keywords that were not referenced at all in the page.
• Most had content that was too long and failed to focus on the value proposition that the business offered to its market.
• No one proactively had any strategy for the optimisation or promotion of their website.

The above is as I said not an exhaustive list. It does however show that of the small sample (be it biased I know) businesses have not come to realise how important marketing of their website is to their business and the opportunity that exists for them should they so choose to take this up. To my own satisfaction one has already made the first step and a couple of others are still considering my proposal to correct their current situation.

What appears obvious from these results and anecdotal evidence I have seen is that most small to medium businesses have a website that they do little or nothing with by way of actively optimising it to gain high ranking on the search engines. This is in spite of the fact that they have invested considerably in the development of their site and the ongoing hosting and maintenance fees. Whatever results they achieve from search engine queries is more by luck than good planning.

For any business that seriously embraces their website as a core part of their overall marketing strategy is bound to improve on their position over their competition. With 93% of Australians using Google  regularly the importance of having a good website that delivers to business outcomes as well as marketing the business’ products becomes even stronger than ever.