Optimizing Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool

Too many organizations spend too little time focusing on their single most important marketing communications tool—their website. A smart, focused audit can be the answer, identifying low-cost, high-impact opportunities for improvements.

Your website is a marketing communications asset of unsurpassed importance. Yet it can be easy to fall behind in keeping your site as fresh and powerful as it should be. You may fear that once you start thinking about opportunities for upgrades, the list of things to do and people to involve will begin to grow. And—particularly in the stressful whirlwind of 2020—there are always other priorities to attend to.

At Kelsh Wilson, we’ve found that a web audit can be a great way to focus attention where it needs to be and get the process started. The idea is to complete a systematic review of your site and develop a prioritized list of opportunities for improvement. If you then find you have time to make only some of those improvements, at least you know you are focusing on the right ones, and you have a rationale to explain your approach to stakeholders, if needed.

In some ways, the thinking that goes into an audit is like the planning that goes into rebuilding a site from scratch, just scaled to be faster and more manageable. However, the driving question is not “What would be the best of all possible websites to advance our marketing goals?” but rather “Given the site in place, what additions and tweaks would deliver the greatest added impact and the best ROI?”

To find the answer, we explore the site from several angles.

First, we do some scenario testing. We navigate through in the shoes of a visitor with a specific goal (for example, finding the softball schedule, planning a campus visit, making a gift). We want to make sure the site works for audience members with each of these goals—and that it’s working for you at the same time, positioning your organization to advantage. Taking test journeys is also a good way to identify improvements you can make to the naming and placement of links.

Second, we make some key comparisons. We think about the first impression visitors will take away from the website versus the first impression they’d get in person on, for instance, a campus tour. Is the site revealing your organization accurately and to best advantage? (This is one of the points in the process where having the fresh perspective of an outsider can help.) We also compare the site messaging with your most up-to-date branding strategy and the site design with your graphic standards. This may seem simple, but it’s common to discover gaps between the image an organization has decided to project and the one it’s actually presenting online. We also consider the site in the context of your other important communications to see whether they are working together consistently.

Finally, we do some imagining. We think about features that are not part of the site but could be. As in life, sometimes the greatest sins in the world of website development are those of omission. Video may be underutilized. Student work and voices may be missing. Or a really memorable presentation of your value proposition might never have been developed.

There’s more to the methodology than this quick overview can capture—from reviewing competitor sites to testing functionality on mobile devices to the detailed work of analyzing the costs and benefits of upgrade options in order to prioritize them.

However, the value of completing this process is simple and clear. By stepping back and evaluating your website in terms of the job you need it to do, you can find the best ways of helping it do that job more effectively.

At Kelsh Wilson, we’ve completed this process dozens of times with organizations large and small and always found it productive. Sometimes we confirm people’s suspicions concerning issues within a site. Sometimes we locate total blind spots. So far, what we have not encountered is a website so good it can’t be made better.