LOCAL MARKET MONOPOLY EPISODE 78
How to Audit Your Small Business’s Website and Why It Matters
Podcast by Clarence Fisher
small business website

About This Episode

Are you struggling to get the leads you need from your small business website?

You're definitely not alone.

Lots of small businesses face this challenge when it comes to their online presence.

That's why in this episode, we'll talk about how to audit your website and why it's so important.

I'll share some really helpful insights on the most critical elements of a website audit, the best tools to use, and how to make changes that really work.

You'll also learn why website performance, user experience, and search engine optimization (SEO) are all key to your business's success online.

If you're a small business owner looking to improve your website's performance and drive more traffic to your site, you won't want to miss this episode.

Listen now!

Disclaimer: The transcription below is provided for your convenience. Please excuse any mistakes that the automated service made in translation.

Clarence Fisher: Have you subscribed to the local Market Monopoly newsletter yet? Each week you get one actionable digital marketing tip delivered straight to your inbox. Designed specifically for small businesses like you who want to increase their market share and grow their online presence. Each tip focuses on strategies for growing your online reputation, increasing your company's reach, and improving sales and referrals without wasting money on ineffective tactics. Sign up now at localmarketmonopoly.com and start receiving our best of the best strategies immediately.
Hey, welcome back to Local Market Monopoly. It's Clarence Fisher, your host. Here we are episode 78, and last week we talked about creating a high converting homepage, getting your homepage to convert more, and then we got questions about, well, how do we audit the rest of the site to make sure that the rest of the site is alright in doing its job? So that's what we're going to cover today. We're going to talk about, we're going to discuss under how to understand the website audits, what are these website audits, and then how do you audit your website to make sure that it is converting as many people as possible, as many of the visitors as possible so that you can grow your business and own the block?

Intro: You're listening to local market Monopoly with Clarence Fisher uncovering the tools, tactics and strategies. The most successful small businesses used to dominate their local market and own the block.

Clarence Fisher: All right, here we go. So if you did not check out the last episode, which was high converting homepage hacks, love that, love that headline, high, high converting homepage hacks that turn a more visitors into loyal customers, clients, or patients. Go check that out. We'll also put a link in the show notes or yeah, in the show notes today we're going to talk about the website audit. So what was it? It's localmarketmonopoly.com/ask, or you can just go to the website and click the button that says Ask, and you can leave us a voicemail and about your question and we'll get your question on the air. This particular question came and it's like, Hey, do not put my voice on air. You can do that too. Hey, you can do that too. If you're on the newsletter, reply to the newsletter and we'll answer that too.
All kind of ways that you can get us here. All right, so website audits. What are they? So before we go into how to do it, just want to let you know so that you understand what a website audit actually is. What the audit does is it allows you to evaluate all of the content on your website and then all the technical elements of your website that Google and all these search engines are looking for. So depending on your goals, the audit may reveal that you have some weak spots in either security or a lot of times conversion for conversion optimization or SEO. So we're going to go over some of the major points, and of course, we're not going to, we can't go over every single part of the audit. If you, I'll tell you what, if you want us to work with you or your head of marketing through this, you can go to mainstreetmarketingcoach.com.
We have these weekly marketing meetings where I'm working with your head of marketing to get all of this stuff taken care of. So that is one way that you can get it taken care of, but I'm going to walk you through this right now. The very first thing that you want to audit is look at the navigation on your website. The navigation should be, I mean, your website should be easy to navigate. If you have, you know, got 10 tabs and then you've got 30 dropdowns and all that, what can you possibly combine so that a person can get to the information they want in fewer clicks? And then also your navigation.
It should shrink or expand depending on what type of device that a person is looking on. If someone goes to your website and they're on mobile and your navigation drops to, ah, I'll say this. Let me say this. If you're looking at it on desktop or a laptop and your navigation is double lined, you have two rows of navigation, that's not really great. Let's keep one row navigation on the dropdowns. I can't give you a number of what looks great, but what looks like too many dropdowns. If you look through the rose colored, not the rose color, we have rose colored glasses where we're looking at our stuff, but look through the cheap sunglasses, the cheap glasses of your customer, your client, your patient, and they're looking at your website. Is it really easy to navigate? If not, change it. Be honest with it.
Have someone else look at it, and if they're like, I would leave this because there's too much information to look at. I don't know where I'm going. Change that. Now we want to look at the speed. You can go to Google and type in Google speed. Is it Google speed? Let me go and do this here. Why am I drawing a blank? Google? I'm going to Google speed test, and you can run a speed test here for your website and see how fast your website is. Now let me give you this bit of goodness. You know what I would really like you to do though is go to GT Metrics. Yeah. Now Google is Google, so do that there. But then also go to GT Metrics. We'll put a link in the show notes, gtmetrics.com and run a website performance test right here. When you enter it, this is free.
When you enter your website URL, what GT Metrics is going to do is not only give you your websites speed compared to other websites, but it's also going to give you some of the technical things to help speed up your website. And you can take that report and you can send that to your web person and say, Hey, are there any of these things that we can take care of, that you can take care of in order for us to speed up our website? But what I was going to tell you earlier is do not be alarmed if your mobile website speed is very low. When we do website audits, 9 times out of 10, the mobile website speed is low and there's not a whole bunch you can do about it because websites are just so heavy now. The images are heavy, the code is heavy, all this stuff is heavy.
You're going to be okay. Your main thing is to make sure that the laptop and desktop speed is high. And I know you're like, Clarence, most traffic is mobile now. I get it. I get it, I get it. I'm just telling you, you can still have a profitable multimillion-dollar business with slower website speed than you have on desktop speed. So just don't be alarmed, but go to GT metrics, get the report to see what you can fix. And then next, we want to look at the SEO elements of your site. Now this, for the SEO audit, you may want to call your web person and say, Hey, let's run an audit on seo. Whatever softwares you're using, most of the softwares that agencies are using are paid softwares that will show you kind of the technical SEO, like what's wrong with the technical part of the SEO.
But what I'm going to share with you right now, what you can do software or not, is you can look at the content number one and make sure that each page that you have is talking about every page on your website addresses one, at least one main keyword. And please make sure that if, let's say you're a staffing company in Tulsa, please make sure you do not have paragraphs of staffing company, Tulsa, Tulsa Staffing Company, Tulsa Staffing Company, Tulsa, Tulsa, Tulsa Staffing Company, Tulsa, Tulsa. Please make sure that does not exist, okay? You want to have good content. You want to make sure that each page has at least 500 words in order to rank well now mean right now, if you really want to from really being truthful with you, you'd like to have a thousand words on pages that you really want to rank.
Google doesn't rank websites per se. They rank pages. So if, this is why I told you that you want to make sure that each page is centered around one keyword on the advanced seo, people will have, okay, hey, this is our main keyword, but then we have two other keywords kind of embedded in here that we're trying to rank for, but you want to at least have one main keyword or keyword phrase that this entire page is about, and you want to have at least 500 words on that page, and preferably if you can afford it up to a thousand words per page that you really, really want to want to rank for.
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Now, if you have some software, let me just give you a software recommendation here. You could do BrightLocal is one good one that agencies use then, and then they can give you a competitor analysis, give you the SEO analysis content, all of that stuff. Your person can actually do an audit on that for sure, which brings me to, do you want to do this in-house or can give you an audit on that for sure, which brings up whether you want to even do the audit in-house or third party. I gave you the Mainstream Marketing coach option. If Tulsa, you want to Tulsa, I'm going to do an audit, we can do that as well. Let's put the link to our audit in there as well. But as often as I possibly can, I want to give you the power to do the things yourself, but you want to look at these things as much as every six months because things change, things get broken.
Sometimes you have links on your website that don't work. You need to be improve your site performance. Maybe a competitor has come into the market, which we have seen right now with one of our clients. We've got a competitor that has definitely hired someone, and then they are all of a sudden everywhere, which is really crazy when this happens. All right, now, check this out. So many people think that your agency has us on a, they've got autopilot. I hear that a lot from service folks. If you're in a service business, I am not hating on you. I'm just saying, a lot of our service clients tend to feel like their campaigns are on autopilot. I promise you, 1000%, whether you're working with us or somebody else, your campaigns are not on autopilot. There are, there's so much that goes on behind the scenes so that it can appear that things are taken care of.
But believe me, it is crazy behind the scenes, which brings me to what I'm saying especially when someone comes into the market and then all of a sudden you can tell they've hired somebody, you do a backlink check and they've got all of a sudden 20,000 backlinks, which it's going to give them some short-term gain for sure, but you're like, okay, is this true? And then you start seeing banners everywhere and it's just like, oh boy, they've hired somebody. We've got a new competitor. It fires us up, and I'm sure the people that are working for you, it fires them up. You don't even have to say anything. What they need for from you. We just did an audit for someone who was a former client, a former client that came back and asked us to do an audit, to audit their existing SEO person because they don't feel like it's on autopilot.
And so we do the audit, and I'm like, all of the technical stuff is, as much as you don't want to say, Hey, your new person is rocking it, they are. So I'm like, dude, this, I don't see, when I run audits, I don't see things done this well. I don't see this much green, but I got to tell 'em what they need from you right now is to just calm down and ride with it. Because I guarantee behind the scenes, they're like, we're doing everything. What the heck is happening? What's happening? It's Google. We're fighting Google. They're just love hate relationship where Google says, this is what works. But does it really? I mean, it's like it's a third party, and you have to understand that we can be doing everything. They could be doing everything as was verified by my own audit and yet not getting the result.
So I guarantee you they're trying to figure it out. Give them some grace. Okay? Alrighty. Sorry, I got excited about that because that one touch, touch home. But you want to do these audits every six months so that you can improve the site performance, you can improve your search rankings, and you can spot issues early. And actually the audit improves your online reputation as well. So just to kind of recap, really, basically what you want to look at, you want to look at your navigation, make sure that the website is easily navigated. People can get to where they need to get quickly. That way they don't leave. Check your website speed. I would recommend go to GT metrics, put it in there. But you can also go to Google site speed, and if it's just pull up Google and then type in Google's site speed, then you can use theirs to just kind of see what Google is saying.
I kind of trust Google, but don't. And I'm sure if you've dealt with Google long enough, you have the same feeling. We get what they're telling us, but we got to kind of watch what they're showing and what they're doing. I see your mouth moving, but I'm trying to watch your hands and you have to, and so check your SEO. Check your content and your competitor analysis mean, look, if you have the softwares, you can look and see what your competitors are doing, but you can just pull up Google and see what your competitors are doing on Google Business profile. Make sure that you're in the same category as the top person. If the top person is, if the top person is listed as a chiropractor, make sure that you're listed as chiropractor. How many images do they have there? How many images do you have?
What else do we have? How many reviews do they have? How many reviews do you have? We have to take this stuff really, really, really seriously. So every six months, audit your website at very least every year. Audit your website. If you have someone that you're working with audit, I mean, have them audit. And you guys sit down and go over it. Okay, there we go, guys. Go over it. Bottom line, auditing your website will make sure that you're reaching your goals from SEO to delivering a great visitor experience. Just make sure you're doing it regularly. If this episode has improved your life by at least 0.5%, would you share it? Send it over to a buddy friend of yours, tag us, Clarence Fisher, hashtag Local Market Monopoly, and I'm going to see you in the very next episode where I'm going to help you own your block.

Closing: We appreciate you listening to Local Market Monopoly. Be sure to rate, review and subscribe to the show and visit localmarketmonopoly.com for more resources that will help you dominate your local markets and own the block.

Resources

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