Website Audit Services

How is your website performing?

A comprehensive audit is an important first step in assessing your overall web presence. It’s like a health check-up for your website. NetGain’s web doctors probe beyond the immediate symptoms and assesses the health of your entire online performance, using a holistic approach. Our check-up will uncover the strengths and weaknesses in your current site. We’ll let you know what is healthy and recommend surgery for what isn’t.

Reasons to Audit:

  • Considering a new web project
  • Brand new site but no traffic
  • Established site that is slipping in the search rankings
  • Poor visitor engagement, abandoned shopping carts
  • Competitors are outranking you
  • Can’t fix something if you’re not sure what’s broken

First Step

We believe in empowering our customers to make sound decisions based on thorough research. As your strategic partners, our first step is to ask questions about your organization, industry and objectives before making any recommendations. Armed with this information we are in a much better position to make an assessment and prioritize specific steps for improvement.

Light Audit (Free)

Our free audit service focuses on 5 primary areas:

  • Design Principles
  • Technology and SEO
  • Keywords and Content
  • Search Performance
  • Social Signals

Full Audit (Paid)

Our paid service analyzes 5 additional areas:

  • Google Analytics Deep Dive
  • Citations and Backlink Profile
  • Competitive Rankings
  • Pay-per-Click Analysis
  • Keyword Rankings

Lite Website Audit (Free)

We’ll perform a thorough audit of your entire web presence. With an understanding of your goals and objectives, we’ll let you know what is working and what isn’t. You can expect us to report back to you with a list of written recommendations. Here is a sampling of performance metrics we appraise:

Analytics

For an existing website, there’s inherent advantage in leveraging your current Google Analytics data to analyze visitor flow. For example, once people land on your homepage, where do they travel next? What are your most popular pages? What pages do visitors spend the most time on? We can use this information to prioritize page placement within your site. Conversely, if users are ignoring certain pages, then consider consolidating them into a lower-level menu or abandoning them entirely.

Design Improvements

Our auditors will critique your overall web design and user experience. We’re grading each page on: ease of navigation, page layout, continuity, quality of images and iconography. We also judge the effectiveness of your calls-to-action and contact forms. Our team will check to see if you provided a compelling value statement and a unique selling proposition. Using conversion philosophy, we will evaluate whether your pages are designed to convert visitors into customers. For example, have you used social proof and trust badges? Are your images and icons appealing? Is your branding consistent?

Technology Audit

In addition to attractive design, your site needs to function flawlessly. Our experts will assess whether your site is up to the current level of technical standards. At a minimum, your site should be mobile-responsive and feature click-to-call functionality. We’ll check whether your web domain has been secured with an SSL Certificate. We will discover whether you are using structured data markup, like Schema. And we will review your URL structure and suggest improvements.

On-Page SEO

This is where careless developers often cut corners. We frequently discover missing or incomplete header tags, meta descriptions, alt attributes, title tags, 301 redirects, sitemap, robots.txt file. We’ll alert you to any shortcomings. As part of our analysis, we will also give you a score on domain authority.

Speed is another critical on-page factor. It’s no secret Google prefers pages that load quickly (in about 2-3 seconds). This is especially true for mobile pages. We run your homepage through a series of independent speed tests. Our report includes data on fully-loaded speed, homepage size, with a score out of 100. If there is something slowing down your page, we’ll find it and let you know what it is. Some speed enhancements are obvious and easy to fix such as enabling compression and optimizing images. Other speed factors are more technical in nature such as minification of JavaScript, CSS, HTML, prioritizing visible content and leveraging browser caching.

Keywords and Content Audit

Quality content has always been a dominant ranking factor in search engine results. Additionally, compelling copy plays a key role in visitor engagement and conversions. NetGain will review your top-level pages from a strategic perspective. We cross reference to ensure you have selected keywords that are aligned with actual search terms that people would use to find your product or service. We’re also checking for a steady stream of fresh, relevant content in the form of blogs, news updates, articles and white papers.

Search Performance

Do you have a beautiful website that no one can find? (Or an ugly website that no one wants to visit?) We will perform incognito searches for your products and services and determine how you rank in comparison with your competitors. We’ll evaluate the strength of your organic, natural ranking in search engine results pages. We’re also monitoring your position in Google’s map stack as well as ad placement.

Social Signals

Google factors social signals into its search algorithm and results. A strong social media following indicates your relevance and reputation as an industry leader. Are your followers engaging with your content? Do your posts convey the right tone? Have you selected the appropriate social platform to deliver your message? We will provide valuable feedback on your main social channels: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+. Since online reviews are increasingly important, we will be checking your social reviews on both Google and Facebook. You can expect advice on how best to handle reviews (both positive and negative).

Full Technical Audit (Paid)

In addition to all the elements of our free audit, we go into further depth with our comprehensive, paid service. This gives our forensic team a chance to dig deeper into the data and uncover trends that can make all the difference against a tough competitor.

Analytics Audit

Web analytics data is crucial for your SEO strategy. By interpreting this data, we can target your marketing efforts more effectively and improve your ROI. With temporary access to your Google Analytics account, we will perform a detailed overview of your web metrics. Google Analytics provides detailed information on website visitors: what pages they visited, behavior flow, how long the they stayed, how they were referred to you, their geographical area, and demographic profile. Additionally, NetGain will review how your tags, goals, filters and conversions are set-up in Google Analytics and make suggestions for a more meaningful configuration.

Backlink Audit

Backlinks are links that point to your website from other websites. They are like letters of recommendation for your site. Since this factor has a significant impact on SEO, you should have a strategy to improve both the quantity and quality of backlinks and citations.

We will assess your overall link health. We can show you the domain authority of your strongest and weakest backlinks. By assigning a “spam score” to each link, we can recommend which low-quality backlinks should be disavowed. During this process, we’ll also identify linking domains that have recently been discovered or lost.

Competition Audit

How do you stack up against your top 3 competitors? We will evaluate their online marketing strengths and weaknesses. We’ll see how you perform against them on specific keywords and search terms. We’ll show you where you overlap on keyword ranking and where you stand apart. We will report on your competitors’ link profiles and compare them to your own linking performance. Together, we’ll outline a plan to crush your competitors. It’s worth noting that we offer our SEO services on an exclusive basis, so you can lock out your competitors from using NetGain’s renowned SEO and digital advertising campaigns.

Online Advertising Audit

If applicable, we’ll investigate your Google Ads (pay-per-click) campaign to uncover opportunities for fine tuning. Many companies throw away money with improperly configured ad campaigns. Common mistakes include:

  • Not using a dedicated landing page
  • Not using call-tracking
  • Narrow keyword selection
  • Lack of negative keywords for exclusions
  • Not enabling day-parting
    Improper lead tracking

NetGain’s auditing service is a valuable tool to uncover hidden weaknesses in your digital marketing. If you are wondering why your competitors are performing better online, then ask our professionals to initiate a website audit. We will provide a list of actionable items in a written report. Call our office today for your free audit (705) 797-2455.