What Every Entrepreneur Should Audit Before Investing in More Marketing
Ready to throw more money at marketing before auditing the website? It's like pouring water into a leaky bucket and wondering why it never fills up.
Before you spend another dime on ads, content, or marketing campaigns – there is one thing you should do first. A website SEO performance audit. Sounds fancy/scary. Doesn't have to be. This could be the single most valuable exercise any entrepreneur undertakes before scaling their marketing budget.
Here's What You'll Learn:
Why throwing more marketing won't always lead to more growth
What website SEO performance actually means
The 5-Point Pre-Marketing Audit checklist
What to do with your findings
Why Throwing More Marketing Won't Always Lead to More Growth
Traffic slows to a trickle. It's the worst feeling as a business owner. You build up momentum and want more. Your gut tells you there's only one way to fix it – SPEND MORE.
Digging deeper always reveals the same issue. Whether sales, traffic or leads – there comes a point when more money just isn't the answer.
Here's the issue:
More money spent driving traffic to a poor website will never increase leads. It will just burn cash.
Ready for a crazy stat?
Around 94% of all webpages receive zero traffic from Google whatsoever. None. Zilch. Nada. If that doesn't scream at entrepreneurs where they should be looking before throwing money at more marketing, nothing will.
Oh – it gets better.
61% of small businesses aren't currently investing in SEO right now. That means for the majority of local businesses – they pretty much don't exist to customers searching online for what they offer.
Throwing more money at ads can't fix your visibility problem. Only an audit of website SEO performance can.
What The Heck Is Website SEO Performance Anyway?
SEO website performance is how optimized your website is to rank on search engines and convert visitors into customers.
It includes things like technical health, on-page SEO elements, content quality, speed, and user experience. Treat this as a website health check-up -- one that diagnoses current wins, deficiencies and anything sabotaging rankings on a daily basis.
But wait...
Awesome website design NH actually plays a direct role in website SEO performance. Search engines grade EVERYTHING from the quality of UX to product page copy. A poorly designed site that's slow to load will tank your rankings no matter how nice your marketing pieces look around it.
Website SEO Performance Factors Into Google's Rankings
Yep. Big time.
Don't expect to throw unlimited money at Facebook ads if your website won't rank on Google. You'd be setting your business up to run as fast as you can with a brick tied to your foot.
Time to audit.
The 5-Point Pre-Marketing Audit You Need To Run
This doesn't have to be complex. Stay focused on these five main facets of the website and you'll identify enough problems to keep your marketing budget stuck here… fixing.
Let's dig in.
1. Technical SEO Health
The biggest culprit when it comes to what website entrepreneurs ignore at their peril.
Technical SEO tells search engines how to find your website, crawl it, and add it to their giant index. Ignore this part and rankings will suffer for it.
Here's what to review:
Page speed – slow pages equal slow rankings and slow conversions
Mobile friendliness – Google uses mobile-first indexing for all new websites
Core Web Vitals – Only 54.6% of websites pass all tests
Broken links – they waste crawl budget and annoy visitors
XML sitemap – did you know ~15% of sites have no sitemap at all?
Fix whatever is broken RIGHT NOW. Don't even think about anything else until this is done.
2. On-Page SEO
Alright – the site can be found. Now let's make sure Google knows what each page is about.
On-page SEO focuses on optimizing individual pages around specific keywords. Yes, keywords. Every page should have a target keyword and include those terms in clever ways throughout the copy. Title tags, H1 headers, meta descriptions, and naturally within content. Simple, right?
Well, analytics show 50% of websites have duplicate meta descriptions on multiple pages. Google loves when you make it harder to know what your page does.
Okay – here's your on-page audit checklist:
Weak, missing or duplicate title tags not including a keyword
Pages lack a clear target keyword (read: service or product you're selling)
Thin content with fewer words than competing pages
Lack of internal links to other parts of the site
Fluffy pages that aren't focused on ranking for one primary keyword are annoying Google (and patrons) at every opportunity.
3. Website Design and User Experience
Okay, this will seem like common sense to most…but Google cares deeply about how visitors use your website.
They land, do what they need to do, and bounce. Bouncing is bad. They land, stay a while and interact with multiple pages. THIS is a good signal Google chases.
Make sure to look at these areas during your website SEO performance audit:
Easy to navigate menu. Can visitors easily find what they need?
Clear calls-to-action on every page. (no scrolling necessary)
Professional looking design that's easy on the eyes. (and up-to-date)
Mobile experience is just as good as desktop. (hint: it should be better)
An outdated site that looks like it was built a decade ago will drive visitors away. Sort this out. It's holding your site hostage.
4. Content Quality
Wait, content is still king?
Yes. And no.
You're not adding value by filling empty web pages with lorem ipsum text.
The biggest issue most sites struggle with isn't a lack of content. It's poor, thin or outdated content they've been living with for years. Grab a checklist and dig into these issues next:
Content so short you'd be embarrassed to show it to your competition
Landing pages lacking images/videos to break-up giant walls of text
Web pages with zero headings making them impossible to skim
Remember, update and improve current content before blasting out new pages left and right.
5. Backlink Profile
Search engines still LOVE websites with tons of links from real places on the internet.
Before you go wild connecting your website to every Tom, Nick, and Harry on the web – know what you already have pointing at your site.
Few tools can help you see your backlink profile better than Ahrefs or SEMRush. These are two examples of what to look for:
How many backlinks does your site currently have?
Are there any links from low-quality or spammy websites?
Which pages receive the most backlinks? Any receiving zero?
A website with a healthy backlink profile will lift rankings across the board. A bad one is like quicksand slowly dragging everything down.
Now what?
Getting any website ready to rock takes work. But the money you spend fixing these issues will pay dividends.
Like seriously, big profits.
Asking how long it'll take? That depends on the site. But like anything else in business, you don't have to dig too deep to realize the areas needing fixing most.
Here's a refresher on what areas to audit before going crazy with marketing campaigns:
Technical SEO factors
On-page optimisation
Website design and UX
Content quality
Backlink profile
Work through each of these items before you write another check for ads. The website is your engine. Marketing is your fuel. Fill your tank before you wreck the engine trying to drive faster.