Your website’s a pretty important tool for getting leads and customers through the proverbial door. A well-made website can help you attract total strangers online, move them through your sales funnel, and turn them into customers or even promoters of your brand.
In the past, we’ve talked a lot about things like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), creating great content, and other tactics for improving your website. However, before you go launching your new inbound or internet marketing strategy, let’s take a look at a few tools you can use to audit your website and improve your return on investment from it:
Tool #1: The HubSpot Marketing Grader
What it’s for:
The HubSpot Website Grader is a free tool that’s available to virtually anyone with a website and an email. This tool runs an automated assessment of your website based on numerous criteria, including:
- Website traffic/performance
- SEO metrics
- Mobile readiness
- Security (such as SSL provisioning)
How it Works:
Simply feed the Website Grader your company website and your email address, give it some time to analyze your website, and it will give you a score between 0 and 100 telling you how your website performs.
It also provides a breakdown of why your website has a particular score. This is great for finding out what your strong suits are on your website, and what needs improving.
Ideally, you want a website that ranks high (above 70). Of course, not every website actually achieves such high ratings out of the gate. If your website score is lower than 50, you know you need to fix a few things.
Tool #2: HotJar (or Another Heat Mapping Software)
What it’s for:
HotJar (and many other heat mapping software programs) allows users to put a tracking code on their website so they can see how people are actually interacting with their website. Some information that you could collect includes:
- Where people click on your website
- How far they scroll down each page
- Which pages get the most visits
- Where visitors exit the site
You could also collect a full recording of a specific user’s interaction with your website saved as a video.
Companies use this software to find out if they have confusing User Interface (UI) elements on their website that might be frustrating visitors, optimize website conversion paths, and to get some focus testing of website designs.
How it Works:
With HotJar specifically, users apply for the service and embed a special tracking code in their website which allows HotJar to start collecting use data.
After a sufficient number of users have gone through the site, you can log into HotJar and see the data they present. The most commonly-used feature is the heat map, which uses a colored filter similar to an infrared camera image to show you where people are clicking. Spots with only a few clicks are a dull blue, where spots with a lot of clicks get colored red.
Heat mapping software is becoming more and more popular as a tool for improving website design, and is frequently used in the Growth-Driven Design (GDD) method of website building. HotJar has both a free “Basic” plan that only tracks up to 2,000 visits per day, and premium plans for larger websites starting at $29/mo.
Tool #3: Google Search Console
Google’s tools seem to make these lists a lot. However, they’re also tools from the leading search engine provider, so leaving them out of these lists would be a bit odd.
What it’s for:
At it’s heart, Google Search Console helps users accomplish three key tasks:
- Analyze clicks from Google Search
- Find critical website errors and bugs
- Check if Google’s search engine can understand your content
These are all critical issues for someone looking to improve their website’s performance and ROI.
For example, with the Website report, you can analyze how your website ranks in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). Knowing if you have severe crawl errors can let you find and fix them so they’ll stop hurting your website’s ranking in SERPs. Finally, knowing if Google can even read your pages in the first place is kind of important.
How it Works:
Getting started is pretty simple, just log into your Google account, go to the search console home page (which I linked above), and add your website property in the text box next to the word “Website.”
Once you’ve done that, you can start accessing important reports regarding your website, such as which search queries are giving you the most website traffic. The best part is that this is a free service, so it costs you nothing but your time to use it.
Also, this service should not be confused with Google Analytics, which provides a different focus for analyzing traffic that is more concerned with external data rather than data about the site itself.
These are just a few of the tools that you can use to audit your website and improve your ROI from it. To learn more, check out some of our other resources today!
Douglas Phillips
Former military brat, graduated from Leilehua High School in Wahiawa, Hawaii in 2001. After earning my Bachelor's in English/Professional Writing, took on a job as a writer here at Bluleadz.