A good website review will not only improve your SEO but it will also give you the answers to the most critical questions that you may have.
What is a Website Review?
A website review is a process that helps you check your website’s performance against a number of parameters. A website review covers additional areas which span beyond classic SEO reviews like advanced SEO techniques, social media, content marketing, usability and conversions.
Why Do You Need a Website Review?
Here are some reasons why you may probably need a website review:
- When you want to improve your Google rankings.
- When you already have enough traffic to your website but no conversions.
- If you develop your website or when you hire a designer/developer to create a new website for you. Also when you buy a ready-made theme.
- If you want to get more targeted traffic to your website.
- In a situation when you suddenly lost your traffic because of a Google penalty and need to know why and how to recover.
- In a situation where you want to make more sales from your e-commerce store.
- When you want to get better results to compensate for your blogging efforts.
- In case you have not done a website review before and you want to ensure that your web property is running optimized.
- If you want to know what other channels you can use in getting more traffic and exposure for your website.
How to Do a Website Review
- Start by visiting the website you are reviewing. Look at a good number of the pages of the website that you are reviewing. Alternatively, you can sign up for a free membership or trial demonstration to understand the functionality of the site. Understand if the site lives up to what the designer says the website can do. You also have to try to learn about the purpose of the site and if those functions can be completed with the current design of the site. This will enable you to make a fair review.
- You can think of ways of making the site better. You have to determine if the site is user-friendly or needs technical knowledge in a bid to use the site. In your review, you may have to include your suggestions. However, it is important to focus on what the site does as well as how easy or hard it is on the user.
- Look for potential problems affecting the site. If there’s any, when reviewing the site, you should try to remain unbiased as possible. This is because if you only write reviews about sites that you like, your audience will not appreciate that you only talk about the positive aspects.
- Try not to be over-critical, rather challenge the usability and functionality of the site. These criticisms are what make web designers better and enable websites to solve issues that come up in early startups.
- Then notify your audience of the main functions of the website. This will give readers a brief overview of what the website can do without too much technical data. If any problems occur while you are testing the site, then you should address them in your review. What you should never assume is that because you had an issue with something that every other person will. Finally, if you have been to similar websites, then you should state the similarities and express how you think the two websites compare to each other. Also, note that including a comparison will often make or break if someone is going to visit the website at all. As such, you should try not to talk about how superior another website is if you’re trying to encourage people to visit the website which is being reviewed.