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How about a little bit of website housekeeping as we wrap up the year? Your website isn’t just a static business card; it’s a powerful tool for supporting your marketing goals. So as you evaluate the impact of your marketing projects for the year — and start planning your 2024 projects — be sure to include your company’s website in that review.
Here are 4 questions to guide your website review.
Start 2024 with good data.
GA4 is great, but there’s only so much insight it can give. To understand how users are interacting with your site (and where the hang ups might be), nothing beats a heat mapping and session replay tool.
Our go-to tool at Starling is Microsoft Clarity. It’s a free tool that collects user behavior like clicks, scrolls, and session recordings.
Looking for other heat mapping tools? Check out this article from Zapier.
Does your website copy accurately reflect your business’ current services or offerings? Or are you still marketing a service that your firm hasn’t offered since 2018? Review your site to ensure it aligns with your current offerings. If it doesn’t, time to hire the services of a conversion copywriter. (Yes, we offer conversion copywriter services at Starling.)
A lot of folks track web traffic to measure SEO efforts, but stop there. But are those users actually taking the right actions on your site? Or just hitting a keyword-heavy page for a few seconds before exiting?
If you don’t already track your site’s conversion rate, now is the time. To do this, you need a clear understanding of your site’s goals. Are you a CPA firm? Perhaps your site’s goal is to generate new client leads. A successful conversion, then, would be an inquiry form submission from a qualified prospect. Or do you want your site to attract new talent? A successful conversion would be a job application submission.
Once you establish your goal(s) and what counts as a conversion, you can calculate your conversion rate. See the formula below.
Conversion rate formula:
(Total number of conversions / total number of website visitors) x 100 = % conversion rate
You may remember that we wrote an article about website accessibility standards. ADA website compliance is often overlooked, but it is a legal requirement.
So how do you determine if your website is compliant? The Web Accessibility Initiative offers Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1), an international standard for accessibility that’s broken into three levels: A, AA, and AAA. The compliance level your website needs to meet is often dependent on industry. For example, our higher ed clients typically must meet at least level AA.
The easiest, most accurate way to determine if your website is ADA compliant: work with people like us who understand WCAG compliance levels. We can perform an accessibility audit on your site and offer a list of fixes needed. Take that list to your own internal dev team, or we’re happy to provide those updates for you.
Whether or not you work with us or another agency, I strongly suggest prioritizing website compliance as you wrap 2023 and start planning Q1 projects. Not only will it ensure legal compliance, it’s also just the right thing to do — creating an online space where folks of any ability can access your content.
(Since we’re talking about websites, something fun with ours: we’re launching a new one in December! 🎉 I’m excited for you to see it. We’ll share more when it’s live.)
Ally Willis is Co-Founder and Head of Strategy at Starling
With a background in conversion copywriting since 2017, she helps clients ask questions, analyze research, test theories, and dig through the results to create custom website optimization strategies.