Overhaul Your Website in 2022: B2B Website Audit Checklist

New year, new goals. Welcome to 2022. Is your B2B website providing you a return on your investment? Is your search ranking encouraging new visitors to click through and spend time on your company site? What percentage of those new visitors are becoming clients? How does your company site add value to your brand? Though there is never a bad time to examine the answer to these questions, starting your business year with a set of goals aimed at upgrading, overhauling, and improving your B2B web presence is ideal and will help organize ticking the boxes on the B2B website audit checklist.

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Learn how GoingClear’s approach helps your B2B company to improve its web presence.

What Makes a Successful B2B Website?

A quick Google search on the question above yields over 270 million results, with commentary from every sphere. C-Suite executives, web designers, user experience developers, researchers, bloggers, analysts, and countless others all weigh in on what a modern B2B site must feature in order to be top-notch. It can be difficult to filter through all of those opinions. It is important to partner with experts who have real-world experience in delivering quality B2B content that meets the basic criteria for a business that is targeting other business entities as customers. The main objectives of a B2B website, though, include a few simple goals. A B2B website must include:

• The ability to generate traffic
• The ability to engage visitors
• The ability to convert visitors to customers

That’s it. While there is no “magic recipe” for success, highly effective B2B websites do share a number of features that help their organizations achieve business goals through impacting sales, advocacy, and lead generation. If recent analytics reporting makes it appear that your current website is not advancing these aims – or if you are part of a team that does not have a firm grasp on what analytics reporting means and how to convert the insights provided into actionable goals – it might be time to consider a website audit with an eye on a website overhaul – especially if certain website features are counterproductive.

Why Is a Website Audit Important for B2B Businesses?

It is likely that your B2B company has already invested significant resources into the current iteration of the company website. Considering a pivot, whether partial or total, can be intimidating for this reason. An overhaul, though, doesn’t mean dumping everything and starting from scratch.

Instead, B2B web design experts will analyze what is working and what isn’t. High-impact quality elements can be repositioned to improve performance. Portions that do not contribute to your B2B website goals can be filtered out. They can also transform to create a more effective tool for potential buyers of your B2B product or service. 

As the web has evolved, traditional B2B business models employing salespeople generating leads and scheduling demos have become less effective, A company’s number one sales tool is the public-facing website. This is where potential clients visit, research, and make a decision about whether to commit time and attention to a particular company in real-time. That real-time window is often brief. There are dozens of factors related to your B2B company website that can cause it to close prematurely. 

If you are offering fantastic content but cannot generate traffic or engage visitors for a long enough time for them to experience that content, then maintaining the site in its current form is a continual money sink. A B2B website either is or has the potential to be your company’s number one salesperson. Time and capital should be invested accordingly.

B2B Website Audit Checklist

A website audit can help identify the gaps in your content that are minimizing traffic, stalling engagement, or failing to convert visitors. Work can be done to improve or change tactics. A basic (though far from comprehensive) checklist should look like this:

• Analyze your website’s conversion rate: This requires a thorough grasp of what your analytics reports are communicating about user behavior on your site. Google Analytics measures the performance of your website by identifying which user segments are visiting your pages. In addition, how long they spend there and what percentage of those visitors convert into qualified leads
• Set conversion goals: If your conversion rate is not a profitable one then it’s time to set different goals. These goals should be ambitious, but also realistic
• Prioritize underperforming pages: if your homepage or your products and services page has a significantly lower conversion rate than other pieces of your web real estate, employ growth-driven design to overhaul these sections in a targeted way
• Organize your content by considering user experience: What questions are your visitors asking, and where can they find the information they need?
• Run User Experience (UX) tests and surveys to ensure that your interface isn’t frustrating your most desired customers. Use tools like HubSpot’s website grader to identify problems with site speed, mobile design rendering, and other issues that will frustrate users and send them off-site.
• Navigation is the backbone of your website and it highly impacts your search ranking. A B2B website’s main navigation area should include the most important SEO pages. These pages should link to related pages, and then close the loop by linking back to the “spine” of your website
• Analyze and refine: This step is never over. The metrics mentioned above drive traffic to your redesigned pages. Therefore, tracking changes in conversion rates, qualified leads, and cost per lead is the key performance indicator of your B2B website.

How to Get Started

At GoingClear, our audit team is a fresh set of eyes with expertise in finding answers to the most important website redesign questions: 

• Are you missing opportunities?
• Is anything unclear? 
• How could changes from the content and design make it better? 

A website overhaul will involve focusing on keywords and improving formatting for user consumption. In addition, ensuring a frustration-free clean, and simple flow that will impress and delight any visiting prospects. Contact the GoingClear team for a multidisciplinary approach that brings your B2B website to the next level.