5 reasons you should be offering clients a website audit

As a web or digital consultant, you are in a unique position to be able to serve as a trusted advisor. This gives you an advantage over anyone who is just out to make a sale. Providing expert guidance should be at the core of your services and since making your customer’s website as efficient as it can be is the perfect way to help them reach their target audience and boost sales, you can use a free or paid web audit to give them real value that they will appreciate.

Your customers should probably expect to have to pay for a comprehensive audit report with actionable information on how to improve their site and grow their business, so don’t hesitate to charge for it. But if you want to go the extra mile and strengthen the relationship offer them the web audit for free, it will be a pleasant surprise!

While the point of a web audit is to help the customer improve their website, it has also proven to be an amazing lead generator. Who wouldn’t like to quadruple their website lead conversion rate? That is the kind of result audits bring in compared to conversions from lead magnets.

An audit delivers personalized information of direct impact and value to the prospect instead of generalized promises or a best practices PDF. Prospects who have requested an audit are also more likely to participate in a consultation since they now want to hear what you have to say about how you can help them.

An offer for a free website audit can easily be incorporated into your outbound email or phone campaign. That way you can offer a unique value proposition to your target audience instead of asking for their time so you can talk about your services.

If you do networking online or in person, or speak at local events a free website audit is a valuable giveaway that will definitely get prospects’ interest. It’s also a successful tool for building your list and a great complement to your social media campaigns.

When you perform a web audit, you not only tell a customer what your services are, but you are able to personalize your service offerings to directly address their unique needs. They don’t have to wonder if you really understand their business, or if what worked for your other clients will work for them. You are giving them actionable, personalized, prioritized and results-oriented solutions to their actual website problems, so they know you are the real deal.

Doing a website audit helps you to better understand your client’s website, but it helps you identify in a holistic manner what their needs are. This deeper understanding of their issues allows you to identify challenges and opportunities and prioritize them based on impact to the client vs. cost and complexity to implement them. Much of the time, when you discuss the results of the audit, you will be revealing problems they didn’t even know they had or telling them about opportunities they didn’t know existed. Both help to establish and position you as a subject area expert.

It is this combination of personalized, helpful information, and your clear presentation of it that builds trust and sets you apart from the competition. That’s what makes it convert so much better than a basic sales consultation—they see that you have already gone the extra mile and come prepared with an action plan to deliver results and grow their business.

A good web audit tool also makes it easy for you to prioritize the work that needs to be done. Some things have a high impact and low cost to implement, like trust factors and a visible phone number in the header, whereas others will be improvements to the site, but won’t necessarily have a short-term impact like keeping a website secure or optimizing their site for SEO. When a client doesn’t have a large budget to do everything, laying out priorities based on the ROI they may get or the resources it takes to implement helps to take a website project from being overwhelming to being a series of relatable steps that the client can plan and budget for. Ensuring you get your foot in the door and have the opportunity to show them you can deliver results.

You give the web audit for free, but it really is a revenue generator. For one thing, it’s a new service that gives you a reason to talk to clients. People are busy, but never too busy to learn about ways they can grow their business and generate more revenue. A well-positioned audit helps you do that to prospects and prospects alike.

When a business owner launches their website, they usually think that’s the end of it, but the truth is a website is a journey that lasts for as long as they are in business. The world of the internet changes constantly, and it’s important for businesses to stay relevant if they want to succeed online.

A targeted audit of their website lets them know immediately where their website is outdated and costing them business, and if you are right there, telling them what the problem is and what needs to be done to solve it, chances are they will hire you to do the work. In presenting the audit results, you have demonstrated that you not only are an expert in the field, but more importantly, that you are an expert on their particular situation.

Contact past clients for whom you designed and built websites to let them know what has happened since then. Likewise, current digital marketing customers need to be kept up to speed with the details of what’s big in SEO and recent advancements in web technologies. They need to know about new ways to grow their business online and how you can increase their return on investment (ROI).

Even if you designed a terrific website for a client three years ago, some of the ways you could improve the site now would include:

• SEO –Search engine algorithms to a point where they are so sophisticated that a website needs to be totally up to date to rank optimally. On-page SEO needs much more attention than in the past but will give your client’s website an immediate boost.
• Security – Website security is important for anyone but critical for businesses that sell directly from their websites. Upgrading their WordPress or Joomla platforms and plugins is a necessity.
• Performance – Improve user experience by implementing strategies to increase page load times.
• Conversion optimization – Add elements designed to build trust, such as awards, certifications, and testimonials. These simple additions make websites convert significantly better.

A web audit is a service to your customer, but it can be a powerfull marketing tool for your business as well. One way to use it is to offer it as a trip wire. You can include it in your marketing funnel as a low-barrier-to-entry productized service that gets them in the door for free, and then you can position your core services around their needs.

You can also use the audit to cross-sell services. A comprehensive audit offers an analysis of several key areas of web & digital marketing. Use it to educate the customer on what they need to fix on their website, and use the discussion to cross-sell your other services that could benefit their marketing efforts.

If you don’t offer all the services they could use, this is a great opportunity to find a white label company to help deliver the additional services, and you can present yourself as a solutions provider rather than only addressing one aspect of their web presence. This is a tactic that is successfully used by dominant vendors in the industry, who present themselves as the go-to full-service agency, but in actuality, they are contracting out some of the specialized work.

There are many benefits to doing a web audits for prospects as well as your existing customers. In addition to pinpointing the prospect or customer’s needs as described above, the detailed examination of their website engages them in a discussion of their overall business, which opens up opportunities to introduce additional services you offer.

Giving them solutions to their problems and delivering quality work builds the kind of trust that leads to long-term relationships, in which they will hire you over and over again as they need additional services. Another benefit for you is that becoming their go-to web professional resulting in more referral business.

Until now, creating website audits that business owners value and can understand has been a tedious, time-consuming and painful process. My Web Audit changes all of that. We’re revolutionizing the entire process, from creation to presentation and everything between. Our software helps you create high-value web audits that measure what matters to businesses, delighting them and helping you stand out from the crowd.