Marketing Audits for Small Business Websites

Brett Johnson [: 00:00:10

Welcome to the Circle sessions featuring the Circle of Experts. The Circle of Experts are Yasmine Robles from Robles Designs, Tonnisha English Amamu of TJE Communications, and Don The Idea Guy. I'm Brett Johnson from Circle 270 Media Podcast Consultants. Well, each week, one of the Circle of Experts joins me to talk about critical aspects of growing your podcast. We focus on marketing, social media, monetization, and website design to help you implement all of these together. This week, Yasmine's here from this Circle of Experts. Yasmine works alongside clients to design a website that's driven by strategy, looks amazing, and that you can actually use to grow your podcast and then in turn your business as well. Yasmine, thanks for joining me today.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:00:54

Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Brett Johnson [: 00:00:56

So you wanted to talk a little bit about auditing your website. And I think it's a really good idea because, I mean, everything always evolves. There's always things that might need to be changed. So let's dive into marketing audits for the small business website. So, obviously, let's start simple. It's a good way to start a podcast. What's a marketing audit?

Yasmine Robles [: 00:01:20

So yeah. So, basically, a marketing audit is a health checkup for your business' marketing efforts. It's taking a deep dive into what's working, what's not working, and where you can improve. For small businesses and podcasters, this is really something that's important because your every dollar that you're spending, every ounce of energy that you're putting into it, you wanna make sure that it's going in the right direction. A few things to note, our marketing audits typically don't just look at the website though. They also look at what is happening throughout the entire ecosystem. That includes social media and email marketing, all the aspects of of basically that ecosystem of marketing just because you can build a great website, but if you don't do a lot of other marketing, it kind of slows down the growth. So we typically look at everything and see what's in the gap.

Brett Johnson [: 00:02:10

Gotcha. So, so let's talk about why should small businesses care about doing these audits. And I'm gonna put on regularly, you know, not just like once, and it's done. But but, again, I don't wanna say constantly, but on a regular pace.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:02:26

Yeah. So it's it's in order to stay competitive, for a small business and a podcaster. You know? Regular audits can help you understand your customers, market trends, and see if your your efforts are really hitting the mark. You can think of it as a yearly checkup. I know it will sometimes I miss mine, but, you're supposed to go see your doctor every year, see what what's going on, and see if there's any changes. I go to the dentist twice a year, so it's kind of these checkups to see if everything is working as it should and if your efforts are going in the right direction.

Brett Johnson [: 00:03:01

Alright. Talk about the, the main areas that a marketing audit should cover small for a small business website or, you know, a podcast website. Sometimes, I guess, you know, what comes to mind too is sometimes is it depends on how we use our website. Sometimes, we don't even look at our website ourselves for weeks on end because it's maybe it's not economic ecommerce driven. So this is a good way to actually get you back on your website going, oh, wow. That's really old. I don't do that anymore or, you know, those pieces to it. So what what are the areas that you do take a look at then?

Yasmine Robles [: 00:03:36

Yeah. So we look at SEO performance, is one of them, and SEO is always a hot topic. But, really, how are you ranking on Google and how how do you appear to Google and Bing and all the other platforms? That includes domain authorities. Basically, what that means is how much oomph do you have against all of the other websites. And depending on the metric that you're using or the tool, it can go from 0 to a100, a100 being the best, And where do you land, on that domain authority? And where do you where do your competitors land? How do you compare to them? So keywords or pre phrases that you're coming up for currently. So what we tend to look at is a lot of people come up for their own brand names. So we're currently doing a one of the small suburbs of, Columbus where we're doing their website, and they they keep coming up for their own name. But if they were thinking out a little bit outside the box, they could start coming up out for, things like the parks that are nearby, those sorts of keywords that people might be looking for.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:04:40

Mhmm. The speed of the website and accessibility of the website. And I know we've talked a lot about these topics, in other episodes, so everyone can, like, browse through those when we dive a little deeper into them. Content quality is also something that, is very, very important, and is it engaging? Is it relevant to the user that you're targeting? There are many techniques. There's much that we could dive into when it comes to quality of content, but, ideally, just remember that you create content for your site, and this means all of the written content on your site. Something you created that it is valuable, and it is something that people want to read and just inspires them to continue to stay on the website. User experience. Is your site really easy and enjoyable to use? And this can be come back to accessibility and really what accessibility is.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:05:31

You can take, listen in on the previous episodes about that. But, basically, is it for check it check your site for color blind issues. Is it easy to tab through for people that can't use a mouse? Is the content the color contrast between the text and the background sufficient for people with, sight disabilities? Is the content really organized so that if I am let's say I'm a resident of an apartment building and I'm looking for all of the amenities list, can I easily find that on the website? And then really knowing what your audience and what they're looking for because if you don't if my the pages that I'm looking for aren't readily available, I'm probably gonna go to your competitor. Social media integration. So really how well do you use social media channels on your website? And not just on your website, but how do you how do you lead them to the site. Right? So your social media is important because it takes people to your website, and then from there, you hopefully get them onto your email list. And, really, what's the strategy behind every post? Is there a call to action? Are you using the right content? For example, video tends to perform better than static posts. Are you on the right platform, or are you, interacting with other accounts? And how is that comparing to your competitors? And conversion rates, are you creating once people get onto the website, are you actually turning those people, those users into paying customers? What is that conversion rate, and how can we increase it?

Brett Johnson [: 00:07:02

Alright.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:07:02

That was a lot.

Brett Johnson [: 00:07:03

Yeah. Yeah. I was just gonna ask. So it sounds as though you got these 5 areas that you talked about. It looks as though before the marketing audit, you're probably gonna have a conversation with that, client about what their expectations are, have been, and what they want them to be after the audit? You know, the look kinda maybe look at specific results from that audit to to improve upon?

Yasmine Robles [: 00:07:25

Yeah. So we're usually, the call is about 90 minutes. So it's a pretty long call. There's a worksheet before we even do that, but there's it's a it's the one of the most important calls. So we will ask you questions about your ROI. If you have an ecom site, it's how much money are you are you obtaining from, from certain products. If you have a podcast, what's your most popular podcast episode? Mhmm. And is that the case with the podcast episode page or transcript page on the website? So how did all these things correlate? And then, really, what is your goal as the website as the the business owner? Right? So if your goal is to if you're just starting out and we're doing a website audit for you or a marketing audit, and you say, you know what? I just kind of wanna increase my my listenership by just 5% for the rest of the year.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:08:17

Like, I I it's not a big I'm not gonna triple it or anything. I just kinda wanna go 5% more. Then we know your goal, and we can make those suggestions based on your goal.

Brett Johnson [: 00:08:28

Right. And and a bigger picture of, okay, little piece here of the website, little piece here of this, little piece here of that. Yeah. It makes a big difference. It makes sense. Yeah. So what kind of tools and techniques do you use for those audits then?

Yasmine Robles [: 00:08:41

Yeah. So we use a couple of tools. I'm gonna run through some paid and some free tools that you can use. Google Analytics, soup it's free. You can install it on any of your sites, Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Analytics is used to track the traffic, while Search Console, we use to track things like the accessibility and keywords that you might be coming up for. Mhmm. One that I I didn't jot down in my notes is Google Ads.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:09:07

Google, I think yeah. Google Ads. You create a free account, and then you cancel that ad. I think they still force you to create an ad, but you immediately cancel it. And then you go use their keyword planner tool, and you type in keywords that you believe your audience is looking for, and it'll tell you our how many searches per month, what's the location, how hard is it to compete, so you can really get a good idea of where you wanna go. Those are free. There's other ones, Semrush or SEMrush. That one I think gives a free 7 day trial, But if you have 7 days and you wanna take a deep dive into all of the nerdy numbers for the website and all of the keywords, that's a great one.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:09:48

Ahrefs is a nice one. It's a competitor to Sunrush, and spyfu, spyfu.com. It offers, I think, a couple of free searches. And all of these, you can also well, Semrush 8 a h refs and spy you can actually put your competitors in there and see how these tools think that your competitors rank. And it's sometimes really eye opening, and it'll make you feel a lot better about yourself sometimes when you put in, you know, a competitor that you see locally or another podcaster that is kind of a friend, but maybe also podcasting about the same topic.

Brett Johnson [: 00:10:22

Mhmm.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:10:23

And you're like, okay. I'm not I'm not doing that bad. So those are good tools. User feedback. Get if you currently have users coming to your site, you can try a little pop up as long as it's not a nuisance. A little pop up asking them to take a survey. If you're on a podcast, you can say go to, you know, website domain.com/survey and take the survey, suggest topics. Just give the chance to your users to provide feedback.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:10:52

And then heat mapping tools. And what heat map is, if you think of a storm, one of those maps of, where the store they're they're tracking the storm and the harder or more horrible the storm is, the hotter the color gets, That's kind of a heat map, but it's for your website. And and you can do it for email marketing as well where you can see how far people are scrolling. You can see what they were clicking on the most or hovering over. So that tool is called Hotjar, and I believe they do have a free trial.

Brett Johnson [: 00:11:25

Yeah. If you've ever, used I don't know if all email newsletter platforms have this, but I think it's really cool in the vein of the heat maps of looking at the percentages of a newsletter where people click on and what they're doing. Mhmm. That that is so cool to kinda see that. Oh, wow. That really worked, or maybe it's just a one line of, a mystery line of some kind. Just kinda piqued somebody's interest, and and you have a high click rate on it. It's just it's really interesting to see that in how your end users use your newsletter.

Brett Johnson [: 00:11:57

So, again, it's the same concept of looking at how are they using your

Yasmine Robles [: 00:12:02

site. Yeah. Yeah. And it's super okay. So heat maps, I sorry. I'm gonna nerd out for a little time. So I know that small business owners, we can see let's say I give you this entire marketing audit and I we provide you so we provide you with a plan of action for after you get the you you get to see what's going on, and then you get a kind of action of how to fix everything. But let's say you just get a marketing audit and you see all of these holes, those tools, the heat map, all of those, if you take a look at them, it's a nice visual for you to break the gaps into chunks.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:12:35

So if you say, you know what? Everybody on my site doesn't seem to want to scroll or maybe they're scrolling, but they're not clicking on anything, maybe you focus on one page, let's say, the homepage, and you edit that home page and you track it for another month, and then you go back and see where are the changes that I made effective with that heat map. That way you don't feel so overwhelmed, and that's that's a hard thing. Right? As a small business owner, sometimes we are a solopreneur. Sometimes we just have a very small team, and nobody really takes charge of the marketing aspect. Or maybe there is a marketer, but they don't have time to look at the stats. And so taking it one step at a time is ideal.

Brett Johnson [: 00:13:14

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that sounds like a a really cool tool toolkit. Can you give, some common findings, from these audits and how small businesses can fix them?

Yasmine Robles [: 00:13:26

Yeah. So a come out a couple of cup some common issues that come up Mhmm. Are poor SEO practices, and this is not. I mean, these issues are not a, you know, a hit on anyone. We all do what we do best, and so, like, I I do not clean. My husband does. He does that best. So I don't want anybody to feel, again, overwhelmed about any of these, but very commonly, poor SEO practices.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:13:52

And what we focus on is just education and really what are the the high level things that you could be doing to just get a really good foundation on those things. So is it making sure you have meta descriptions? Is it, alt text? And, we can get into the weeds of what those are, but, basically, what can you have as easy wins so that when you do say, you know what? I do have time to write, 4 1,000 word articles every month, you have a a good foundation on all of the other other things that you have written, whether it's the homepage, the about page, or other articles. Slow load times, these usually are unoptimized code and sometimes it's really large images. So there's a couple of quick things that you can do. It depends on your platform, but you can always for example, if it is a large image, you can, make sure that it's no wider than 2,500 pixels. You can run it through an optimizer. You can do a couple things. You can rename the file.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:14:54

This will help with SEO. You rename the file, whatever the description is. So if it is a black and white cat sitting on a rug, the file literally will say black and white cat sitting on a rug. Now if you wanna add a little bit, I know there's a battle between SEO specialists and, these techniques for accessibility, but you could add black and white cats sitting on a rug in a Columbus, Ohio home, I guess. But you still have to be descriptive because that's what screen readers will use. And then just confusing navigation. I see it all of the time where peep I don't know where to go, where to click on. Sometimes there's no contact page.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:15:34

Sometimes it's just a a lot of different wording. So instead of saying about, they might say something cutesy, but I have no idea what it means. Right? Or a button says something cutesy, and it's cool. But what if I am not let's say it's an inside joke about Friends, and I have never seen Friends because I grew up on telenovelas, so I might not get that joke, and I will be very confused. So just make sure your navigation, your buttons are clear and to the point, and actually spell out what I'm going to be clicking into.

Brett Johnson [: 00:16:04

Yeah. Now your audit results, I'm assuming it's gonna be a combination of easy wins, but also prioritizing what should be done first to to kinda really feel that the love come back, kinda quickly.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:16:18

Yeah. So what the way we organize it, and I say we, but it's really my team. So what the way we organize is we say, here are some of the issues, and then here is a broken down list of how you can tackle them. What is the topmost thing that you really have to do and by when? What are the other things that you could tackle, but maybe when you have time? Mhmm. And then we look forward into the future. So if we found some issues on your site, fix those. And then based on the goals that we talked about during our call and during the the workshops, then how can we help you get there, and what does that timeline look like? So if you are focusing in on SEO, what we typically do is a I think it's a 90 day 60 or 90 or I think it's a 90 day overall high level view of your content strategy. Mhmm.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:17:09

And it's, for example, if you are, selling water bottles and your goal is to rank for water bottles, what would that content strategy look like for a blog, email campaign, social media, and what are what are the topics and what are the keywords that you're going to go after? And then you come in and say, okay. For month 1, these are what I'm going to work on, and then you can then write the blog post. But the basic idea generation and timeline is done for you so you don't have to you you can ease into it. Right? Because as business owners, we're always busy, so you can ease into that content creation, and then you can spread it out. We always always what we do is really educate. So we'll tell you, you know what? This is what you can do in the next 90 days to hit your goals. But if you're like, you know what? I have kids. I am a solopreneur.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:17:59

I do not have time for all that. I have to take my kids to soccer practice. We can then say, alright. So if you spread it out into 6 months into 1 year, this is what your end result could be. So we we completely understand both sides of the coin of wanting to really push forward, but also we have lives. So we help you navigate that.

Brett Johnson [: 00:18:20

Yeah. Well and I think that's also the time to do a a self realization of what how much your time is worth.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:18:28

Mhmm.

Brett Johnson [: 00:18:28

So if it's something that, yes, you can do, and some things that I'm sure that audit are, it's gonna be on the website owner. Yeah. Like you said, the blog writing or something like that. But at at the same time, there's a lot of things you can, get off your plate by having someone else do it for you, especially if you want it done more quickly. You guys can do that too. Right? I mean, it it just depends on the priorities and the dollar amount, of course, but it's that sometimes it's just I come to the realization, I am not going to get this done. I need help.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:18:57

Mhmm. Yeah. I would say, it it gets rid of that paralysis of having to learn. So, for example, we use Semrush, and you would have to learn how to use that tool, and then there's that learning curve before you fully take the full use of it. Right? And we take that out and we pull all the reports for you. We'll send them, and we explain what every everything means. But you can still do it yourself. I am pro.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:19:23

Like, if you if you're on a tight budget, you can use these tools and do it yourself, and use the free versions. There's no wrong there's no reason why you shouldn't be using the free versions, and then just kind of break it down into bite size, which is what we do for you, but to not paralyze you, but break it down. You can say, I'm going to audit my site traffic and see where everything is coming from. And if you see that you're getting a ton of traffic from traffic from social, but you're not getting any leads, they're not really doing a lot on your website, well, then let's focus on the website. Is it that the content needs to be revamped? Is it some kind of messaging issue where they think they're getting one thing when they click onto your link within Facebook, but now they get to your site and they're like, where am I? Is the navigation the issue? So just check a few things. Don't get overwhelmed. Just check a few things and then break it down into bite sized pieces.

Brett Johnson [: 00:20:18

Yeah. I could see where it could be, what you're talking about here, the audit, could bring back bad dreams of building a website initially. You know, how it's like, it's never done. It's never done. I don't know how to redo this sort of thing, but it's sometimes still what you're putting together is not, you know, it's it's not talking about a rebuild. It's tweaking things. It's like, updating your home. You do, you know, the you redo the bathroom.

Brett Johnson [: 00:20:41

You redo the kitchen. Yes. It's somewhat painful to do it, but the end result is you have a more enjoyable space to live in. The same thing could be for the podcast or your, your your podcast website or your business website or, you know, if it's but we'll all one the same. It it sounds as though if you haven't looked at it for a while, this is something really, you know, to take a look at. You may have problems you don't even know about necessarily, or you you've come to realize, yes, I have issues, and it's this, this, and this, and this is a good way to kinda figure that out. So I what's the best way to get a hold of you to I mean, start the process or at least ask you a few questions about, hey. I don't know if the audit's right for me, but here here are some things.

Brett Johnson [: 00:21:19

Tell me, is this what I need?

Yasmine Robles [: 00:21:21

Yeah. Yeah. I'm always happy to chat and break down and to basically educate. Mhmm. So you can find us at Robles, roblesdesigns.com. You can find us on social media. Typically, we're on Instagram at Robles Design Studio on LinkedIn. You can always find me on LinkedIn, Yasmine Robles.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:21:39

I'm I'm typically that's my space now. I hire people to fit focus on the Instagram and all in TikTok and everything else, but my home base is now LinkedIn. So if you wanna message me there, that's great. If you fill out a contact form on the website, it's going to me. So, you can do that. You can also go to Robliss designs.com/checklist, and there's, like, a really quick overall kind of checklist for what you should be doing on your on your website. But, yeah, I'm always happy to educate and sift through the jargon. I know people email me about things like they're starting a membership site, and there's so many membership site, kind of like platforms.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:22:15

There's so many platforms out there. And let's say you're a podcaster, you have no idea which platform to even start with, I can we can just sit down and chat. You can bribe me with a coffee or a taco or whatever, and we can chat about what the differences are and what's best for you because we all have different goals, different skill sets. Not one thing fits, fits whatever everybody else might be using.

Brett Johnson [: 00:22:36

Yeah. It's I I think you're right with this audit. We do the podcast audits as well too, and it and it, it blends in toward a website audit too. And I think it's that clarity of where you want to be in 6 months, a year, or dream big. What do you want it to be in 5 years? The the laying the groundwork now through an audit, whether it's a website audit, a marketing audit, a podcast audit, we do the same thing. We take a look at what you're doing right now. What do you want the podcast to do? Well, that may also include, an audit of your of your podcast website or your business website on where that podcast lives to understand, well, what you wanna do a year from now can't happen because of what you have right now. So I think I think these audits are really important.

Brett Johnson [: 00:23:18

They're cost effective because, as you said, a lot of that, and we would do we do the same thing with our podcast audits, is a lot of it is you can do this on your own. You can do this on your own. We encourage you to do this on your own, but you can't. We'll figure some other ways to do it and prioritize what the problem problem points are and making sure that you get where you need to be. But, yeah, if you Yeah. Wanna go through a podcast audit, you just reach out to me, mypodcastguy.com. Same thing. If it includes a website look, which it probably will be, we're gonna bring Yasminea as well as well too because, it they're all they all work together, and and and they have to move in the right direction for you.

Brett Johnson [: 00:23:52

But, but yeah. Yeah. I I think I think they're important. I really do. I agree. I agree. But, yeah. Thank you for joining me this week.

Brett Johnson [: 00:24:00

I appreciate Yasmine.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:24:02

Yeah. Thank you for having me.