One of the important steps we take with new clients is completing an in-depth comprehensive website audit to go over your site and look for possible problems and inefficiencies. In the first phase of our engagement with you and your team we strategize, analyze, prioritize, and plan a course to optimize each effort to harness our findings into results to improve your web presence. Virid also completes periodic audits with existing clients to find ways to continue to improve.
ECRO is Conversion Rate Optimization Specifically Designed for eCommerce by Virid.
Strategize
The Virid eCRO process begins with an end-to-end analysis of your site, where we review your current business goals and resources. Our overall goal is to make your business work better for you and your customers with your specific business’ needs in mind.
Analyze
Then we analyze our findings compare them to a review of your current priorities and team availability to incorporate these details into the initial audit road map. We have found that audits are most successful when the first two steps include most of your team members. This allows your team to align a proper and cohesive strategy and analysis.
Optimize
Now that your team has a road map in place, we optimize each task to help you get results in a timely manner.
Prioritize
Once we have it compiled, we review your updated roadmap with your team and prioritize executable steps for the next 90 days (about 3 months) to provide actionable results. With you and your team we prioritize based on reach, impact, confidence, and effort to see which projects make the most sense for you and your business. Below is our five layers of the comprehensive website audit checklist specifically for eCommerce:
Tech Fundamentals
We start by looking at the bones of your site – assessing your site for items like loading speed, if you have errors in your code, and if technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has been correctly implemented.
These core aspects of your site are frequently overlooked but can have an enormous impact on your bottom line. Improvements here will affect 100% of your traffic and that can mean big revenue gains when implemented with the highest quality.
Page Audits
Your home page is first broken down and measured in three main categories: first is performance, second is adherence to best practices and third is SEO. Our page audits also include a detailed breakdown of all the pages in your checkout path, viewed on desktop, mobile and through networks.
Areas we look at in this section include cart abandonment challenges including:
- Pricing issues in cart – the price (sticker shock)
- Forced processes during the checkout process, sign up to email or create an account.
- Delivery options were limited, not fast enough.
- The return policy was unknown or just not agreeable.
- Preferred method of payment not available
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) & CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) Standard
During this section we comb through a wide landscape of devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks, based off guidelines set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). When we review, we account for other impactful factors like WYSIWIG editors, and third-party scripts.
List includes an 8-point check that runs through:
- Page description length
- Meta Descriptions
- Image Alt Text
- Duplicate Content
- Canonical URLS
- Structured DATA
- Server Response Codes
- Internal Links
Site Accessibility
Your eCommerce site’s accessibility is the next aspect of your site that our experts review – can everyone get to and use your site?
We assess your site against WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.1… A, AA, and AAA accessibility standards. Making your site accessible is more than just best practice. Not meeting these standards can open to tremendous risk of lawsuits and unhappy customers.
In this section, we review overarching issues that include:
- Image elements
- Iframe and Fram elements
- Image elements and their alt attributes
- Buttons and interactive items on the pages
- Form controls
- Label elements
- Images that flash or change automatically.
- Link text and screen text to reader connections
- Area – Labelled by attribute references.
Low-Friction Checkout
Shoppers who have made it as far as your checkout are among your most committed and gains here can have large bottom-line impact.
We assess items like user flow, use of form fields, microcopy, a contextual support. Your checkout is also reviewed for additional opportunities to lower the friction for your customers in the checkout funnel.
We include the following check points.
- Related Upsells
- Unrelated Upsells
- User Experience – Clear path forward (review of CTA’s)
- Payment types
- Payment options on mobile
- Saved customer data (Addresses)
- International Shipping
- Multiple shipping options
- Saved Customer Payments
- Guest checkout settings
Product Discovery
Optimization of your Product Discovery is key to helping visitors become buyers. Your products need to be presented in the best light possible – merchandised with strong images and rich descriptions. They need to be easy to find, grouped intuitively, and searchable.
In this section we dig into categories, facets and search settings, homing in on the following check points.
Category Listing Pages
- Standard Category and Subcategory settings
- Apparel category
- Collections
- Facets (examples)
- Materials
- Prices range
- Color
- Size
- Brand
Search Pages
- Search Filters
- Product tags
- Search Thesaurus reviewed
- Spelling variants
- Search Page product presentation
- Related search links
- Custom redirects
Product Detail Pages
- Out of stock handling
- Alerts
- Cross sells
- Back in stock handling
- Alerts
- Cross- sells.
- Alternative product cross sells & upsells.
- Community QA (Quality Assurance)
- Reviews
Next-Level Optimization
At the last stage of the audit, Virid covers the more nuanced items in optimization. These are typically unique options, often specific to the needs of your customers. Your users experience is assessment for improvement opportunities in area as diverse as effective application neuromarketing principles, full lifecycle management and customer expectation alignment. Looking to optimize your website? Request a free consultation to get your project started!
