Your Website Analysis
and Scorecard

The standard for web design and usability in your industry seems a bit lower than most other industries. Potentially, there's an opportunity for your website to stand out in the crowd with a well design website that's simple to use.

Based on your lower web design score you should focus more immediately on making sure your site establishes a minimum level of professional credibility. This puts you at a disadvantage, as you'll need to play catch-up in this area while addressing other factors that are even more crucial to your website's success.

Performance metrics like page speed and load times are not a focus in your industry. Similarly, providing unique and helpful features for customers seems a lower priority compared to other industries. But this relatively low bar represents an opportunity to make a meaningful impact with a well functioning site that provides unique and helpful features to your prospective customers.

A score that's below your competitors means you might want to reassess your resources – what is driving your website's infrastructure 'under-the-hood,' and are you focused enough on improving your customers experience? If not, you might consider regrouping on the IT side of your website while rethinking the site's overall customer experience strategy.

When it comes to converting website visitors to customers your competitors seem asleep at the wheel. That's good news for you. According to a recent article in Forbes.com, The Top 10 Trends Driving Marketing In 2017, the trend topping the list is an "Increased focus on customer experience." With your competitors stuck in neutral you have an opportunity to deliver a better experience for customers in your market and a more efficient sales cyle for your company - and perhaps even catch up on other fundamentals while you do it.

Seems you should be a bit more focused on content marketing, which is the most immediate driver of online behavior. Customers are putting a greater dependence of their decision making on their online experience. If you're not already considering strategies to make your product or service more compelling through your website, your ability to catch-up will become increasingly more difficult as competitors take more substantial strides innovating the prospective customer experience.

Search is the perpetual game changer for the success of any website. Scalable growth is easier to achieve if you can improve your exposure with less effort. Fortunately, your competitors have not yet gained significant traction in search, so you're in a relatively wide open playing field. But you should get working on it soon, this window of opportunity will likely close quickly.

Seems your competitors have a bit of a jump start in this area - but that's ok. There's a clear path forward and with the right guidance, some hard work and patience you can still get out in front of the competition.
Start with the fundamentals - find out what on-site improvements you need and make sure you have the resources to implement those changes. Then, develop your strategy for improving your website's exposure. Your strategy should cover three important areas:
1) in-bound linking
2) local search optimization
3) social media presence