In business-to-business and AEC marketing, there is sometimes a belief that you "don't win work from the website." But have you ever wondered if a poor web presence is costing you projects or recruiting opportunities? What if you haven't even been invited to the conversation because of incorrect contact information, broken links, online forms that go to nowhere, or worse? Enter the website audit—a simple tool you can use to identify your website's strengths and weaknesses. Is it meeting your firm's objectives, or is it a candidate for a full rebuild? Kyle Davis walks us through the Middle of Six process with tips for in-house teams.
CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 5
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to The Shortlist.
We are exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.
I'm your host, Wendy Simmons, and each episode, I'll be joined by one of my team members from Middle of Six to answer your questions.
Today, we're chatting with Kyle Davis.
Hey, Kyle.
Hey, how's it going?
Good, how are you?
I am doing well.
I have edited and produced a few of these already, and now I'm on the other side, and we'll see how it goes.
Whole new experience.
I know, right?
You get to feel what it's like to be in the hot seat.
The microphone in your face.
Everyone's listening.
Now, I have to follow my own advice, so it's a tall order.
Yeah.
Well, I'm thrilled you're here today, and I thought an interesting piece for you to describe is what your role is at Middle of Six, because you wear so many hats.
Your official title is Marketing and Communications, if you can call that a title.
Tell us a little bit about what you do.
I do tend to focus a lot on the digital marketing side, be that websites, website design.
I like to get in on proposals here and there, and help with the design and the layout of those.
And then another large bucket that I participate in is sort of that content writing, editing side.
I really enjoy the writing process, be it blog posts, advertising copy, taglines, website copy for clients, telling people stories.
Well, you're a very strong writer, and so you tend to kind of be writer, editor to a lot of our content.
You know, either polishing things up, to helping us say things in a more concise, impactful way.
I mean, I see you play that role kind of in all areas of Middle of Six stuff.
Yeah.
Also, dip my toe in the PR world from time to time with press release and media relations.
I also really enjoy coordinating with photographers and videographers and working to produce that kind of marketing collateral, imagery, video.
That's super exciting and fun for me.
And a new arrow I'm adding to my quiver these days is apparently podcast producer for The Shortlist.
So that's a new skill and a new thing that I'm learning about, and it's been a lot of fun so far.
Yeah.
When we first dreamt up the idea of having a podcast and what that would look like in a way for our team to communicate and share best practices and that sort of thing, it was no question in my mind that you could be a great producer granted, neither of us had experience in this area.
We've done a lot of video editing and you just kind of are drawn to that type of work anyway.
Yeah, absolutely.
When I posted, I think you barely let me finish the sentence before you were saying, yeah, let's do that.
Sounds good.
Appreciate that kind of attitude and it really kind of shows in all the digital marketing stuff that you are kind of exploring for our clients and trying to find cool ways of them communicating their brand digitally.
I really enjoy that exploration of finding new avenues to do that kind of thing.
And it's like, how hard could it be?
There's YouTube, right?
Right.
Yes.
That's how we learn everything.
Which yes, I've spent plenty of time on YouTube listening to guys with really nice microphones being like, and this is how you edit a podcast.
That's fantastic.
So I imagine at some point down the road, we are going to unwrap podcast producing and steps for our listeners in case it's something they're considering.
That is not today's topic though.
Instead, we're going to go into an area that's definitely solidly in your wheelhouse.
And the topic you selected today was about website audits.
Want to share a little bit of what you're thinking under that umbrella?
I see a website audit.
It's sort of the natural first place to begin when you start to think about what a website might need.
Maybe you're thinking, we just want to do a quick refresh.
Maybe you're thinking, we want to start it all over from the very foundation and strip this thing and have a brand new website.
You're not really going to be able to make an informed decision just anecdotally.
I think you want to produce this initial website audit, and that's going to sort of give you a more holistic view of what you can do moving forward.
Yeah, this is something that we recommend to clients when they come to us.
Their question is often just something as basic as, do you also help with websites?
Right.
That's the starting point.
And a great way to show that is to say, well, why don't we produce a website audit for you?
And that will be this really excellent high-level overview of your current website property, where it stands, some recommendations to consider.
And that can then be a jumping off point for how the project evolves from there.
We always say this and we try to live it.
And what we do is that we want to start with strategy.
Exactly.
And it would be so easy to just look at a website on the surface and say, oh, yeah, it looks good, or it needs to be thrown out and start over.
But that's really not getting to the strategic part of it.
Do you want to talk a little bit about what you're looking to discover in a website audit?
Yeah, absolutely.
In the AEC world, it seems like the website is a very easy thing to sort of go on the back burner.
Everybody's chasing proposals.
Everybody's doing the day-to-day.
And your head is down, and then you look up, and your website's out of date, or you've got something broken, or your team changed, and it's not accurate anymore.
Maybe you moved offices, and you don't have the correct contact information any longer.
And that's typically where people engage us at that point.
So then by doing the audit, that gets both the client and ourselves on the same page with accounting of the current state, maybe some issues that we see, like to maybe call it low-hanging fruit, and then perhaps some more in-depth recommendations of what could really evolve the website or take it to the next level.
You can start using that information as an analysis to ask, do we think that this website is currently servicing the goals of the company?
And then with those goals in mind, you can start to decide, are we talking about a quick refresh here?
Is this going to be a very simple process to just make some improvements around the edges?
Or are we dealing with a larger project here where we might want to consider a foundational rebuild of the website from the ground up?
It's really easy to forget about what your website is doing out there and what it's communicating.
And I know that our clients will come to us with this sort of request.
It's like, it's five years old.
It was great at the time.
Our projects are not up to date.
We've had a couple of changes in personnel, and they maybe didn't even think about it for two years.
I mean, it's amazing how quickly that much time can go by.
Absolutely, yeah.
And I think because often we're working with our clients on proposals, we are hearing their newest stories.
We understand the technology and cool things they're doing.
We see the projects and realize, wow, there's a disconnect between what we're saying in your proposal content and what's being shown to the rest of the world.
And yeah, we like to think of that website as a great opportunity for a first impression.
If you have potential clients looking at your website or teaming partners, if your proposal content and your website content isn't on the same track, then it's time to get them both up to the same level.
Yeah, definitely.
And we should be leveraging all that great work we did for The Pursuit.
If we've created case studies or there's examples and imagery to show your process, why wouldn't we want it on the more public-facing site so that owners and influencers and prospective employees, new team members, could understand at that level?
No, that's a great point, Wendy.
We hear that a lot that clients want to use their website as a recruitment tool.
And if that's the case, we absolutely want to be putting our best foot forward.
We want to be showcasing the culture, the strengths of these companies.
And so sometimes, things fall off, and it's just time to reengage with the process and get things updated.
Yeah, I just want to add to this something that we've discovered multiple times.
I almost hate to say this, but we have been asked to look at websites that have gotten a little bit stale.
And when we go and have that review, what we have found is that the firm that was hired to develop the website did not have a background in AEC.
Yeah.
So, Kyle, to your point about it being stale, absolutely, and also sometimes just off message, or like close but not real.
That very special AEC vibe.
I know.
Is it there or is it not?
Yeah.
You know, stock photography with your logo, photoshopped on a hard hat, is not going to cut it.
I don't think so, no.
It's not going to cut it.
So that is an area in the website audit where we're actually reading the words on the page and being an outsider perspective and also an insider perspective and a little bit of a BS monitor there.
Your clients can see right through that, and we want to avoid that kind of fluff as much as possible.
So those are some of the things that we're looking for when we do the audit.
Kyle, what do you think about just going step by step through the outline of our audit and what we go through?
We can kind of hit some things at a high level or dig into a few that might be of particular interest.
Yeah, I think I can just sort of start at the top of the document and just kind of run through it.
Obviously, we start with some logistical information, and then we like to spell out sort of an agenda for how we're going to discuss the audit.
It's at the top of the document, but that might be something you fill in almost last where you've gone through the audit, you have a list of recommendations and issues that you've found.
Right.
What is the goal?
What do we want to accomplish, making it really clear, and keeps everyone really focused on the task?
Exactly.
And right there, we have our primary and secondary objectives.
This either comes from an initial conversation with the client, maybe pre-audit, or maybe it's something that we develop after looking deeper into it.
But we like to have sort of a primary, a secondary, and maybe even another objective that we feel are maybe the two or three priorities to address.
Yeah, we don't want to lose sight if someone reached out to us and says, I just want to be able to update this myself instead of having to go through a third party to do it.
Can you help me with that?
That's a really important objective.
Yeah.
And we don't want to gloss over it just because we see all of these other marketing strategies that should be implemented.
Exactly.
It's not as glitzy, but that is a very common thing.
And it's always sort of shocking to me how many people build websites out there and then don't give their clients access to their own platforms and their own content.
I guess you could call it a pet peeve.
I'm just like, number one, we've got to let you get control of your own back end.
Like, if you can't change a team member or fix a typo or swap an image out, that actually ties in nicely to sort of the first part of the main audit.
We want to know what the website's built on, what's the way that you access the back end, what's the username and password.
And yeah, if you don't have that ability, that goes right up to the top of the list is we got to be able to get hands on this stuff.
Right.
50% of the time, if we ask for the login information, they're like, yeah, we'll find out who has that.
That's a sign that probably hasn't been updated very recently.
Sign that it's time to take control of your website.
But moving from the technology part of it, we then tackle some high level buckets around the narrative of the website, the design of the website, imagery and photos, potentially graphics or iconography.
And then we're dealing with something that's a little more ethereal, like a user experience.
How do people move through the site?
What types of calls to action are there?
Are people being prompted to dive deeper into the content if they so choose?
Are they being directed to the important information that they're looking to find?
We often paraphrase something we've heard around the web design world, where we've got skimmers, swimmers and divers.
And that's different levels of engagement as far as the user on the website.
And we want to make sure that someone who is taking a quick glance is getting what they need.
And also, we want to make sure that someone who wants to spend five minutes on your site and learn more about you, that they're able to move through the pages and find that valuable content.
There's a lot of overlap to the strategies that we use in proposal design and layout.
Exactly.
It needs to work for all of those visitors.
And I'll say this, I've heard this a million times.
I just want to echo it for the record.
People are not reading anything.
So do not expect everyone to be a deep diver at all.
That's going to be a very select group in your audience.
When they have a very specific need, we need to address that.
But assume that no one's reading anything.
So how can you communicate your brand, the value you're bringing, your expertise, the reason why you should be selected in visual elements and very short bits of content?
That's accurate and also heart-breaking for someone who claims to be a writer and an editor, especially proposals or websites, because we spend so much time agonizing over the right way to tell these stories.
But it is what makes the digital marketing space interesting, is of course you want to just nail it.
If someone's going to read your paragraph, if someone's interested enough to spend time reading your words, you want to hit it out of the park.
But of course, you can't discount the visual and the instant and the impression that you give in the blink of an eye on the internet, and you just always have to keep your focus on both at the same time.
Yeah, we didn't hit on this exactly in the goals and objectives piece, but it is something that we're looking at when we're doing this high level design and content review is the target audiences.
And because AEC is primarily B2B type of marketing and communications, obviously, we're double checking the narrative design photography, those three kind of visual content elements Kyle mentioned at the top for the target audiences of owners, decision makers, people who are pretty knowledgeable about architecture, engineering, construction, but that also we don't want to be too jargony and too in our space if we're just full engineering.
We need to speak to a more general audience.
Absolutely.
And then we do take a deeper dive, say on a page by page basis through the website.
So we're talking homepage, about us, services, contact us.
Maybe you have a company blog or something else that's special or unique to your company or your industry.
But we will go top to bottom, what's working, what's not.
Try not to list 300 itty bitty little nitpicks, but try to hit the really glaring obvious things.
And then beyond that, we might lean on our experience on other websites or some of the best practices that we're aware of, where, you know, have you considered presenting your projects in this way?
Maybe you want to look at a portfolio format where you have your projects in a grid.
Maybe you need to reimagine the headshots on your website.
Maybe you want to consider adjusting this layer of navigation because it's not quite accomplishing what we want.
It is that balance of not being too detailed, but also showing that there are very actionable things that we could move forward on quickly.
It feels a little bit like a hit list that they could handle in-house if they had the time, interest, and resources.
Often, they're already looking for our support in that area, which is great.
But we like to provide it that, hey, if they have someone who is used to getting in the back end and wants to make some progress on these over time, that they can go through that.
I do agree.
I think you could consider it almost a playbook, and it could be handled by an internal team with the proper technical understanding and the proper access to the back end.
But as I mentioned, we also like to throw out some of those next level recommendations where we won't dive into it super in depth, but we will list things and ideas that may be worthy of further discussion or exploration.
Like what if, instead of just doing the surface level refresh, you engage with this a little bit more and look for some opportunities to innovate or take it to the next level.
And those can be fun conversations.
Right.
And we don't want to make assumptions on behalf of our clients.
We want to serve them well.
So we're trying to map out the information in a really clear way, either gives them a roadmap to move forward with on their own, or a starting point of a discussion.
And often, we're surprised and excited by what a team is ready to do, or just it's the right time for them to go even more than we're recommending.
Success leads to more success, or enthusiasm leads to more enthusiasm, where it's really cool to do the first dozen really simple things, and then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, wow, the website looks a lot better.
Imagine if we dedicated a few more hours, or imagine if we actually did take you up on these two or three recommendations.
You can really see a large transformation rather quickly.
Yeah.
So what are you looking for technically related to SEO, which is search engine optimization?
Right.
So just a real quick primer on search engine optimization.
There are both technical and content-related portions of an SEO playbook where you want to make sure that your website is recognizable by a search engine, typically Google, who is crawling the web, indexing the pages on your website, and sort of if someone searches for Washington state electrical contractor, we want to make sure that your website is telling Google, hey, I'm a Washington state electrical contractor.
You should be serving up my website to folks who are looking for this type of information.
There's a host of technical best practices that are, you know, boring and totally pretty simple to execute.
But then there's also the narrative portion of it, where you want to make sure that the words on the page are reflecting all those hot keywords that will tell Google that this is the place to send people.
You just want to make sure you have checked that box and that you're just executing that.
Play in the game that Google wants you to play so that you can get recognized and get served up in those search engine results.
You know, it doesn't matter if you have a website, if no one can find you, even if they're actually Googling your name.
Talk about like something I'm excited to just take care of real quick post-audit.
It's like, hey, let's make sure that if someone searches your company's name, that you actually show up in Google.
That seems like something we can absolutely handle.
Right.
Some teams don't go to their website very often.
It can be because the information on the website is something that your own employees and team members don't need.
And so then internally, there aren't a lot of eyes on your website.
But I think that your in-house teams can be a great asset.
So eventually, when you have a website that has a blog or some of your social media content or an employee login portal, different elements that draw your team in, they can be advocates and they can be seeing what's the news on the home page and just kind of, I don't know, being another set of eyes and quality control in general about things.
Right.
There's one additional technical thing that we should hit on when we think about the nuts and bolts of the audit, and that's looking at the back end.
Like I mentioned earlier, you want to be able to have a username and a password and access to the back end.
If you don't have that, let's take care of that immediately.
But then once you do get into the back end, you're going to be looking at a host of technical things.
You want to make sure, are all the plugins up to date?
Is your site currently secure and safe?
Hopefully people aren't getting weird security messages when they land on your website that says, oh, are you sure you trust this content?
Things like that.
I mean, that's just not the impression that you want to give.
But depending on the platform that you're using, it's really easy for plugins, themes to fall off, and you want to get in there and make a list of all the things that need to be updated.
Right.
We don't want friction.
We don't want the website to be annoying to anyone.
People will bounce.
Yeah.
Eliminate friction.
That's good.
Yeah.
They'll leave so fast, and that's not what we're going for there.
Right.
It's like, oh, did I have to struggle for one millisecond?
I'm gone.
Hitting that X.
I know.
There's no room for error in that area.
And if you're paying attention, there are relatively easy fixes, but you don't want to let that lag too far.
Right, so as we discussed, we have our playbook now, and we have a list of issues, we have a list of recommendations, best practices, and now it's time to sort of tally those things up and make an evaluation on how large the effort's gonna be moving forward.
Sometimes that's gonna depend on budget and time, but in the perfect world where we're free to make the most strategic decision, you wanna take a look at all these things and say, okay, are we doing a refresh or are we doing a rebuild?
Yeah, what do you hear from clients as far as their concerns or preference refreshing versus the rebuild?
I would say generally people don't reach out to us thinking that they're gonna start their website over from scratch.
Typically their assumption is more of a refresh type of a mindset, which of course, it's simpler, it's less complex.
In your mind, it's probably cheaper.
But the audit can really show you whether that assumption is correct or not.
I mean, if you have a host of glaring problems and an audit that goes longer than average and all of a sudden it's all right there and black and white on your screen, maybe you do have more of a realization like, oh, this is a bigger problem than I thought.
Conversely, maybe you just have a few really simple things, then it's just like, this is awesome, this is my action list, we're just gonna tick, tick, tick, take care of these things.
But you don't know until you take a look at it all in one place, and that's why we like the audit.
Often clients wanna take it back to a larger team and evaluate, which is totally fine.
Yeah, what are some of the examples of things clients come back to after they've talked to their executive team about the website audit?
We've got all the simple stuff like, yeah, of course, fix that typo, fix that image, make that happen.
That's not a huge lift, and you can see a big impact quickly.
But then there are things like, do we want to schedule a photo shoot?
Do we need new brand photography?
Do we need new head shots?
Often we make that recommendation, and then we also remind folks that, hey, this isn't just for your website.
This is for your proposals.
This is for your social media.
Having a professional photographer come out to your space, especially if you work in an awesome office and everyone's really enthusiastic about it.
We've had a lot of people whose office is a huge part of their culture.
It's a place of camaraderie and teamwork, and they're proud to show that off.
And so, yeah, let's get that on the website.
Let's keep that in a folder and be prepared to turn that into social media collateral.
Let's make sure that that weaves into the proposal, so it doesn't have to be one or the other.
You can still get a lot of bang for your buck with that type of thing.
Maybe you want to send a photographer out to take some exteriors.
Maybe you want to reach out to architects and former project partners and consider purchasing some professional shots of the work you've done.
Or maybe you're happy with what you have and you decide that's not worth the time and the money at this time.
So how long does a typical audit take?
And what do you find are the next steps after you've done your report and had that conversation with our client?
Of course, it's going to depend on the depth of your existing website.
But it's pretty typical unless you're a really large GC with some really deep pages that go into maybe portfolios of hundreds of projects or something like that.
Typically we're looking at somewhere between four to six main pages and maybe some sub navigation.
But in an instance like that, I would think that it would typically take somewhere around three to six hours, give or take.
Sometimes a website is so sparse that it doesn't take a lot of time to get the idea of what's going on.
Other times, there's more content.
And that's actually something that I've found is by engaging with it, sometimes you can tell a client, hey, you know, I spent six hours on your audit.
You're doing a really good job of explaining your services and capabilities.
But you know what?
The design's not there.
So people aren't actually engaging with it.
I think the next steps is to develop that list of action items and then weave that into the budget.
So if we have 30 recommendations, are we going to do all 30?
Are we going to do 15?
Right.
Often our recommendations at the end of the checklist of things to do and potential items and the areas that need more conversation also include some ranges of what that investment might look.
Because that's part of the decision making process, right?
Totally.
That needs to go to the leadership and decide, like, where are we at?
And, you know, maybe that is option one, two, three, with a spectrum of things that could be implemented.
We also see quite often that a firm, after doing a comprehensive audit of their website, decides they need option one and option three.
Which is, I'm speaking generally here.
But what that might look like is we need to fix the grammatical errors and the broken links tomorrow or today.
And we want to think about a phase two, which may be a full rebuild or really, really detailed update of the website.
But, you know, that's not an uncommon experience that the audit and covers some things that need immediate attention.
I like that phase one, phase two, because you don't want to get paralyzed by the size or the scope of what you're trying to accomplish.
And then neglect to even get started and take care of the easy stuff.
Like, take care of the easy stuff.
Do phase one.
If you're scared, if you're a little hesitant to do phase two, no problem, take your time.
But if we can do a phase one really quickly and cost effectively, I'm a big advocate of that.
Like, take care of it, make it happen.
Yeah, and a website refresh or rebuild can take, you know, two to six months, depending on the depth of the website and the level of design that's happening and, you know, different development areas.
I would not want to wait six months to have errors fixed or to have my website popping up properly on Google.
I wouldn't want to wait that time at all.
Yeah, or, you know, get the project manager who doesn't work there anymore swapped out for the one who does.
That's a good move.
Yeah, yeah, that we can help with for sure.
Great recommendation.
And probably a great place to wrap it up.
Thank you, Kyle, for your thoughts in sharing the details on what a Middle of Six website audit looks like.
And I hope listeners were able to take away some things and write down those buckets.
You should maybe go ahead and do this on your own website right now, whether you think you need a refresh or not.
Thank you for having me.
I cannot wait to listen to my own voice and edit myself.
I'm sure that won't be cringy at all.
I know.
Good luck with that.
And thank you so much for being here.
Yeah, you got it.
The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, principal marketing strategist.
Kyle Davis is our producer with Graphic Design and Digital Marketing by Alison Rose.
If you have a question or topic you'd like us to discuss, send an email or voice memo to theshortlistatmiddleofsix.com.
If you missed anything or want more info, check out our podcast page at middleofsix.com/theshortlist.
And follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at Middle of Six.
Thanks so much for listening.
We hope you'll tell your friends and colleagues about the show, and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes.
Until next time, keep on hustling.
Bye.
Catch you later.
The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.
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