I am judging your website.

Not maliciously.

tamara scott | april 10, 2026

I’m genuinely trying to understand the choices that were made to put the site together. Because every website, marketing campaign, company, job—everything is a series of choices that we made.

I have a sense of humor about diagnosing/roasting/questioning/visually auditing a website, because I know that we’re all humans, doing the best that we can, with what we have.

The question I’m really asking when I look at a website is: What series of choices, systems of behavior, or organizational requirements congealed into this particular website? And more importantly, what can be done to make it better?

Website audits uncover website and systemic issues

A website audit works best when I review a website in collaboration with someone who works at the organization, including marketing pros and SMEs.

These conversations often show organizational systems that could use a little touching up—in addition to a fresh marketing messaging.

Fairly simple, common problems with fairly easy fixes. But you have to be able to see them to fix them, and most marketing teams are too close to the systems to see them, or have too much organizational inertia to fix them.

How to  audit (roast) a website

A website roast (or audit, whatever you want to call it) can be done for the home page or it can be done on a major landing page. Check your analytics to understand where you’re getting the most traffic and extrapolate from there. Follow these steps:

1. Identify your primary audience
I wrote about identifying and working with your primary audience for MarTech, but in brief: are you writing for businesses or consumers? Niche down as far as you can. Remember that by identifying the small audience you cover many others.

2. Identify what people want when they come to your site
Use your analytics, your search term rankings, and other data to understand what folks are looking for when they land on your site. Check unbranded terms and consider user intent.

3. Ask if they can achieve their goal on that landing page
If yes, skip ahead to step 6. If no, what’s missing, and can it be added to that page? For example, if they’re searching for a product, can you feature it high on the page?

4. Count the number of actions before they can take an actual step toward that goal
People who know what they want are on a mission, so don’t bury the CTA. How many links do they have to click, parts of a form they have to fill out, and scrolls they have to scroll to reach their goal. Then ask how you can reduce that number.

5. Document how you can ease this part of the journey
Usually it’s as easy as putting a contact form or button CTA at the top of the page. Don’t overcomplicate it, and don’t bury it.

Once they can achieve their goal quickly, deal with the stragglers.

6. How do your pages deal with someone who doesn’t have an immediate goal in mind but end up there anyway? Do you speak to them in a way that tells them you know who they are and you understand their problems? Do you explain how you can help? If not, do that. In plain language.

7. Check your internal links on that page.
Do links quickly take the stragglers to the other places on your site where they need to be? Maybe they need more information, so link them to a blog post. Or they want to see how your product stands up against competition, so take them to a comparison page.

8. Fix it, rinse, repeat.
Fix a thing, document it, and come back in a month (or when you get enough traffic) to see if there’s a difference. Are more people converting, filling out forms, contacting you? If so, great! Move on. Or keep testing.

You don’t have to do this alone

Marc and I help companies understand what’s working on their sites and identify how they can achieve their goals a little better, a little faster. We audit websites sight-unseen, and we help marketing teams find simple solutions.

Let’s get on a call. I promise we can find a solution.