Why would you need a Magento site assessment and pay for it?
We receive a number of inquiries from Magento shop owners who would like some changes and improvements on their Magento stores. Sometimes there are also some issues to be solved, some bugs that need to be fixed, SEO unfriendly situations or they just want fresh insights to get quality inputs for site advancements. In the lines below, I’ll explain our approach to projects of this type, and why your Magento store might need a site assessment.
If we are available to take on the project, we suggest doing a site assessment i.e. detailed analysis of the current condition of the site, before providing our suggestions for improvements or doing the actual required development efforts. But this sometimes remains unfavorable for our potential clients – why would they pay for someone taking a look at their site, especially “if they already know what could be wrong/get fixed”?
Magento site assessments we offer
- SEO and usability assessment (15-20 hours of work) covering site traffic, SEO, conversions, UX and overall site usability analysis
- Technical assessment (20-30 hours of work) which covers detailed theme setup, code review, database integrity check, customizations and 3rd party extensions analysis
- Overall site assessment (including SEO, usability and technical analysis) with special focus on clients’ key concerns and required improvement areas, like module compatibility, upgradeability analysis, speed issues etc. (40-50 hours of work)
Purpose and results
The purpose of this process is to clearly outline the state (status) of the current solution and provide guidelines for needed and possible improvements. This is an initial overview before doing required changes, improvements and implementations in a particular Magento environment. It enables us to have a clear understanding on how the existing system works. It also ensures making decisions for improvements based on the actual data, not assumptions.
The process of a detailed audit results in a detailed report on the findings, together with suggestions for actionable improvements and an estimate for the scope of work needed, if our team would conduct all the proposed modifications. Of course, we are here for you for all suggested improvements and development work later on, but you are not obligated to continue working with us. Perhaps you might receive more suggestions than you have expected (e.g. there are more problems and required fixes on the site than you noticed at a first glance), so you need more resources to continue development – that is why we leave this decision up to you, after you receive the report with the results.
With a detailed overview of the site condition, we make sure our suggestions for later work are backed in actual condition of the site, clearly explained in these reports as deliverables, supported with adequate visuals, numbers and explanations. And each audit and report are tailored for every clients’ unique business needs and Magento store’s specifics.
Why this isn’t free and other clients’ concerns
Deep and quality analysis requires time and expert knowledge, and we can invest that in your project. In a lot of cases, there are issues and uncovered areas, that need a deeper check-up than what you can initially see when you start noticing what’s wrong on your site, or what could get better. We don’t like taking a partial approach and this way of working gives us just enough space to cover all important areas and output quality deliverables. This process includes our Magento certified developers, ecommerce consultants and SEO experts and practitioners. With their knowledge and expertise you are on a right path to solve your store’s issues and to get quality improvements.
We have already had really good success stories, where we have started our cooperation with these type of assessments, and continued the work with actual implementations and development work later on. So if you are a Magento store owner or engaged in business development of some existing Magento store, feel free to reach out to us and require an assessment.
We will be glad to help you out if you:
- have known and/or unknown issues on your Magento site
- desire and want suggestions for specific site enhancements
- need a site inspection to see if it is inline with Magento best practices
- want to check some 3rd party solutions or module compatibility
- look for exploring your store’s upgrade possibilities and concerns
- need to identify and improve key sales and conversion drivers
- simply want to get some quality ideas on how to refresh your store, to emphasize the uniqueness of your business model and improve on it…
Interested? Start a conversation with us!
4 comments
Very well explained how to do the right assessment. Sometimes it takes more hours than it’s defined in a post to all business processes. Ecommerce should earn the money and if you want great solution with right strategy you’ll pay for it. 🙂
Thanks for posting your comment, Dave.
I’ll give you a short description on how this works, but please keep in mind that we take individual approach to every business case we encounter and of course, each analysis and the report that comes from it provides different (clients’ specific) outputs.
Within these 15-20 hours, we examine Google Analytics (set up, goals, funnels, tracking…), Google Webmaster Tools, Magento admin, on-site SEO and look for other SEO improvements. Identifying most common Magento issues related to SEO (layered navigation, duplicate URLs, etc.) is also included here.
We often add descriptions and advice on how to use particular parts of these services, if we see that the set-up is not correct and not providing results.
The entire process is based on clients’ industry specific project set-up and also covers examination of all the steps of purchase process from customers’ point of view (usability analysis). These investigations are covered with improvements suggestions and estimated scope of work to implement all these correctly.
I hope you will find this useful.
@Dave: Insane amount? Really? From reading the client’s briefing to delivering a detailed report including problem areas and possible solutions? If you go to a doctor’s office you pay for his diagnosis, not just the medicine he prescribes.
I’m sure the work includes analyzing Analytics data, server logs, Magento templates, seo reports, etc.
This seems like an insane amount of hours for the scope of work on just an assessment without actually coding or testing anything. Can you break down in more detail how you are spending 15-20 hours for example just looking at SEO/Usability?