Your website isn’t converting. You know something’s wrong, but you don’t know what. So you guess. New homepage hero. Different CTA copy. Maybe a redesign. You’re making changes based on intuition instead of evidence.
Here’s the problem: you can’t fix what you don’t measure. And most B2B companies don’t know how to measure the right things.
An effective website audit isn’t complicated. It doesn’t require expensive tools or agency expertise. What it requires is a systematic approach to identifying where your site creates friction and where buyers actually drop off.
Most audits focus on the wrong things. They check page load speed and mobile responsiveness. They count how many CTAs you have. None of that matters if you don’t know where your actual conversion problems live.
The audit process we’re walking through focuses on identifying the specific points where your site stops buyers from moving forward. Not aesthetics. Not best practices. Actual friction that kills actual deals.
Start By Defining What Conversion Actually Means
Before you audit anything, you need to know what you’re measuring. And in B2B, conversion isn’t one thing. It’s whatever indicates meaningful movement toward a buying decision for your specific business.
Most companies mark too many events as conversions in GA4: form fills, content downloads, button clicks. That’s activity, not conversion. But the opposite extreme is just as wrong. Counting only demo requests as conversions when 80% of those demos go nowhere doesn’t help either.
Real conversion means buyers getting closer to choosing you. What that looks like depends on your sales process and what actually predicts closed deals.
Start by identifying your hard conversions: contact form submission, demo requests, phone calls, calendar bookings. These create pipeline, not just activity. But you also need the engagement patterns that predict those conversions: multiple sessions over multiple days, viewing specific page combinations like industry to solutions to proof to contact, time spent on decision-stage content.
Here’s how to figure out what matters. Look at your last 20 closed deals. What did those buyers do on your website before converting? That pattern tells you what conversion looks like for your buyers. Track both the hard conversions and the engagement patterns that predict them. This connects to understanding what conversion really means in B2B.
Audit Traffic Quality Before You Audit Conversion
Not all traffic is equal. Before you audit conversion, audit what’s actually landing on your site. Open Google Analytics 4 and go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition. Look at the last 90 days.
Start with your traffic source breakdown. What percentage comes from organic search, paid ads, direct traffic, referrals, and social? If one source dominates with irrelevant traffic, you have a traffic problem, not a conversion problem.
Compare engagement by source. Look at average engagement time, views per session, and conversion rate across sources. If paid traffic shows 15 seconds of engagement while organic averages three minutes, your paid targeting is wrong.
Click the “Landing page” dimension dropdown to see which pages are getting the most traffic. If your blog post from 2019 drives 40% of traffic but converts at 0.2%, that’s a quality issue. High traffic volume means nothing if those visitors were never going to buy from you.
Watch for these red flags: engagement time under 30 seconds across all sources, huge traffic spikes with no conversion lift, paid traffic converting worse than organic, and most traffic landing on blog posts instead of commercial pages. If your traffic quality is fundamentally broken, fixing conversion won’t help.
Map How Buyers Actually Move Through Your Site
Now look at how people who actually convert move through your site. In GA4, click Explore in the left sidebar. Click the plus sign to create a new exploration, then select “Path exploration.”
Set your starting point as your homepage or leave it as “Any page” to see all entry points. Click “Add ending point” and select your conversion event. The visualization shows the buyer journey as a flow diagram. Thicker lines mean more people follow that path.
Look for common conversion paths. Do buyers typically follow homepage to industry page to proof to contact? Or do they enter through blog posts and never make it to commercial pages? Identify drop-off points by watching where the lines get dramatically thinner. If the flow from your solutions page drops from thick to thin, that page is creating friction.
Click on different nodes to explore deeper paths. Which combinations lead to conversion? Most B2B companies assume buyers follow a linear path. Reality is messier. Your audit should reveal the actual patterns, not validate your assumptions.
Find Friction Points Using Engagement Data
Now identify which specific pages are creating problems. Go to Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens. This is where GA4 shows page-level performance, but you need to know which metrics actually matter.
Look at “Average engagement time per active user” and “Views per active user.” A page with high views but only 10 seconds of average engagement time means people are landing and immediately leaving. That’s a friction point.
Check “Views per active user” for pages that should move buyers forward. If this number is close to 1.0, it means people view the page once and don’t explore further. That’s a dead end, not a progression path.
Compare your highest-traffic pages. Sort by Views. Then look at their engagement time. Your homepage might get 1,000 views with 45 seconds of engagement. Your solutions page gets 300 views with 12 seconds. The solutions page is your problem.
Look for pages with high views but low event counts. Events show actions like clicks and scrolls. If people are viewing a page but not taking any actions, they’re not finding what they need.
Layer Visual Analysis With Your Analytics Data
Install Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity if you haven’t already. Both are free for basic use and take about 10 minutes to set up. Give them 24 to 48 hours to collect data.
Once you have data, open your heatmaps for the pages you identified as problems in GA4. The heatmap shows clicks in red (high activity) and blue (low activity). Are people clicking on non-clickable elements? That indicates confused navigation. Are they ignoring your primary CTA? It’s not clear or compelling enough.
Check scroll depth to see how far down the page people actually read. If 70% of visitors never scroll past your hero section, you’ll see a sharp color change from red to blue. Your opening messaging isn’t engaging them.
Watch 20 to 30 session recordings of bounced sessions from your high-traffic, low-engagement pages. You’ll see where people pause, where they immediately scroll past content, when they rage click in frustration, and the exact moment they exit.
The combination tells you not just where problems exist, but why. GA4 might show your solutions page has 12 seconds of average engagement time. The heatmap shows no one clicks the CTA. Recordings show people scrolling looking for pricing information that doesn’t exist. Now you know the fix: add clear pricing context.
This connects to how your site structure should support buyer decisions. If pages that should move buyers forward are creating friction instead, you need to see what’s actually happening.
Test Your Homepage Like a First-Time Visitor
Your homepage is where most traffic lands. Open it in an incognito window. Set a timer for eight seconds. Read what you see. Then answer these questions honestly.
Can you explain what the company does in one sentence? If not, your messaging is too vague. Is it clear what problem you solve? Would your target buyer recognize themselves? Are there multiple clear next steps? If your only CTA is “Request a Demo,” you’re losing buyers who aren’t ready.
Check your homepage in GA4. Go to Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens, then find your homepage. Look at the average engagement time. If it’s under 30 seconds, people aren’t finding your homepage relevant. Check views per active user. If it’s barely above 1.0, your homepage isn’t encouraging people to explore.
Open your homepage heatmap. Where do most people click first? Check the scroll map. How far do people actually scroll? Watch recordings of first-time visitors. Do they scan quickly and leave? Do they read carefully but then bounce without clicking?
Most B2B homepages fail both tests. The eight-second test reveals messaging problems. The engagement data and heatmaps reveal what people actually do. See what buyers actually expect from homepages for what should be there.
Check Message Match Across Entry Points
If you’re running paid campaigns, you need message consistency. Go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition. Click on your paid traffic source, then add “Landing page” as a secondary dimension.
You now see which landing pages your ads send people to and how each performs. Open each ad. Read what it promises. Visit the landing page in an incognito window. Does the page deliver on that promise in the first paragraph? Check the average engagement time. If your ad traffic shows 15 seconds of engagement, there’s a message mismatch.
Do the same for organic search using Search Console data if you have it connected. See which keywords drive traffic. Search for each keyword and find your page. Does the content match search intent?
Every message mismatch creates friction. Your ad promises “manufacturing solutions” but the landing page talks about “industrial services.” The buyer expected specificity and got generic messaging. They leave.
Audit Your Actual Conversion Mechanisms
Now audit the conversion mechanisms themselves. Open your contact page and forms. For each one, check clarity first. Is it obvious what happens after submission? “Submit” tells buyers nothing. “Schedule Your Strategy Call” sets expectations.
Count your form fields. How many are you asking for? Every field increases abandonment. We consistently see companies asking for 10 fields for initial contact. Most buyers give up.
This is where custom event tracking in GA4 becomes valuable if you have it set up. Events like form_start and form_submit let you measure exactly how many people begin your form versus complete it. The gap between those numbers is your abandonment rate. If 100 people start your form but only 40 submit, you’re losing 60% of potential conversions at the final step. That’s a critical metric most companies never measure because they haven’t configured form tracking.
Even without custom events, your heatmaps and session recordings tell the story. Check your form in Hotjar or Clarity’s heatmap view. Do people click into the first field but never submit? Watch sessions that started but didn’t complete the form. You’ll see exactly where they stop and why. Often it’s a required field that feels invasive, unclear instructions, or a mobile experience that’s simply broken.
Test your form on mobile yourself. Pull out your phone. Go to your contact page. Try to fill it out. Does the keyboard cover important elements? Can you easily tap all the fields? Does the submit button work? Most B2B sites never test this and their mobile form experience costs them conversions they’ll never see in the data.
Prioritize Fixes Based on Actual Impact
You’ve now identified multiple conversion problems. You can’t fix everything at once, so prioritize based on actual impact.
Start with high traffic, low engagement pages. Go to Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens. Sort by Views. Look at their average engagement time and views per active user. If your homepage gets 40% of traffic but shows only 25 seconds of engagement, improving it has massive leverage.
Focus on pages that should move buyers forward but show low progression. Your industry pages, solutions pages, and proof pages should have views per active user above 2.0. If they’re at 1.1, those pages are dead ends.
Address message match problems if your paid traffic shows dramatically lower engagement than organic. Check this in Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition. Calculate what broken targeting costs you.
Tackle conversion point friction. If your heatmaps show people abandoning forms at specific fields, or if you have custom form events showing high abandonment rates, fixing your forms compounds across all traffic sources.
Don’t redesign your entire site. Start with the highest-impact fixes that require the least effort. Most conversion problems are messaging problems, structure problems, and friction problems that require strategic thinking, not visual changes.
The Framework You’ll Use Every Quarter
Most B2B website audits check the wrong things. They focus on technical SEO, page speed, and design trends. Those matter, but they’re not why your site doesn’t convert.
Your site doesn’t convert because it creates friction at critical decision points. Because your messaging doesn’t prove relevance fast enough. Because you’re not addressing the questions buyers actually have.
The audit process we’ve outlined identifies these real problems using both quantitative data from GA4 and qualitative insights from heatmaps and session recordings. Not theoretical best practices. Actual friction that stops actual buyers.
Run this audit quarterly. Your conversion problems will change as your traffic sources shift and your buyers evolve. The framework stays the same: measure what matters, identify where buyers drop off using engagement data and path analysis, understand why through visual analysis, and fix the highest-impact problems first.
Because you can’t fix what you don’t measure. And you can’t understand the “why” behind the numbers without watching what buyers actually do.
Need help identifying what’s actually broken on your site? Our B2B Growth Audit includes a complete conversion analysis using analytics and behavioral data that shows you exactly where buyers drop off and which fixes will have the biggest impact. Get your audit here.
