Does AI Like Your Site? 3 Turbo AI Website Audits with Heatmaps (Prompts Included)

While marketers everywhere are using AI to write things quickly, a few marketers are using AI to better understand their audience, do analysis, find gaps and improve the quality of everything they publish. These are two very different approaches to AI.

Some marketers use AI to find efficiencies and make things faster.
Other marketers use AI to find deficiencies and make things better.

Which group is more likely to drive results? Which is more likely to produce something impactful, comprehensive and memorable? Maybe it’s obvious, I’m a big fan of the second group.

I also believe that before we write more articles, we should first polish our sales-focused web pages because those URLs have a bigger impact on marketing outcomes. This is explained in our video on where to start in digital marketing: always optimize from the bottom up. Fix the website first before writing another article.

But how can AI help us improve our web pages? How can we give AI our pages?

Today we are sharing three ways to audit web pages using AI. Each method has its own advantages and limitations. But they’re all focused on business impact and B2B lead generation.

• Quick copywriting review
• Conversion optimization review
• SEO copywriting review

Each method works for a different use case. Each use case has different outcomes.

We’ll use ChatGPT, but you can run this kind of AI website audit using any LLM. And as always, we’ll share the prompts so you can copy and paste them into the AI of your choice.

1. AI-powered copywriting review: Copy the text into AI (or give it the link)

The fastest and easiest way to give a webpage to AI is to just copy and paste in the text. Or, if you use the paid version of ChatGPT, you can just link to the page and it will fetch the copy itself.

• Pros: Fast, easy and free
• Cons: AI doesn’t “see” the page so it doesn’t consider the images, videos or visual hierarchy.

With this approach, AI can check the conversion copywriting, find gaps and suggest changes to the text. But it can’t review some of the conversion elements like trust seals, badges and faces.

Before doing this quick AI website audit, you must first train the AI on your persona, using a persona prompt or by uploading your ideal client profiles. That’s always step one.

Until AI knows who you’re talking to, its responses are generic. AI might as well stand for “average information.” But after you train it on your audience, responses are relevant and specific to your buyer. Quality is much much better.

First, use the persona prompt (and tell it to fix the persona it gives you if it’s not accurate) or paste in the text from the personas you’re already using in your marketing. Next, copy and paste in all of the text of one of your key pages along with this prompt:

Copywriting review prompt: 

You are a conversion optimization expert, skilled in evaluating pages for their ability to both inform and persuade. The most compelling, highest converting web pages share common traits. The following are best practices for B2B service pages.

1. The header clearly indicates the topic of the page, quickly letting the visitor know they’re in the right place.
2. The copy clearly answers the visitor’s questions and addresses their objections
3. The order of the messages generally aligns with the visitor’s prioritized information needs.
4. The copy uses supportive evidence to support its marketing claims (testimonials, statistics, case studies, etc.)
5. Subheads for each section are meaningful and specific
6. The copy leverages cognitive biases in subtle ways when relevant (loss aversion, urgency, etc.)
7. The page provides compelling calls to action

I’m giving you a web page. Create a list showing the ways in which the page copy does and does not meet the information needs of the persona.

Suggest changes that would make the page more helpful and compelling to the visitor based on the persona above. Highlight the changes in the recommendations.

[copy and paste in the webpage]

Like all the best AI prompts it starts by giving AI a role (“You are a…”), but then include a few elements that push the AI farther:

1. It asks for input based on the perspective of the persona
2. It describes the best practices for the asset being audited
3. It asks for recommendations based on what is and isn’t there

You can see why the best prompts are written by marketers with deep expertise. They know what ‘good’ looks like and can write audit prompts that tell AI to look for those elements. Once the prompt is written, less experienced team members can use it to emulate an analysis by the skilled expert.

The prompt is like a magic spell that transfers skills.

The response is a high-level analysis of the copywriting. Of course, some of it won’t be good. It may miss things, misunderstand and get confused. But even if most of the response is useless, that’s fine. Because one or two of the insights may be gold.

Think of AI as standing for “another input” just like any input from anyone. You’re the digital strategist. You separate the signal from the noise. Look critically at the response. Look closely at the page you’re auditing. AI can help you see it from the perspective of the visitor, but you know your audience best.

If you’d like a visual output of the analysis, ask AI to summarize with a chart. Here is a prompt that asks AI to prioritize the persona’s information needs, then create a colorful bar chart showing the extent to which you satisfied those information needs:

Draw a chart with two columns. The column on the left is the personas prioritized needs and emotions. The column on the right is color coded to show the extent to which the page addresses those needs and emotions.

The response is always interesting. In this example, I gave it a page promoting AV integration services to higher education facilities managers, along with a persona for that target audience. It suggests that “future proofing” and “budget alignment” are two of the most important concerns for the prospect, but the page didn’t address those topics well.

The color on this chart wasn’t what I was hoping for. It’s using color to show the audience priorities, rather than the extent to which those topics were addressed. But it looks nice.

2. AI-powered conversion optimization review: Upload a full-page screenshot

A more comprehensive way to audit the conversion optimization of a webpage is to give it the entire page, not just the text. Because it can see the images, allowing it to give feedback on the use of faces, awards, client logos and certifications. The best way to let AI audit a webpage is to give it a full-page screenshot.

To do this, you’ll need a tool for taking full-page screenshots. There are free browser extensions available.

• GoFullPage (free versions available for Chrome, Edge and Firefox)
• Awesome Screenshot (free versions available for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari)
• SnagIt (paid tool for screenshots of anything anywhere)

Again, you should always start by giving AI your persona. Otherwise, it won’t know who the webpage is for. The response will be generic.

Once you have a screenshot of the page and the persona, you can start with the prompt above to check the conversion copywriting. Then go one level deeper and do a quick audit that includes the visual elements, such as trust seals (awards, badgest, client logos, etc.)

This prompt will audit the extent to which the page uses evidence to support its marketing claims. It can even make a list of every marketing claim that you failed to support with evidence.

Conversion optimization review prompt: 

You are a conversion optimization expert, skilled at using evidence to support marketing messages. The following are types of evidence that can be added to webpages: testimonials, reviews, case studies, success stories, data and statistics, years in business, number of happy clients, client logos, awards, association memberships, etc.

The attached image is a screenshot of a webpage. Rate the extent to which the page does and does not use supportive evidence. Which marketing claims are unsupported? Show your thinking.

Again, don’t trust AI too much.

The responses may be a bit misleading. For example, AI will tell you that something is there, but it may be hard for visitors to see. AI will say you checked the box for adding awards, even if they are far down at the bottom of the page. Use a scroll heatmap tool to see what percentage of visitors, on average, saw the part of the page with that element.

In the scroll heatmap above, the awards logos are present (AI says we’re good!) but really only 30% of visitors make it down to that scroll depth. The next step in the analysis is about prioritization. What’s the most compelling evidence we can offer? Is that also the most prominent part of the page?

Maybe you want a chart to bring to your meeting. Or maybe visualizations are easier for you to analyze. Or maybe I’m just looking for visuals to add to this article. Whatever the reason, here’s a way to have AI create a visual chart that summarizes this mini-audit of supportive evidence.

Make a chart with three columns. In the column on the left, list the marketing claims make on this webpage. In the center column, show the format for the evidence that supports the claim (or indicate that the claim is unsupported). In the column on the right, rate the extent to which the claim is supported by evidence using a bar chart.

Here’s one I did for our own homepage. It took several follow up prompts to get the claims and charts to show up in this format:

The results are interesting. Some are useful, some are not.

• Useful: Our webpage says we make data-driven decisions but doesn’t give examples. We should add those.
• Useless: AI says we didn’t support our claim of completing 1000+ website projects …but that is the evidence! It’s data supporting our claim about experience.

As always, use your judgment. You know your brand, your competition, your audience. It does not. AI is a helpful tool for quick analysis, but nothing more. It’s another input.

Liza Adams, AI Advisor & Fractional CMO, GrowthPath Partners “AI can perform various persona-driven website analyses. Provide ChatGPT with screenshots of three competitors’ pages and your own, including homepages, product pages, offer pages, pricing pages, case study and testimonial pages, about us pages, and others. For each page type, have ChatGPT compare and contrast, list pros and cons, and assign 1-10 ratings. Then, request a summary table with all ratings. Lastly, ask for recommendations to improve your pages, making them stand out from competitors based on your ICP and target persona.”

What else can I tell AI to look at?

Once you start giving AI images, you might get all kinds of ideas. For example, you can give it two images and ask it for input. Which might be more interesting to your persona? Which is more authentic?

Here I gave AI two images, one stock and one from a photo shoot, to see if it could tell the difference. It spotted the stock photo right away.

3. AI-powered SEO scan: Give AI the link to a page (or upload the HTML file)

In the two methods above, we gave AI the text of the page and the full page screenshot of a page. But those both missed important elements for SEO: the title tag and meta description. So the AI audit for SEO uses a different approach: give AI the link to the page or upload the HTML file.

• Pros: AI can review the title and meta tags within the HTML code.
• Cons: You need to use an AI that has browsing capabilities or lets you attach files. So you might need a paid account.

Pick a page on your website that is optimized for search and aligned with a keyphrase. If you aren’t sure about your keyword targeting, the two fundamental steps are detailed in these two articles: How to Research Keywords and Semantic SEO. Start with your homepage.

Next, give AI the link to the page and the target keyphrase with the following prompt:

On-page SEO prompt:

You are an SEO expert, skilled at optimizing web pages for high rankings through copywriting and semantic SEO. I’m giving you a search optimized webpage [insert link to attach HTML file] that targets the following keyphrases: [enter target keyphrases]

The following are on-page SEO best practices:

1. Exact match or partial match of the target keyphrases appears in the title tag
2. Exact match or partial match of the target keyphrases appears in the H1 Header
3. The target keyphrase appears at least once in the body text
4. Exact match or partial match of the target keyphrases appears in the meta description
5. The body copy includes many closely related phrases, subtopics and answers that are closely semantically to the target keyphrase.
6. The copy in in-depth and detailed

Analyze the page and rate the extent to which the page does or does not align with these SEO best practices on a scale of 0-5.

The response will tell you if the target keyphrase was missed in any key places. It also includes a score showing how well you indicated relevance in general. Here’s a mini review that AI did of a page for an integrative medicine clinic.

Of course, a skilled digital marketer could do the same analysis quickly, but this quick SEO audit is useful for non-SEOs and more junior marketers. It could also be added to an editorial workflow.

Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Comms, Wix “When training clients and juniors to carry out SEO updates, an AI generated assessment can back up your recommendations and help you to show clients how you get from A to B with content improvements. And adding these processes to a workflow allows you to gain content velocity and maintain a base level of quality.”

The recommendations at the bottom are very basic. They’re not very actionable. The best next step is to edit the page to better indicate relevance, that starts with confirming that the target keyphrase is in the title, headers and body text, then going deeper into the subtopics and using more of the related phrases.

AI can help by recommending SEO edits. Here is the prompt:

Make 5 recommendations for 5 changes to the body text of the provided webpage to better incorporate the semantically related keyphrases. Make sure all recommendations improve the flow and clarity of the copy.

Highlight the keyphrases in the recommendations.

The results might be useful, but be careful. AI will have no trouble stuffing a bunch of keywords into a short paragraph. Here is one of the recommendations it made for the page we audited above.

It’s not terrible writing, but it feels a little dense. That list of services could be a bullet list. That would be easier to scan. That last sentence could be its own page block with faces of the doctors. That would be more engaging. Maybe they could make a little “board certified” icon.

One more prompt (you can guess what it is) and you can turn the ratings into a chart.

Again, it’s your job as the strategist to review the response, find the useful ideas and build on them.

More ideas for AI webpage audits

Now you know the three ways to give AI your webpages. You’ve seen examples of prompts that get AI to give specific feedback based on provided guidelines and best practices. What other types of AI audits could you go on your website?

• Brand alignment audit
  Write a prompt that checks for alignment with your brand standards, from visuals (color and typefaces) to tone of voice.
• Cognitive bias scan
  Write a prompt that scans the page to find missed opportunities to leverage cognitive biases such as urgency, loss aversion and conformity. (I actually have a fun prompt for this)
• UX best practices review
  Write a prompt that finds issues usability issues, friction, vague labels, and misuse of visual hierarchies.

Mostly it’s about using AI for gap analysis, finding opportunities and getting quick recommendations. Once the prompt is written and refined, the AI methods are mostly very fast and easy.

But don’t get lazy.
Don’t trust AI.
Stay critical. Stay strategic.
Focus on the audience, the actions and the impact!