The audit that keeps missing it
The page-level audit is a fair way to find broken things. It's a bad way to find friction. Broken things happen on one page. Friction happens across three or four of them at once.
The pattern we see most often: the page a visitor bounces from is not the page that lost them. The page that lost them was the previous one, which failed to set up the question the current page was supposed to answer.
“The problem is rarely on the page you're looking at.”
The three friction layers we see most
PROMISE-VS-PROOFHome page promises, solution page doesn't deliver
TRUST-VS-PRICETrust content and pricing content read as different products
CATEGORY-VS-SELFSite describes the category, not the specific product
