Conducting Website Analysis: The Definitive Guide - Top4 Smarter Local Marketing

Websites are an extension of your business and brand; they represent you online, establish your credibility as an expert, drive traffic to your physical locations and convert visitors into loyal customers. Whether you have a new or current website, it is essential to pay attention to details when conducting website analysis in order to ensure that your website conveys the right message about your brand.

What is a website analysis?

Website analysis is the process of investigating and evaluating a website to identify strengths, weaknesses and potential improvements based on a set of pre-defined criteria. It’s an ongoing process that will help you understand how your target audience is currently engaging with your website, the areas that need improvement and what you can do to optimise your web presence.

The purpose of website analysis is twofold:

1. It will allow you to make more informed decisions about your current web design and functionality, and
2. it will help you to identify and prioritise the optimisation opportunities that will directly impact your business.

Why do you need a website analysis?

The internet is a unique channel that requires a unique marketing strategy. To succeed online, you must understand how people behave online, what motivates them to take action and how your business can best interact with its audience. Website analysis is the first step in creating an online presence that will drive revenue and increase brand awareness. At its core, the internet is an information exchange. Your website is the medium through which you can share information about your business, products and services with your target audience. By conducting website analysis before you begin creating or redesigning your website, you can identify the information that you want to highlight and optimise your design to ensure that your intended message comes through loud and clear.

The Top4 Steps to Analyse The Effectiveness of Your Website

A website analysis involves four main steps of processes that span the strategic and technical aspects.

Step 1: Identify The Target Market for SEO

Understanding the characteristics and behaviours of your target market will help you create content that resonates with your audience and informs them about your product or service offerings. With those views, you might also want to respond to crucial concerns like:

• Are the right user segments and their needs clearly emphasised on the website?
• Does the site architecture provide a suitable user experience?
• Does the website have effective search engine optimisation, or SEO, making it easy for search engines like Google to find and promote it?
• Is the website’s content relevant and optimised for users and SEO?

Step 2: Understand The Customer Journey

The customer journey is the path that leads potential customers from discovering your brand to becoming loyal customers. Understanding this journey will allow you to identify potential points of friction that could be impeding conversion rates. By identifying the journey your customers are taking when they engage with your website, you can create a more streamlined and effective user experience, which will allow you to better engage your target audience and increase conversion rates. An analysis of the data can reveal patterns in how customers navigate the website and the content they are most interested in. As a result, you can create a better experience for your users. You can also use analytics to monitor the efficiency of your content marketing efforts. This can give you an indication of how much content you need to publish to meet the needs of your customers.

Step 3: Optimise The Design

Once you have a better understanding of the customer journey and know who your target audience is, you can begin to optimise the design of your website to ensure that all elements are aligned with your marketing objectives. The design of your website can be one of the most important elements in converting visitors into customers. Your website should provide a clear message about your brand and its products or services, and should be designed in a way that is easy to navigate and visually appealing. At this point, you can also check:

• Does the website follow the best design strategies?
• Compared to other websites in your industry category, is it relevant?
• Does the website appear nicely on a phone or tablet since it was “mobile first” designed?

With that questions in mind, one of the best ways to optimise the design of your website is by conducting user testing. This allows you to view the website from the perspective of your target audience and identify any potential barriers to engagement. By implementing design changes based on the results of your user testing, you can create a more engaging user experience that will lead to increased conversions.

Step 4: Check If The Technical Aspects Are Up to Date

While design and functionality are essential components of any successful website, they are only two of the five pillars of online success: Reach, relevance, resonance, retention and conversion. Each of these pillars is equally important and can be negatively impacted by outdated technical aspects, such as:

• The security of your website,
• The scalability of your website,
• The speed of your website, and 
• The mobile-friendliness of your website 

A secure, scalable, fast and mobile-friendly website is essential to ensure that your brand is taken seriously by your target audience and that you are able to reach them at the right time and in the right place.

How we can help

A lot of people might think that conducting a website analysis is a long process to be done. Website analysis is one of the most important aspects to improve traffic and generate conversion rates in the digital world. If your website isn’t optimised, your competitors will surely get ahead of you. As elaborated above, having a well-maintained website is critical for local search, standing out against competitors and winning customers online.