A Helping Guide to Website Analysis

Your website is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, marketing tools in your arsenal. It is an effective way to connect with your target audience, market your business, sell your products and services, and share your brand image (among other benefits and uses). 

Marketing statistics for 2022 show that 79% of users will be less likely to make a purchase from a website if they have a bad user experience. This is why it’s essential that your website is fully optimized and that both your back-end and front-end performance are as they should be.  

A website analysis is a great way to shine a light on any areas that may be negatively affecting your user experience and keeping users from engaging with your company. That is why we have created this helpful guide to website analysis to keep your connection with your customers strong and profitable. 

What Is Website Analysis?

A website analysis involves evaluating how a website performs in regard to SEO, competition, speed, and traffic and making the necessary improvements to drive more leads and revenue. You can analyze various performance factors for your website, from where you rank in search results to how fast your website loads, and use the data to improve the overall user experience (UX). 

Website analysis can be useful to any website, provided they take the results and use them to make changes to the website. This data can be used to increase website performance and ROI by reducing page and image size, for example, or optimizing a landing page with a lot of traffic to increase conversions.

The Benefits of Website Analysis

Increasing leads and revenue through your website are attainable goals for most businesses. A website analysis will give you important feedback on how users are interacting with your website so that you can see how your site performs and improve it in order to achieve the increase in leads and revenue you are working towards. 

Some other reasons a website analysis is important are:

• A website analysis will help you find opportunities to improve your conversion rate
• You will be able to fix problems that are preventing conversions (conversion blockers), such as a broken link or form
• You will be able to find opportunities to improve your website’s rank in the search results
• You can perform competitor analysis’ to uncover helpful strategies to apply to your own site
• You get valuable insights into your current visitors (such as geographical location) so that you can adjust your strategy to target the areas and visitors you want.
• You can see where your traffic is coming from to identify areas that you could improve on and what areas are best to invest your time and resources into.
• You will be able to see where you are losing customers through bounce rate data.
• You will have the necessary information needed to optimize, improve, and update your website.

Types of Website Analysis

There are different ways to analyze or audit your website so that you can find different areas to optimize. All the types of analysis are aimed at improving performance, and there are numerous ways they can be used to do this.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

An SEO analysis of your website will give you insight into what people are searching for and how your business competes with others on various search engines. An SEO analysis will typically entail

• On-page SEO audits: For identifying technical issues in your website’s structure that could be impacting your performance, such as missing title tags or broken redirects.

• A SERP ranking analysis: Which can be used to see the pages that are currently ranking on your website, where they rank in comparison to your competitors, how the keywords you are targeting are performing, and the position of keywords you want your website to rank for. SERP analysis’ can also give you ideas for potential new keywords to target, new content ideas, and factors that may be causing your competitors’ websites to outperform your own.

• An off-page SEO audit is used to review activities that take place outside of your website yet still affect its performance. Usually, the primary focus of an off-page audit is a backlink analysis – you want to be sure you are getting high-quality backlinks that will improve the authority of your website. Spammy links could be seriously detrimental to your site, but by identifying toxic links and disavowing them, you can keep your domain authority where it should be and improve your website’s visibility.

• A website speed analysis will show you any slow-loading pages on your website and what is causing the speed problems. Slow pages can be disastrous for your website’s ranking, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, bounce rate, and page views.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

A conversion rate analysis is used to identify and eliminate any conversion factors that could be negatively impacting your sales. For a successful CRO analysis, you will need to look at your traffic and your messaging. 

Using qualitative and quantitative traffic insights will help you develop strategies to increase the number of relevant visitors to your website that are most likely to lead to a sale. The quantitative data will refer to metrics such as the number of visitors per page, the session duration, and the bounce rate. 

You will also want to ensure that your website copy, whether from a service page or blog page, resonates with your target audience. If your target audience does not find your content relevant, struggles to navigate your pages, or if your pages are too content-heavy and they cannot find what they are looking for, they won’t become a conversion. 

A CRO analysis will help you understand user behavior, focus on the right pages, and prioritize your ideas in order to see a measurable difference. You can’t focus on addressing all conversion areas at once. Have a goal in mind (for example, reducing cart abandonment) and work to achieve it before moving on to another one.

Usability Analysis

A usability audit involves evaluating your website’s interface to see how visitors respond to it. This audit will cover both functionality metrics (are all pages and links working) and heuristic metrics (best practices). 

A heuristic analysis, or an expert review, involves using a set of rules to crosscheck the best practices a website should follow. This is done in order to detect issues with a website design so that you can implement educated changes to improve usability.

Tools for Analytics

The digital age is rife with both free and paid tools to help you get the most out of your digital marketing efforts. There are a number of useful free tools, but if you truly want to get actionable insights through your analysis, a paid tool will be more comprehensive. 

Some useful website analysis tools include:

• Google Search Console – This is a free service offered by Google to help you maintain, monitor, and troubleshoot your website’s presence in the search results.

• Google Analytics – The biggest website analytics platform in the world, offering both free and paid tools for websites to get a deeper understanding of their customers and their behavior. This is done through a collection of statistics and basic analytical tools specifically for SEO and marketing purposes.

• Screaming Frog – This is a website crawler that is aimed at helping you improve your onsite SEO.

• Ahrefs is an SEO software suite for marketing professionals with tools for link building, keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking, and site audits.

• Figpii is a user experience platform that can give you insight into user behavior through heatmaps and session recording.

• GTMetrix – Analyzes your website’s speed and shows you what may be compromising its performance.

KEY27 can help you take your online marketing to the next level. 

From SEO and content marketing to website design & development and conversion optimization, we are experienced in every aspect of online marketing. Contact KEY27 Marketing today to find out how we can help you.