What Is Website Analysis and Why Do You Need It ?

Optimizing your website for easy navigation and search not only helps attract users to your site but also encourages them to return. Elements such as user-friendly accessibility, fast loading speeds, and relevant links to your website help it appear more professional and enhance visitor satisfaction. However, to improve your web pages and content, you need to perform a comprehensive website analysis. In this article, we will cover the following:

- What is website analysis?
- What are the benefits of website analysis?
- Four types of traditional website analysis
- How to conduct website analysis
- Why should you analyze competitor websites?
- What should you look for when analyzing competitive websites?
- Tools for easy website analysis.

Website Analysis: What Is It and Why Do You Need It?

Website analysis is the process of examining and evaluating a website's performance against key criteria such as speed, traffic, search engine optimization (SEO), and user experience. Each of these elements is a critical factor in the success of your website, as they directly impact your company's performance.

What Are the Benefits of Website Analysis?

Conducting website analysis is beneficial because the data you gather and the insights you discover can help you improve your web pages and strategies to attract more visitors. Therefore, you have a better chance of converting them into customers or clients. Website analysis can help you identify which areas of optimization are successful and where you can benefit from updates and improvements.

Furthermore, analyzing competitors' websites can help you discover desired content and keywords, find ways to enhance the search experience, and generate ideas to differentiate your site and drive more traffic. However, website analysis is currently a significant project, and analyzing your competitors can be even more challenging.

4 Types of Traditional Website Analysis

Website analysis strategies can provide you with more information about your website's performance, efficiency, and user interaction. These traditional website analyses include:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Analysis SEO helps you understand what people are looking for when they encounter your website online. Several options for analyzing your website for SEO include:

• Backlink Analysis: This type of analysis helps you discover internal and external pages linking to your site and compare your backlink profile to your competitors. Most SEO tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Content Analysis Tools offer these features.

• On-Page SEO Audit: This analysis helps you examine your website for common technical issues that can affect search engine performance. Using specialized tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console can help you identify issues.

• Search Engine Ranking Analysis: This type of analysis shows where your website ranks for specific keywords on various search engines. Depending on the tool you use, you may be able to look at keyword rankings of your choice.

2. Speed Analysis Website speed analysis helps you understand how quickly your content loads on different devices. Speed is crucial because both users and search engines prefer fast-loading websites. Identifying elements that slow down your site, such as large images, messy code, or excessive plugins, can help you make improvements. Many free tools can assist in speed analysis, including Google Page Speed Insights, GTmetrix, Pingdom, and Webpage Test.

3. Traffic Analysis Analyzing incoming traffic to your website can provide insights into the number of people visiting your site, when they access your content, and where they come from, including their geographical location and device type. Understanding traffic helps you determine where to invest your resources for the best results. Comprehensive analytics programs like Google Analytics examine traffic and user interactions on your site.

4. User Experience Analysis User experience analysis allows you to understand what visitors do when they land on your website. Unlike some other types of website analysis, which may be similar for all companies in a similar market, user experience is something unique that only you can provide. It focuses more on human preferences and behaviors than on specific metrics and numbers.

Tools for behavior analysis, such as session recording and heatmaps, can help you see how people navigate your site and which elements engage them the most. Feedback and Voice of Customer (VOC) tools, like on-site surveys and polling tools, can enable users to provide longer or more specialized feedback on their interactions with your website.

How to Perform Website Analysis

Understanding the steps involved in conducting website analysis can streamline the process. Here are some points to consider to help you prepare for and execute your analysis:

1. Define a Analysis Goal You can perform website analysis at any time and for any reason. In fact, conducting analysis often helps you better understand the impact of new search engine updates or optimization trends across the internet. However, even if you analyze regularly, each analysis should still have a specific goal in mind for maximum effectiveness. To determine a goal for your analysis, look for a problem, challenge, or issue your website is facing.

For example, if you have a page that is not meeting your expected conversion rate, you might conduct an analysis to better understand what you can change to improve that metric. Consider questions like "Is the page loading fast enough?" or "Are all elements easily accessible on mobile devices?" Knowing why you are conducting the analysis can help guide your actions in the later stages.

2. Create an Analytical Roadmap Once you've defined your goal, it's useful to have an ideal scenario or benchmark in mind that you can compare your results to. This helps you determine exactly what you expect to achieve from your analysis and how you plan to standardize your actions after the analysis. Create a step-by-step plan for how you expect a user to progress in your conversion funnel or how you expect users to navigate and interact with your website.

It's helpful to be as precise as you can at each stage, and start as early as possible in the process. For example, your very first step might be an internet search performed by a user to find your website. Take notes on each stage so that you can track the user's experience throughout the process.

3. Collect Data The next step is to use analytical tools to gather the appropriate data from your website and your competitors if necessary. This helps you understand the real performance metrics and ways you can improve your website. The type of data you collect, the tools you use, and the experiments you conduct during data collection depend on your analysis's goal. Only collect information that is directly relevant to your goal. If you come across other data that needs attention, plan separate analysis for that or a different goal.

4. Examine and Understand the Data Once you've defined your goal, collected relevant data, and benchmarked your results, you can examine and compare them. Look for areas where your website deviates from the ideal scenario or benchmark you've set. Identify areas that do not follow your intended user journey or any stages of your roadmap that aren't functioning as expected.

Understanding the data you've collected allows you to make decisions about how and where to make changes that will be useful both for your website's users and your company as a whole.

5. Brainstorm Solutions for Website Improvement Knowing what you want or need to change is only part of the analysis process. The other part is deciding how to execute these improvements and make real changes. Create a list of actionable steps you can take to update specific aspects of your website with minor adjustments. For more complex reviews, consider creating a step-by-step set of guidelines for use during your sessions. Then select teams or individuals to assign each section to.

Continue Making Changes and Optimizing Your Website

After implementing your changes, continue periodic analyses across all parts of your website, not just the ones you've modified. This can help ensure that your changes are effective and identify if further adjustments are needed. It also allows you to determine if other sections of your website can benefit from a similar improvement process over time.

Why Should I Analyze Competitor Websites?

Focusing on competitor websites during website analysis can provide insights into alternative solutions that your target audience may encounter when shopping, browsing, or searching for a product or service online. In fact, resources suggest that 99% of competitive intelligence professionals consider competitors' websites a valuable source of information during their audits.

With online activities or customer acquisition through an online presence, businesses have access to a larger global customer base, not just their physical locations. Therefore, understanding how other businesses reach their target audience can help you enhance or make your solution or experience better or more appealing for the same global market.

What should I look for when analyzing competitor websites?

While there are many criteria you can examine regarding a competitor's website, three common criteria may be prioritized depending on your analysis objectives. They include:

1. Customer Demographics: Understanding who your competitors perceive as their target audience may help you discover niche markets that are underserved or assist you in identifying larger markets that you hadn't previously targeted.

2. Organic Traffic: If you rely on organic traffic to drive customers to your website, understanding SEO statistics and search engine rankings for your competitors' content and keywords can help you adjust your keywords and achieve higher rankings in search engine results pages.

3. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC): If you use paid advertising or pay-per-click campaigns, you can investigate how your competitors utilize their paid traffic. Focus on areas such as the type of ads they create, where they display those ads, and user interactions with each one.

Tools for Easy Website Analysis

Various website analysis tools offer unique features to help you monitor different aspects related to market analysis and data collection. Additionally, testing these tools can help you understand which ones best serve your analytical goals and business model. Many of these tools offer free, paid, or trial versions to allow you to discover which one suits your needs best. Some of these tools include:

1. Google Search Console: Search Console is a free service provided by Google to help you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your website's presence in Google search results. You don't need to register your site with Search Console to appear in Google search results, but it helps you understand how Google views your site and make improvements.

2. Ahrefs: Ahrefs is an online tool that continuously crawls the web to collect, store, and host data for you to discover and analyze. It allows users to perform SEO audits, analyze social metrics, study content marketing strategies of competitors, and investigate backlink patterns. Ahrefs is a paid tool but offers a low-cost trial to help you decide if it meets your needs.

3. MixRank: MixRank provides precise information about a company and its affiliated companies. It aids in competitive analysis and discovering new leads by helping you identify products and services offered by your competitors. Some data points provided by MixRank include categorized advertisers, keyword, and traffic source rankings, contact information for company management and owners, registered business directories, and information about each company's marketing channels.

4. Moz: Moz is a popular tool for monitoring SEO and social media marketing campaigns. You can use it to monitor ranking tracking, examine backlink analysis, perform keyword research, and conduct site audits. The Pro version allows users to check both their websites and those of competitors. Additionally, its crawling feature informs you of new issues that need to be addressed.

5. Quantcast: Quantcast focuses on demographics and user behavior. It tags websites, blogs, videos, and widgets for statistical measurement, such as age, gender, and preferred regions of user activity. It also tracks user retention and interactions with various elements and provides real-time analytics for monitoring changes over time.

6. SEMrush: SEMrush monitors competitors' display advertising strategies and search engine marketing. It can also track your website's performance in organic search results and compare it with competitors. Other information provided by SEMrush includes changes in search volume over two years, tracking nofollow and dofollow backlinks, organic and paid search traffic volume, and keyword rankings for competitor websites. SEMrush offers both free accounts with limited features and professional plans with additional capabilities.

7. Similar Web: Similar Web helps you see how much traffic your competitors receive and which advertising channels they use successfully. It includes data mining and analytical tools for extracting data from local and global data cooperatives, local ISPs, web crawlers, and web beacons. Variables considered in each analysis include audience interests, average time spent by visitors on a website, bounce rate, display of banner ads, estimated monthly visitors, paid search keywords, traffic share from separate channels, and top referring websites. Similar Web offers a free service but limits data to a few metrics. With an organization plan, you can access three years of web traffic data and unlimited metrics.

In conclusion, obtaining the necessary information for website analysis can be much easier with the help of analytical tools. Learning how to interpret and evaluate the collected data can teach you valuable insights about your competitors and your current strategies, helping you improve your website's design and strategies. So, choose the right tools and enhance your business strategies with proper training.