What is Website Analysis? The Complete Guide

A comprehensive guide to website analysis

A website analysis will help you better understand what your audiences want and need so you can deliver relevant information to them once they land on your website. This guide is your handy resource for what website analysis is, why it’s important, how you can run a website analysis and more.

In this guide, we’ll explore:

• What website analysis is and the key benefits

• How website analysis can help you solve problems and identify opportunities for growth

• How to choose the right website analysis solution

• What a successful website analysis framework looks like

What is website analysis?

Website analysis is the process of testing and analyzing a website’s performance for top metrics like:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

• Speed

• Traffic

• User experience (UX)

It also involves an analysis of competitor websites. Each of these elements plays an important role in your website’s success as they directly affect your company’s perception and online performance.

Sites can benefit from regular website analyses by using the results to make improvements to optimize and enhance existing pages, ensure a positive user experience and keep visitors coming back.

The importance and benefits of website analysis

Website analysis provides you with insights into how website performance and user experience. A regular website analysis can:

1. Identify areas on your website that need improvements, updates or changes

2. Help you optimize your website to attract new visitors and keep your customers coming back

3. Ensure you’re providing the best experience for your customers and prospects and offering the most value to them

4. Make sure you’re remaining competitive by analyzing competitor websites and discovering new keywords and content opportunities

You can’t just “set it and forget it”

As with most things related to technology, change happens fast. To stay relevant and engaging for visitors and potential customers, your website must be constantly evolving. Regular website analysis is critical to ensuring your online presence is meeting key metrics while driving the development of relevant website content so visitors find value, come back again and ideally share their experience with others.

Improving customer experience on your website

Your website provides the ability to quickly establish new connections and realize success or failure. The potential for an experience that leads to frustration is only a few clicks away. The end result of these negative experiences is a painful reality: once they’re gone, they’re gone, with little to no chance of returning. They will find answers from any number of competitive options.

A website analysis provides the guideposts for the process of continuously reviewing and optimizing your website or online product/service to ensure you’re providing the best possible experience for your customers and potential customers. This is especially true in an economic downturn where potential new customers have less patience and increase their scrutiny before making a purchase. Ultimately, the brands with websites that offer the best user experience while providing the most value will win.

How can I use visitor behavior to improve customer experience (CX)?

Optimizing the user experience to increase engagement and conversions starts with a better understanding of your website visitors and their behavior on the site. Examples of important questions to ask to piece together your customer journeys include:

• How are they entering the website?

• What are the main subjects they’re interested in?

• What pages/elements are they interacting with the most?

• How long are they staying on the site and specific pages?

• Where are they falling off or leaving the site?

How can I use personalization to improve CX?

Gaining a customer’s trust and loyalty can take time to earn. That process requires providing a smooth experience—both in-person and digitally. Personalization is a great way to further your online connections by facilitating more empathetic style of communication to connect with your visitors and tailor your message to their specific needs.

Knowing what is important to your customers and the deciding factor to achieving trust can be offering relevant content at the right moments during their experience. In addition to developing detailed personas and having voice of customer (VoC) feedback, achieving a more personalized experience often requires multiple marketing technologies to work together and connect key consumer data points. It’s important to look at your current data sources (or consider adding them) to avoid leaving customers behind.

Increasing engagement, adoption and conversions

Understanding how key customer segments navigate your website helps illuminate ways to keep them engaged throughout their journey and move them through the sales funnel. Staying vigilant with regular website analysis will provide customer insights that could also translate to other audiences and impact future business

Selecting the right strategies and tactics to increase conversions will come from your customer’s behavior. Evaluating specific customer use cases can lead to elevated experience changes that drive additional visits or purchases—ultimately building retention and loyalty for the business.

Identifying barriers to conversion can lead to simple changes like alerting customers when they have abandoned their cart. Frequent visits to the same product page could lead to the ability to keep a list of “favorites” that trigger a cadence of reminder emails. “Buy again” reminders during the checkout process can help increase sales for products with a short shelf-life. For continued success, it’s critical to test new strategies and adapt based on your website analysis to build on customers’ needs and interests.

Marketing and advertising

Segmentation is the process of dividing your customer data into specific groups based on established criteria. This process will not only inform your website UX, but it will also inform more personalized and relevant messages to optimize advertising investments aimed at key customer segments.

In addition to driving more traffic to your website through clickthrough rates, targeted ads will also increase visibility for your brand. Specific advertising messaging can also improve negative brand perception that may be uncovered with a key segment.

Types of website analysis

A typical website analysis will help you increase your website’s performance by optimizing the user experience with the different sections and functions of your website. As we mentioned earlier, the typical types of website analysis are SEO, speed, traffic, UX and competitor analysis. This information can provide valuable context so you can make your experience stand out to increase engagement and expedite the path to customer loyalty.

Quantitative website analysis

Quantitative website analysis collects quantifiable data at scale to provide a macro view of how a website is performing and how users are interacting with a website.

This numerical data is collected indirectly and provides the understanding for the types of actions users are taking on a website, such as time on website, time on page, clicking a CTA button, bounce rates and more.

Qualitative website analysis

While the quantitative numerical data can provide a solid foundation for a website analysis, qualitative data is about “why” and helps fill the gaps in between the numbers to provide a more complete picture.

Qualitative data is collected directly through observation and recording and helps determine the characteristics, emotions, perceptions and traits of your website visitors. Types of qualitative data collection methods include one-on-one interviews, focus groups, surveys, observation notes and more. For understanding specific behaviors on your website, heatmaps or interaction maps (interaction maps are the next generation of heatmap tools) combine both quantitative and qualitative data.

CRO audit: Using qualitative and quantitative analysis to fuel experimentation

Reviewing a combination of quantitative and qualitative data will provide an overview of your website’s usability to better align with your website visitors and increase their time on your site. In addition to supporting their desire to gather information, certain areas and functions of your site are about getting them to engage on a higher level.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the number of visitors who take a desired action on your website that results in a conversion. This can be a purchase or another action the business considers important to the customer journey. Examples of a conversion could be a customer making a purchase, a case study download, newsletter sign-up or another predetermined metric.

Gaining a higher conversion rate often depends on actively monitoring the effectiveness of these areas and refining them through testing to deliver the desired results. The most common testing methods are:

A/B testing

This compares the conversion rates of two versions of a page, showing half to visitors the current version of the page (the ‘control’) and other half the variant page (the ‘treatment’). Comparing which version achieves the CRO metric will help determine which version is more effective.

Multivariate testing (MVT)

This type of testing is more complex. Instead of one element changed on the variant, multiple variables are modified. Multivariate testing can determine which combination of those variations performs best out of all possible combinations.

SEO

Constantly improving the experience for visitors is important but it won’t help if they don’t find your website in the first place. If they’re already familiar with your brand and solutions, they may come to your site directly. You may also be driving traffic from specific marketing campaigns and using campaign-specific tags in your URLs to gauge effectiveness in attracting users.

Visitors can also come from completing an organic search on a particular topic. Understanding what people are searching for related to your business can inform how your SEO efforts are performing. When analyzing your website SEO, you should consider including the multiple analyzation options:

Search engine ranking

Search engines like Google and Bing run algorithms that scan websites for a variety of elements and other factors that demonstrate a company’s expertise, authority and trustworthiness. Much like optimal websites themselves, these algorithms are constantly being updated to stay current and provide the ability to rank the best results.

In addition to providing the most accurate, reliable information on your website pages, you’ll want to be including the main words and terminology (keywords) your target audiences are using in their search process. A search engine results page (SERP) analysis shows where pages on your website rank for specific keywords with different search engines. In addition to seeing where your competition is ranking for certain keywords, you may be able to look at rankings for the keyword of your choice depending on the tools you use.

On-page SEO audit

This type of SEO analysis reviews your website structure for common technical issues that can affect your website’s performance with search engines. In addition to the website content itself, optimizing the parts (making sure visuals include tags so they register with search engines) and functions (ensuring redirecting links are sending users to a valid page) on your web pages will help improve your search result ranking and drive more traffic from search engines.

Backlink analysis

This type of analysis illuminates the pages that link to your site and shows how your backlink profiles compare to your competitors. While web pages with backlinks are the main factor of off-page SEO, social media and press releases are other examples of external ways people can link to your site.

Performance and speed analysis

The digital world is on the cutting edge of immediate gratification, and expectations for website visitors are extremely high. Search engines and site visitors prefer websites that load quickly, so optimizing your website’s performance and speed is critical for success. The fact that visitors are accessing your website from a myriad of devices only compounds this challenge.

It’s important to know what website elements are slowing download speeds. Large images, inefficient back-end code or too many plug-ins to facilitate actions on your website are examples of where you can implement changes to improve your speed.

👉🏻 Check out Glassbox’s Web Performance Index, which shows the web performance of leading companies across industries and global markets. These benchmarks give companies what they need to beat, outperform and outrank competitors.

Traffic analysis

Understanding your website traffic can play a big part of identifying where to make the best use of your resources. Using the data for what pages have the highest and lowest traffic over time, along with what pages visitors are spending the most time and/or taking a desired action, can help you make the right decisions to improve low performing pages. In the case where there are many low performing pages, this may be a sign that it’s time to consider a complete website redesign.

Competitive analysis

Including a review of your competitor websites as part of your website analysis will provide a valuable perspective of the other experiences and solutions your visitors may also be exposed to when searching or shopping online. Along with the other parts of a detailed website analysis, this understanding can help guide improvements to your website better or avoid having a “me too” experience that prevents the opportunity to stand apart and deliver real value and advance visitors through the funnel.

In addition to completing an analysis of your competitor websites, additional external research efforts in support of a larger overarching strategic business analysis can help illuminate opportunities to differentiate from your competitors’ website design, messaging strategy and mix of products and solutions.

How to run a website analysis: A framework for success

As mentioned earlier, a website analysis should never be a one-time occurrence. It should be viewed with a mindset of continuous development.

To achieve success with website analysis and optimization, it’s important to follow a structured framework of clearly defined steps. This will facilitate your efforts and how you’ll focus your time across the various categories of website analysis to ensure resources are applied effectively.

Plan the work. Work the plan

Flexibility is one of the best parts of website analysis. When, why and how often you run a website analysis is subjective and totally up to you to decide. In addition to finding the best approach that supports the goals of your business goals, website analyses often provide a better understanding of emerging optimization trends and recent updates to search engines.

1. Define your objectives

Regardless of your frequency, there should still be a purpose for each analysis to help define success and maximize the effort involved. In many cases, a specific issue or problem will emerge as the impetus for analyzing your website. A specific page may not be achieving the desired conversion rate, so you need a better understanding of potential actions to achieve the stated goal.

Start by clearly defining the objectives of your website analysis. Some self-starter questions to guide this process may include:

• What do you want to achieve?

• What are you trying to solve and how can a website analysis help you?

• What are the KPIs that you'll be measuring?

Outline a roadmap

Once you’ve established your objectives, identify a benchmark or standard to compare your results against. This can help identify what you’re looking for from your analysis and inform actions to meet the benchmark. To support a user-driven analysis, put yourself in the user’s perspective and detail how you want them to achieve a certain conversion or identify other optimal ways they could engage with areas of your website.

Be as precise as possible and start early in their potential process—this may involve conducting an organic search to find your website. Tracking each step through the completed action will help you determine the ideal user experience through the process.

Also, define how your time will be spent across the key areas of your website analysis. In order to achieve the established objectives, be realistic as some areas may be more important than others based on the maturity of the business/product/team focus.

2. Select your website analysis tool

There are a number of options to consider when identifying the right website analysis tool(s) that suit your budget and needs. There are free and paid options to consider and many of these tools have unique features that set them apart. Consider testing these tool(s) as a way to discover the solution(s) that align with your analysis and data collection objectives.

🔥While popular website analytics tools like Google Analytics offer insights into user behavior, understanding the underlying reasons behind user behavior requires a more powerful engine. Keep reading to find out how a digital experience intelligence (DXI) solution can help.

Digital experience intelligence (DXI) solutions

You may end up using a set of specialized tools to facilitate the different part of your website analysis process. Depending on your business model and analysis needs, a DXI solution may be worth considering. DXI combines multiple analysis functions into one platform that allows multiple teams to align around a single source of information to help get to key insights faster.

In addition to combining a range of functions, a DXI solution also provides the ability to include external data from other sources like Google Analytics and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to create a complete picture of your website in one place. These powerful solutions enable marketing, sales, e-commerce and other teams to stay on top of meeting customer expectations and delivering the right experience at key moments of their journey to ultimately drive revenue growth.

3. Analyze your website content

Conduct a thorough audit and analysis of your website content. This should include all web pages, blog posts, videos and any other types of content. This will look for potential performance issues—like determining which pages are generating the most traffic and evaluate those pages against similar types of pages that may not be performing as well.

In addition to evaluating whether the content aligns with your business goals and brand voice, make sure the content is engaging with a mix of impactful headlines, visuals and video content. Your content should also support multiple visitor scenarios. Some visitors are early in the funnel and simply browsing, so bitesize content and highlighted key copy points can be helpful. Other visitors may be further along in their journey and require more in-depth content to support their search needs. Accessing session replays of individual users can help answer some of these questions.

Is your content optimized for SEO?

Compare the types of content on the pages to find key differences to identify any areas where your SEO could be improved. Make sure high ranking keywords are included in the headlines and copy—while ensuring all headlines are properly defined in the website hierarchy. Also make sure all image and video content includes meta tags so they register with search engines.

Don’t forget to analyze your design

While written content is often the main focus of a content audit, website design is also an important aspect of website analysis. Review your website's layout, colors, font and other design elements. Make sure your website is easy to navigate, visually appealing and optimized for user experience. Web tools that key you in on where users are struggling can help spot issues quickly.

DXI solutions help provide a more holistic view of your visitor’s full experience, including your website design. This end-to-end view can help guide UX designers identify flaws in design/usability, prioritize bug fixes and improvements, guide the development of a new section or product or fuel an experimentation roadmap to maximize visitor engagement.

4. Evaluate your website performance

Once you have tracking set up, it's time to start analyzing your metrics. Use the selected web analytics tools to gather and analyze website performance metrics related to your established objectives. Looking at website traffic, speed, bounce rate, conversion rate and page load time are often key metrics that demonstrate what areas of your website are performing well in terms of user experience and areas where it could be improved.

If you have qualitative data, overlay this information to provide additional context on your target audience segments to better understand any performance issues.

5. Monitor user behavior

In addition to evaluating key website performance metrics, track and analyze user behavior on your website to understand how visitors are interacting with your site. Look at the pages they visit, the buttons they click and the pages they exit.

Analyze your UX and conversion points

Ensuring the vision for your website user experience matches what your visitors are actually experiencing is critical to the success of your website. Analyze how easy it is for users to navigate your website, find the information they need and complete their intended actions to identify any areas where the user experience could be improved. You should also analyze your conversion rates and identify any areas where CRO could be improved.

DXI solutions like Glassbox include specialized features like the Augmented Journey MapTM to optimize digital customer journeys. View conversions, drop-offs and other struggles across your website with AI-driven insights and built-in revenue impact metrics to quantify the cost of poor experiences.

6. Identify optimization opportunities

Once you have completed your analysis, identify areas that need optimization, such as improving website speed, reducing bounce rates and optimizing your content.

Even with powerful data provided by analysis tools, don’t fall victim to relying on data alone to solve your UX problems or viewing these challenges solely from an internal perspective. Rather, stay hyper-focused on what your visitors want and need. By continually evaluating potential UX changes through their perspective, you’ll deliver customer-centric experiences that create mutually-beneficial relationships and loyalty that have a positive impact on long-term revenue goals.

Create an action plan

Based on your analysis, create an action plan to improve your website performance. This might include making changes to your website design, content, user experience, SEO or CRO. Prioritize improving pages with higher traffic and implementing changes to desired actions that aren’t leading to conversions. Set specific goals and timelines for implementing your action plan to stay on track to meet established deadlines.

Track your progress

Last but not least, be sure to track your progress. Continue to analyze your website's metrics, design, content, user experience, SEO and CRO to see how you’re progressing toward achieving your established objectives. Use this information to make data-driven decisions to help guide and prioritize potential changes that can improve your website experience and performance over time.

By following a structured framework for website analysis and staying focused on your customers, you can achieve success with your online experiences and achieve efficiencies that help minimize technology investment. Don't leave your website's performance and optimization to guesswork — take a proactive approach and ensure that your website is achieving its full potential.

Website analysis tools

SEO tools

SEMrush: Drive more traffic to your site with the SEMrush 20-in-1 toolkit. You can navigate the most trusted keyword research database and discover new targets based on tons of metrics and easy-to-use filters, including competition level, keyword difficulty, monthly volume, related phrases, search intent, questions and more. Competitor reports provides the ability to see your competitor keywords, backlinks, ad campaigns and their top performing content.

BrightEdge: Trusted by 1,500+ global brands and about 57% of the Fortune 100, BrightEdge is an enterprise-grade SEO and content performance management platform. Through tools like Data Cube, Share of Voice, Opportunity Forecasting and Intent Signal, BrightEdge reveals the true intent behind search queries, exposes true competitors for each content topic, and highlights potential opportunities. It can also help optimize your content by dialing up existing assets and targeting new, high-value topics with built-in recommendations.

Moz: The Moz all-in-one SEO software suite helps you improve your search engine visibility by providing fresh insights and empowering you to stay competitive. Moz offers 55+ SEO tools including keyword research, rank tracking, site crawl, content optimization, link research, analytics & reporting and more to help businesses and individuals to improve search rankings, drive traffic and get more customers.

Page speed and performance tools

Glassbox: Glassbox performance analytics of real user monitoring (RUM) give you a real-time view of your website or app’s performance while finding and alerting you to issues and anomalies. You can view session replays to discover issues and measure their CX impact and leverage business impact metrics to prioritize efforts based on ROI.

Google PageSpeed: PageSpeed Insights is a free performance tool that analyzes the content of a given webpage and provides page speed scores for both the mobile and desktop versions of the page. It can help identify performance best practices on any single URL, provide suggestions on a webpage's optimizations and suggests overall ideas of how to make a website faster. It can be accessed directly in any browser and grades webpage performance on a scale from 1 to 100 and provides a report on suggested optimizations, divided into categories of high, medium, and low priorities.

Pingdom: SolarWinds® Pingdom® is a single-platform solution to help monitor the availability and performance of websites, servers and web applications. Optimize your website’s performance based on data from actual site visitors with RUM. Analyze the load speed of your webpages and learn how to make them faster. Identify which elements of your webpage are fast, slow or too big, which best practices you’re not following, and whether the changes you’ve made have had the intended effect. Track and analyze page speed over time to find bottlenecks affecting your customers’ end-user experience.

GTmetrix: GTmetrix breakdowns your page performance and explains why it's slow along with providing suggestions for optimization opportunities. You can track your performance over time by testing your page on a schedule to keep track of how it's doing. Set up an alert and get notified when your page underperforms and receive an alert linked to a full report so you can know what happened. With GTmetrix PRO, you can test your page on a real Android device or on over 30 different simulated device options. Analyze your performance with iPhones, iPads, Samsung Galaxy/Note, Google Nexus/Pixel phones and other popular devices.

Web traffic tools

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a free, widely used web and app analysis platform for measuring traffic and processing and reporting data. Data can be analyzed in real time, by certain days, a specific month and even year-over-year. The data generated through Google Analytics can be organized by a wide variety of criteria including overall traffic, page traffic, user sessions, device used, event engagement, geographic location and user demographics. Users can filter out internal company traffic and developer traffic to get a true picture of engagement with a website or app.

Ahrefs: Ahrefs is a SaaS company that provides online SEO tools for marketing professionals. The company runs its own search engine and it’s crawler processes up to 8 billion pages a day—making it the third most active crawler on the web. As an all-in-one SEO toolset, Ahrefs can be used to explore website traffic and analyze competitors, conduct audits and optimize a website, explore keywords your customers are search for, discover content ideas and link opportunities, and track ranking progress.

Similarweb: Similarweb offers traffic analysis tools to uncover insights and opportunities to improve digital marketing. It’s used by small businesses and large international enterprises alike to capture and index public data from billions of website pages and apps every month. Similarweb empowers you to gather intelligence on competitors’ websites to compare online strategies. It also reveals engagement metrics so you can understand actual engagement with your website.

SEMrush: SEMrush traffic analytics lets you unearth competitors’ site traffic, set benchmarks and track trends. It shows a range of data inluding total number of visitors, unique visitors, pages per visit, average visit duration and bounce rate. SEMrush also displays the breakdown of devices (mobile or desktop) and percentage of global traffic by country. It leverages real user data to explore the traffic journey and pinpoints other platforms that drive the most website traffic to your competitors’ websites.

Considerations when choosing and setting up tools for website analysis

With a number of specialized analysis tools and DXI platforms that combine multiple tools into a single platform, choosing the best solution for your specific situation can seem like a daunting task. The good news? The digital space is in constant evolution and that applies to your website analysis approach and the tools you use. It’s ok to make a decision and pivot when needed if a better fit materializes.

Customer-centric website analysis with digital experience intelligence

The most important view to maintain when picking a DXI platform is: How will this experience make the experience better for my customers? Leadership might want to be able to make data-informed decisions about your product, legal might be looking for digital record keeping for compliance and the marketing team might be looking to map the customer journey—but anything you want from your system should ultimately ladder up to improving the customer experience.

Since we know it can be difficult to identify a definitive list of selection criteria but there a few things to keep in mind as you work through your process:

Identify your objectives

The main objectives for your website analysis are more important than the tools involved. In addition to having a clear picture for what you’re trying to achieve with your analysis, identifying a specific set of business problems or opportunities where your website experience can provide the biggest impact. Make sure your tools are a good fit for helping you achieve those objectives.

Find similar use cases

You are not alone in your pursuit of analyzing your website to optimize the user experience. Through research and networking conversations, you should be able to get a sense for the website analysis tools people in your industry are using to solve some of the same challenges you’re facing.

Keep focused on your end-users

Your website visitors and existing customers are taking journeys that touch many areas of your business. To get the most out of your website analysis and the data you’ll collect, it’s important to have tools that facilitate the involvement of multiple teams and roles within the company. This cohesive approach allows the subject matter experts in each of these areas to impart their knowledge and feedback to help guide decisions that lead to better experiences on your website.