With your website analysis to success

Your website is your business card on the web for your products and services. In order to remain visible to your customers on the web, an analysis of your website is necessary at regular intervals. As soon as you put your site through its paces, you should consider several factors. We explain to you what a website analysis actually is and which aspects you should pay attention to.

What is a website analysis?
How do you start with a website analysis?
The 6 steps to analyze your website
What are website analysis tools?
Why schould you perform a website analysis regularly?
To the point – Conclusion

What is a website analysis?

A website analysis focuses on quality and the associated success. A website is often the most important marketing tool of a company and now goes far beyond the function of a “digital flagship”. Youre website should inform, entertain and sell the user. With a regular check of your website you take a closer look at the following points:

• Traffic Key Figures & Sources
• Content and sources of your website
• Pagespeed of the page
• Usability

All these factors give you information about possible weak points on your website and can contribute to the continuous optimization process. A well-functioning website is not only worth a visit for the user, but also your ranking in the SERPs will improve and remain constantly good.

How do you start with a website analysis?

At the beginning of your website analysis you should simply click through your website. Here you can already consider the following points:

• Do all links work?
• Is the content all in the right place?
• Does the page structure make sense?
• Are the look and design still up to date?

Often you are already a bit blind for your own website, which is why you can get help from a new colleague, an acquaintance or a relative. The input of a new user on the site can already give you very valuable insights.

The second step is a bit more technical. Here you evaluate the digital key figures and interpret them. Tools like Google Analytics can be used to evaluate a lot of information for your website analysis, but not all values are interesting for everyone. This depends on which target group you want to address, in which industry you are active and which business model you are pursuing. The most important KPIs for a company are usually:

• Visibility
• Visitor numbers & sources
• User dwell time
• Bounce rate & exit page
• Conversion Rate

The 6 steps to analyze your website

The beginning of your website analysis is done. With the following 6 steps you go even deeper into the check of your website. All key figures, which you receive during your analysis, show you how you can further optimize your website. The analysis and evaluation of the data should be firmly anchored in your daily routine. A sporadic website analysis, for example once a year, will not help you in the long run.

Step 1: The traffic

Traffic metrics refer to the number of users who visit and interact with your website. Traffic can be broken down into the following values:

1. The conversion rate: It is an important KPI of your website and indicates the percentage ratio between the number of your website visitors and the resulting sales (conversions). There is no one-size-fits-all answer to how high a good conversion rate should be. This depends on factors such as price, products offered or the current season.
   You can easily calculate your conversion rate:

2. The user: This analysis gives you information about how many visitors your website had in a certain period of time. As a rule, you can select here by days, months or a whole year. It is important to note, however, that the analysis tools do not count individual people here, but end devices. If two people use the same device and visit your website, they will be displayed as one user.

3. The dwell time: One of the most important points in your website analysis. The dwell time gives you information about how long the user stays on your website. A very short dwell time is not necessarily a bad thing, for example, if the user has found what he is looking for very quickly. A longer dwell time indicates that the user has conscientiously read an article about your product or service, for example.

Step 2: The traffic sources

In the first step, you have now analyzed how many users come to your website, how long they stay and how high your conversion rate is. Now it’s time to evaluate where your website visitors come from. This will tell you in which areas you are already doing well and in which areas you still need to improve. You can take a closer look at the following traffic sources in this step:

1. Organic Search: This value tells you how many users reach your website via the organic search of a search engine, such as Google.
   
   
2. Refferral Traffic: If one of your partners has set a backlink to your website, the user will reach your site via your partner’s website. This key figure gives you information about how many visitors reach your website via a backlink.
   
   
3. Direct traffic: These are visitors to the website who already know your URL. This can be, for example, existing customers or interested parties who have become aware of you through a flyer or similar.
   
   

4. Social media: Almost every company has a social media account nowadays. When evaluating this traffic source, you get an analysis of how many users come to your website via your social media accounts, such as Facebook, Instagram, XING or LinkedIn.

Learn more about how to use social media marketing correctly.

5. Email: “Old but gold” is the guiding principle for traffic generated from e-mails. For example, users can become aware of news on your website through a newsletter. By using UTM parameters for the links in your e-mail, you can better evaluate how many users come to your website.
   
   
6. Ads: If you have online advertising measures in use, this evaluation gives you information about how many users come to your website via your ads. Especially this traffic source shows you whether the money invested in ads has a benefit for you, or whether you need to optimize your ads.

Don’t become dependent on just one traffic source. If this one is doing well, make sure it stays that way and invest time in optimizing other traffic sources.

Step 3: Content & Quality

As Bill Gates said, “Content first“. This may seem a bit cliché to you at first, but this guiding principle still applies. In this step of your website analysis you take care of the evaluation of the content of your website. Take a closer look at the following points:

• Keywords: Are you using the right keywords so that the user can find your site?
• Page Performance: What content interests your users the most?
• Target group: Do you address your target group with your content?
• Textual content: Does your content make sense and offer the visitor added value? Do you use different types of presentation such as tables or bulleted lists?
• Visual content: Have you taken care of metadata and alt tags? Do you present more complex content with infographics or explainer videos?

Here you can find more about content optimization😊

Step 4: Speed

The lack of speed of a website is one of the most common reasons for a user to bounce. Surely you have already had the experience that you landed on a website where the content loaded very slowly and you did not stay very long on this website.
So that this does not happen to you with your website and you can show a good pagespeed, you should take a closer look at the following points:

1. Image size & format: The image files you use on your website should not be too large. Upload images as small as possible without blurring them and make sure you upload your images compressed.

Free online tools such as tinypng can give you the best compression of images for the web.

2. JavaScript & CSS: Check if your website contains unused JavaScript or CSS. This can slow down your website and is just unnecessary ballast.

You can easily find out how the pagespeed of your current page looks like via Google’s PageSpeed Test.

Step 5: Usability

In this step of your website analysis you check the user-friendliness of your website. Nothing is worse for the visitor than an unstructured and unclear website. Take a close look at the following aspects:

• Structure and navigation: Check whether the content of your website is structured. Only then can the user navigate independently through your website. Make the structure of your site as simple as possible and offer the visitor added value at all times.
  
  
• Corporate Design: A point, which is often “only” subconsciously perceived by many users, but is just perceived. Your corporate design should be consistent throughout the entire website. If you change too often between different designs on your website, the user might get the impression that he has left your website in the meantime. A consistent corporate design also increases the recognition value of your company.
  

• Unambiguity: Take a close look at whether it is clear to the user within a few moments what your website is about. Especially when using landing pages, you should make sure to prepare the user for the following content with the right keywords right at the beginning.

Read more about increasing the satisfaction of your website visitors with usability here!

Step 6: SEO audit

In the last step of the website check, you subject your website to an audit according to important SEO aspects. Whether the focus of your SEO audit is on content-related topics or technical search engine optimization depends on your goals and can therefore vary. During your SEO audit you should check the following points:

1. Status quo of your website: At the beginning of your audit, you first get an overview of the current state of your website. Analyze your visibility on Google, the traffic on your website and your CTR.
    
2. Technical check: Here you check the sitemap and redirects of your website. Also, analyze exactly if your website has technical problems or duplicate content inside and outside your website.
   
   
3. Performance: How high is the loading time of my website? Have I paid attention to image optimization? What about my core web vitals?
   These are all questions you should ask yourself when looking at the
   performance of your website.
   
   
4. Snippets & Metadata: Always remember to maintain your metadata and alt tags properly. Check if this has been done consistently on your current website. Give your website and subpages meaningful titles and descriptions.
   
   
5. URL analysis: As part of your SEO audit, check whether your URLs are meaningful. Your focus keyword should definitely appear in it.
   
   

6. Linkbuilding: The last step in your little SEO audit. Here you take a closer look at the links of your website. If you use internal links, check if they are still up to date and working. You should do the same with the backlinks.

Learn more about how to create the perfect SEO audit here 😊

What are Website Analysis Tools?

For your website analysis, there are numerous tools available free of charge or for a fee. We have summarized our three favorites for you here:

1. Google Analytics:
   As a free service from Google, this analysis tool provides you with information about the traffic, the traffic sources and the behavior of the user on your website.
   In order to access the data of visitors to your website in compliance with the German Data Protection Act (DSGVO), you must inform them that you are collecting this data. Of course, there will always be users who object to the use of cookies for analysis, which is why the analysis data at Google Analytics does not quite correspond 100% to reality.

We have an article for you on how to get started with Google Analytics.

2. Google Search Console:
3. Also a free service from Google. The Search Console helps you monitor the presence of your website in Google search results. It also provides you with information about the functionality of your website on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. Unlike Google Analytics, no personal data is displayed here. This means that it can be used at any time in compliance with data protection laws and is therefore a popular must-have for website analysis.

3. Developer Tools:
   In modern browsers like Google Chrome or Firefox, the Developer Tools are already integrated. They give you a quick overview of a variety of topics and potentials. To be able to use the developer tools well, however, you should have a little bit of developer or programming experience.

Why should you perform a website analysis regularly?

Simply creating a website and putting it online is no longer enough these days. The state of the art is constantly evolving. The user’s expectations of a website are also completely different today than they were perhaps 10 years ago.
More than “just” a website is now required for visibility on the web. Important points are for example:

• Informative & meaningful content
• Addressing the right target group
• Responsive design
• Accessibility
• Internal linking & external linking
• Use of the right keywords
• Maintained metadata
• Fast pagespeed

A regular website analysis brings you permanently forward in the SERPs and always shows you current weak points of your website. This way you can keep your online presence up to date at all times and guarantee the user the best possible visitor experience.

To the point – Conclusion

A detailed analysis of your website takes time. You should go through all the points at your leisure in order to obtain really meaningful evaluations. In addition, it makes sense to not only sporadically perform the website check, but to integrate it into your daily routine and let it run rudimentarily.
Often companies lack the time and the necessary know-how to perform a detailed website analysis, but fortunately there is a solution for this as well. You can turn to an agency, which helps you with these ToDo’s under the arms and helps you regularly. Weaknesses of your website can be discovered and fixed faster.