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Written by Anouk van Iersel, 17 March 2022

Website research: discover areas of improvement for your site

Our clients are excited: in fact, our new website research called, Resultsmatter preliminary research, shows them exactly where their existing website needs improvement. We look at each site from the point of view of visitors, search engines and competitors, then come up with clear action points. Find out here if such an analysis is for you.

Why a website survey?

To reach a new destination, you must first know where you stand. This is true of many things; including a website. If you pursue online success, you need goals and you need to know how far away you are from those goals. 2manydots’ website research vets your site from top to bottom. You will benefit from technical knowledge, web design experience and SEO expertise.

What does Resultsmatter preliminary research consist of?

2manydots’ preliminary research is a thorough analysis of your existing website. This will give you a complete picture of areas for improvement. Action items that not only make the site more findable in search engines, but also provide a more pleasant experience for visitors. Specifically, we will go over the following items.

Target audience

To create a good Web site that attracts the right audience, you first want to be clear about which people that audience consists of. Together with the client, we put them on paper. Sometimes we can see right away where the shoe pinches: the design or texts do not connect well with the target audience. This is especially true when a company is targeting new audiences but the website is not adapted to them.

Market Movement

Are there any market trends that may affect visitors or leads? In this chapter, we identify them. This may involve changing demand from (potential) customers or additional marketing efforts by competitors. A pandemic or economic crisis can also shake up the market quite a bit.

Website findability

The most important part of the Resultsmatter preliminary research is the findability analysis. With this, we focus on findability in the most widely used search engine in the world: Google. The findability study is divided into four elements:

  • First, we conduct a baseline measurement. From this roll the search terms on which your website is already being found, your rankings in search results, the most popular pages among visitors and any trends in visitor numbers. These numbers provide a benchmark against which we can judge the success of improvements to the site.
  • We then do a
    technical SEO research
    . After all, the existing website can have such strong content, but if Google’s crawler cannot reach it, your site will not be indexed well enough. For example, we look at whether the alt texts, page titles and meta descriptions are optimized and whether there are pages with status codes (301, 307, 404). When the time comes to develop the new website, we solve these technical SEO problems.
  • We also provide a
    keyword research
    . We discover what your target audiences are really searching for, in part by looking at what search terms your competitors are scoring on. We group search terms by topic and recommend a page structure that is search engine friendly.
  • Finally, we conduct a broader website scan. That identifies potential risks, such as plugins that can cause errors or take a site off the air altogether and insufficient security against hackers. We also test the loading speed on mobile devices and desktop computers, both from the Netherlands and from foreign servers.

Additional questions

In the preliminary stage, the client can ask questions that we can answer with our analysis. For example, one of our clients asked whether the search function on the website was used at all and whether there were any pages that were hardly visited or not visited at all.

User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI).

How are the user experience and visual appearance of the website? We answer these questions in the UX and UI section of the website survey. We look at the extent to which the user is central, whether the website is consistent and the look is modern. Possibly supported by screenshots, we show where the site could be clearer.

Conclusion

Thus, website research not only finds defects, but also offers you direction. But what is the overall conclusion from the multiple scans we perform for you? You’ll read about it in this final chapter, which you can present to executives as a summary if you wish.

The preliminary research is done; now what?

Website research exposes weaknesses and gives you a thorough understanding of the website. You could work on that yourself, if you have the knowledge and time to do so. Clients often take on part of the open tasks: for example, they get to work writing the SEO content. But even that is a job the copywriters at 2manydots can help with.

A logical continuation of the preliminary research is a full Resultsmatter process, in which 2manydots’ professionals get to work optimizing your website. Through constant measurement and improvement and regular consultation, we grow together to create the best possible version of your website – and you can see it in the results!

Interested in more visitors, more leads and a stronger brand? Resultsmatter, the name says it all, promises resounding results. Contact us for free information about the website research or the actual Resultsmatter process.