What is User Behavior Analysis? 4 Essential Methods and 1 Secret Weapon to Outshine Your Competition
In today's digital age, having a fast, high-ranking, and user-friendly website is crucial. However, building a website that your users love is even more important. To achieve this, it's essential to perform a website analysis that includes a user-led approach. In this article, we'll be sharing four methods for analyzing your site's performance and one way to ensure customer delight.
SEO Analysis
SEO analysis is essential to rank higher and get more organic traffic to your site. To perform an SEO analysis, you'll need to conduct on-page audits to identify technical issues like broken links or missing title tags. You'll also need to perform a search engine ranking analysis to track your position in search results for keywords and conduct a backlink analysis to see who links to your site, what anchor text they use, and how it compares to your competition.
Tools that can assist with SEO analysis include Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Ahrefs.
Website Performance Analysis
Slow websites can be frustrating for users and won't rank high in search results. To determine how fast or slow your website is, you can use free tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom. By analyzing areas like page size, load time, and HTTP requests, you can identify what needs fixing for faster results.
Competitive Analysis
Understanding your competitors is crucial to spot threats and growth opportunities. By conducting manual research, you can find answers to questions like "How does our product compare to others in the space?" and "What is our competition currently doing?"
To compare your site to your competitors, you can use tools like SEMrush and Similarweb. These tools tell you how much traffic your competition gets and where it comes from.
Traffic Analysis
Knowing how your site performs with your audience is crucial to understanding how to invest your resources. To determine this, you can use tools like Google Analytics or Open Web Analytics to see where your traffic comes from, how popular your pages are, which of your pages are most popular, which traffic sources convert best, and where you lose potential customers on your site.
User Behavior Analysis
While the four analysis methods above are a great start, they don't necessarily give you a competitive advantage. After all, your competition has access to the same tools and can gather the same information. This is where user behavior analysis comes in.
Your unique audience is your secret weapon, and they have all the information you need about what is and isn't working on your site. By using tools like Hotjar's heat maps and session recordings, you can see how people interact with your site. This allows you to understand user behavior and spot areas of your site that need improvement.
But what's even more valuable is adding context to user behavior to understand why they use your site the way they do. Hotjar surveys and incoming feedback tools let you gather in-the-moment, voice-of-the-customer data. This allows your users to tell you exactly what they love and hate about your site, helping you make changes that will bring the fastest results and delight your customers.
Website analysis is essential to understanding the performance of your site and product. However, to really outshine the competition with a product people love, you need to complement your analysis with user behavior analysis tools like Hotjar. By signing up for free today, you can start gathering valuable data to help improve your website's performance and delight your users.