Top five ways to conduct research for an effective new website

And suddenly, it hit you. You need to redesign your website.

You have two options. You can give your existing website a facelift and hope it’s effective. After all, it worked well for you years ago … right?

Or you can invest a little extra time and money on the following research, ensuring your website is as effective as your budget allows.

1. Take an inventory of your existing website.
Before you begin, you need to know what you’re working with. Become familiar with your website structure. Note content that needs to be updated.

2. Complete a competitive analysis.
Compare the design, usability and information architecture of key competitors’ websites. Learn from their successes and mistakes, and determine how you can do it better. Take note of best practices. For example, if you call a category by one name and your competitors call it something else, you may be confusing users.

3. Conduct stakeholder research.
Interview or survey a cross-section of internal stakeholders to determine the goals and objectives for your new website. Seek consensus and prioritize needs. Then ask external stakeholders about how they use the Web, what content and features are important to them, and how your website compares with the others.

4. Review your search engine optimization efforts.
Keywords, in-bound linking, blogs and social media are all ways to improve your search engine ranking. If you’re not using them, you may want to. If you are, can you be using them more effectively?

5. User testing
Watch real users explore your existing website, and later, a wire frame or prototype of your new website. Look and listen for areas of your website that may need improvement.

Sure, the research is a bigger investment in time and finances now. But if you choose to update just the look of your website – and not its features and content – you will be paying for it later in lost traffic and failed conversions.

At Hellman, we offer a comprehensive Web marketing research and planning service called “Phase 1.” Contact us to learn more about how we can optimize your existing website and develop a strategy to generate new traffic and leads through search marketing, social media, PR, blogs and e-mail marketing.

Tags: Advertising, blog, e-mail marketing, Hellman, Interactive, Iowa, Marketing, pr, Public Relations, search marketing, SEO, social media, strategy, user testing, Waterloo, web design, web marketing, web marketing research, website marketing