Researching your market is a key factor in business success. You need to know if potential clients are available in sufficient volume to bring a profit and whether they can be reached in a cost effective way.
As clients come, you have to understand their requirements, whether they are satisfied, if there are further opportunities you could share with them.
The web is a good place for all the above. Your website can drive awareness and create emotional engagement, clarify the value you offer. Understanding is then enhanced by the data your site returns and additional information from the web.
Accessing Data
The UK’s leading search engine provides useful options for online market analysis, such as Google Trends and their AdWords keyword tool. They can help with assessing market volume and targeting a website.
Google also offer a free, easy to add analytics system, to better understand the way people respond to your website. Whilst mainly aimed at technical compliance, their Search Console facility can bring useful pointers.
There are other services available to collate, or analyse website data. Heat maps can show how each page is used, the completion, or abandonment of forms can be studied, specialist software may assist, such as the type our analysts use.
Website reports will at times benefit from a deeper market analysis, or a study of website user behaviour. Even so, we would suggest that just using freely available data correctly can take you a long way.
Using The Input
Keyword data from Google Trends, or AdWords is not exact but close enough to appreciate how many people are searching for your product, or service online. The terms they might use to find you can also be traced.
They may be different from your expectations, or internal terminology and should be identified. Stuffing a website with keywords is not wise in Google’s AI driven world but the site still needs to be about searched for topics.
If the market is there and your website well optimised, you should then have an opportunity to see how your users behave. Are certain pages failing, with users just bouncing off, do people take the online journey you want them to.
Analysing the performance of key pages is vital and not just the home, or other landing pages, shopping carts, or contact pages tell a story. From the structure of the site, to placement of a button, be prepared to make changes.
The Wider Picture
The web provides further opportunities, competitor analysis can help, along with their popularity online and your own. As with keywords, inbound links for their own sake may not be useful but relevant ones will be.
Whilst not for everyone, in certain sectors, social media presence and reach will matter. Understanding your customers views is an additional opportunity.
Taking a balanced, productive view of your business life online can require experience but for all of us, so much data is there to assist. Time taken to learn about the available facilities is well spent.