In website building, it seems that gathering premium content is the first step. Then come accessibility practices and SEO strategies. What more is needed? Well, it’s about time to gather more data from…the users!

Testing incoming traffic

So, SEO is not enough, because it is directed at AI and Search engines. But we make websites with real people in mind. Therefore, it is important to check if our findability strategies are effective. This is what testing is all about: finding out if our predictions regarding the usability of our website are worth anything in reality.

Traffic analysis is more that compiling numbers about who visited a page and when. Most website tracking tools have the benefits of giving flexible settings such as collecting the demographics, the entry points and the localisation of the audience. It is also possible to test which pages are most or least popular among visitors over a set period of time.

Remodelling UX and UI

Let’s say I have created this brilliant blog about my favourite Science channel. I have created a section called “useful links”, thinking that all the aficionados out there would go for it. My traffic analysis tool crunches the numbers and tells me that nobody is clicking this page at all. WHY?

It is simply time to call for surveys, remote user feedback and user observations. Analytics only give data, but there are many reasons why users experience a website in a certain way. For example, it could be that my visitors only want to read information about my channel. It could also be that the title of my section is too vague. Or maybe the link to the section is not very visible.

And it’s often said that the key content needs to appear on the homepage or within 2 clicks of their landing page. Users do not want to think, they want to search, click, find and enjoy. And if they can’t find due to server errors, well it pays to anticipate this with personalised 404 Error pages. This is the subject of my next article.

Sources:

Makeuseof.com: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-websites-to-track-a-websites-traffic/

UXplanet.org: https://uxplanet.org/20-tools-to-test-how-your-users-experience-your-website-1a776c61ebce

Gathercontent.com: https://gathercontent.com/blog/statistics-make-content-findable