Website analysis: monitoring data that matters

2/13/19

Scheduling a website review is a little like flossing: you know it’s important, but it’s awfully easy to put off.

You might boast the best bank website design on the planet, but without regular maintenance, any website can fall into disrepair. At BrownBoots, we make ongoing website analysis as easy — and painless — as possible by offering our clients a website analytics report that contains key information in an easy-to-understand format. We also make recommendations based on our findings.

In our professional opinion, reviewing website data once a quarter does wonders for keeping websites healthy. Yet even annual reports are worthwhile. As with flossing, something is better than nothing!

But what, exactly, belongs in a website analytics report?

Bank Website Traffic Trends

Google Analytics is a beautiful tool, and we won’t launch a website without integrating it. While Google Analytics allows us to dig very deep into website data, we focus primarily on the statistics that most impact banks and credit unions.

Here are a few examples:

• General Traffic Overview: total sessions, users, pageviews, bounce rate, usage anomalies and so forth
• Sessions by Channel: a breakdown of sources, including direct traffic, organic search, paid search, social, email and other referring websites
• Top 10 Pages: tracking popular pages for desktop and tablet as well as mobile devices
• Geography: a list of the cities responsible for the most sessions
• Organic Keywords: the keywords that prompted traffic from search engines
• Social Media: landing pages from social media websites and the number of referrals per channel
• Site Search Terms: a full list of words and phrases visitors typed into the website’s own search field
• Trends for Key Pages: weekly and quarterly pageviews for important pages, such as Checking Accounts, Savings Accounts and Mortgages
• Contact Us Form: the number of visits to this page and conversion rate for the webform

And because we are big fans of context, we also include legacy data in our website analytics report — stats from the prior period as well as the same period last year.

SEO Analysis

For those clients who take advantage of our SEO (search engine optimization) service, we track ranked keywords and pages for predetermined keywords, not only for the client, but also for competitors.

Because the ranking of any given keyword can change from day to day as new websites crop up and as Google tinkers with its algorithm, we also record the average ranking for each keyword to provide the most accurate results.

Ideally, the highest ranked keywords will correspond to the list of organic keywords that brought traffic to the site, included in the prior section of the report.

The best SEO for banks leverages inbound links. Also called backlinks, inbound links are external websites that link to the website in question. Our website analysis report lists new inbound links for the period and shows the Link Influence Score (LIS), which indicates how high a search engine ranks the link. (The higher the LIS, the more valuable the backlink.)

ADA Compliance & Website Scan

Google Analytics and SEO monitoring can reveal what’s working well and, to a lesser extent, what might be ineffective. However, if there’s something wrong with a bank website, we want to know about it so we can fix it.

To discover such issues, we use a program that scans every page of the website in search of everything from broken links and missing metadata to ADA compliance problems. This website audit classifies concerning items in three categories:

• Errors: issues that can have a negative impact on user experience as well as a negative influence on SEO rankings
• Warnings: issues that, if resolved, could improve search engine rankings
• Notices: non-critical items that could positively impact SEO if fixed

Websites change over time — and so does legislation. To ensure our credit union and bank websites remain ADA compliant, we run a specific website scan to check for violations. If any issues are discovered, we promptly rectify them (if it’s a code-based problem) or let the client know (if it’s a content-based problem).

Finally, we take everything we’ve found and compile a list of suggested action items. These recommendations range from essential fixes to enhancements for making the website more effective.

Which brings us back to the flossing analogy. Sure, you can skip the website scan, but banks that choose routine care have a better chance of making their websites as bright and effective as possible.

And that right there is a good reason to smile!

Contact BrownBoots for your next website analysis.