Website redesign is a phrase which sparks fear and doubts into the hearts of many marketers and business owners. It’s often an expensive and time-consuming process which requires a lot of effort in terms of planning, wireframing, data audits and quality testings. Instead of focusing on marketing, which is the main reason the website is built and updated every once in awhile, the whole team directs their focus to the all-absorbing redesign problems. And there’s still no guarantee that the redesigned website will return the investment with better performance and higher conversion rates.
The good news is that there’s a smarter alternative to the traditional, outdated approach to website design. And this new approach is called Growth-Driven Design. It eliminates the headache and challenges of the website redesign and provides a reliable and stable growth through continuous learning, analysis and informed decisions.
What’s Growth-Driven Design and How Does It Benefit Your Business?
Unlike the traditional website redesign which is a one-time event, Growth-Driven Design, also known as incremental design, doesn’t have finite start and end. It is an ongoing process which focuses on smaller-scale goals on every stage and uses real-time data to guide the decisions of design and development. The ability to track who visits your website, how they get there, how long they stay on each page and what they click on, arms you with the necessary information to judge what aspects your site should be improved or totally changed.
Many businesses use their own website analytics to track the overall traffic, user behavior and conversion rates to plan their next steps in the website development process. But a more successful implementation of data-driven design requires a deeper approach. Not only you need to analyze what works and what doesn’t work on your own website, but also learn every in and out of your competitor websites to see what you are missing from yours. This will help you keep your finger on the pulse of online marketing and website design trends and maintain your own site up to date.
Whether you run a big eCommerce or a small restaurant, you need to collect and analyze a massive amount of data. While tracking the performance of your own website is a relatively easy task, conducting a competitive analysis and consumer research requires more time and effort.
And here is where Data Scraping comes in handy.
Data scraping, also known as web crawling, is the process of extracting and collecting the actionable data practically from any source across the Internet. Here is how data scraping can facilitate your decision-making process and help you take the guesswork out of your website design.
Analyzing Your Competitors
As a business owner, you need to be aware of your competitor’s online activities. After all, if you don’t have an idea about what they do on their websites, you can’t know what moves you should take in response to build a competitive edge for your business. The first step towards competitive analysis is to look at the market and find the companies competing with you.
Next, you can either dive into the “ocean of information” to collect and analyze massive piles of data on your own or turn to web crawling services, which will provide a complete service of harvesting, collecting and structuring the required data. Instead of just opening Google and making hundreds of searches, you can have data scraping services, like Datahen, do the legwork for you, saving you time and allowing you to concentrate on other tasks.
Data scraping will allow you to gain a lot of insight about your competitors, from what they have to offer to their pricing strategy. For example, if you run an eCommerce website and want to see what products your opponents sell on their websites and what their prices look like, you can apply data scraping to gather all the information from your competitor’s product pages and pricing lists at any frequency to monitor the changes on their websites and keep track of historical data.
Web crawling services will provide the harvested data already structured and converted into the format of your choice. Having this insight will help you to stay in the loop about the market trends and adapt your strategy to your competitor’s actions.
Analyzing User Behavior and Preferences
Although opinion mining is an increasingly popular research technique, analyzing user comments and reviews on social media on your own can be a tedious task due to a large amount of data and certain restrictions some social networks have in place.
Web crawling services not only enable you to extract massive volumes of data from competitor websites but also to scrape social media, extracting information about the users based on targeted keywords and profiles. Web scraping services apply customizable crawling of forums, industry-related blogs and social media networks, like Facebook or Twitter, to analyze user reviews and feedback, conduct brand analysis and brand monitoring. This data helps you understand and predict the behavior of your potential customers and tailor your website to the user profiles you create based on this data.
Understanding user behavior across different social networks can be helpful during the website design process in a number of ways. It guides you in the evaluation of your existing content and leads to better decisions for website design and customer engagement. At the end of the day, any business becomes a brand when it aligns its service and strategy with the opinions, sentiments, and needs of its customers.
Conclusion
Growth-driven design is a smart approach to web development which enables you to make continuous adaptations based on real-time data monitoring and make every little element of your site perfect for users. Analyzing your own website performance, tracking your competitors and gaining competitive intelligence may seem a difficult task, but web scraping services make it incredibly easy. It allows you to selectively harvest data from competitor websites and social media, develop your own brand strategy and get ahead of the pack in your niche.
