21 Questions

Almost every business these days owns a website, but not every business makes the most of being online – does this statement feel familiar to you?

If so, you may want to take a quick trip through this game of “21 Questions” we setup to help you analyse your website and whether you’re doing enough to make it work harder for you.

These questions are broken up into four main sections (strategic, content, SEO and technical) which should help guide you in understanding where you should focus your efforts on developing your digital presence. 

Of course, if you need any help with the answers to any of these questions for your site, feel free to get in touch with us!

Strategic questions

Q1: What is the purpose of your website?

Yes, really. Why does your website exist? Do you sell a product or service on it directly? Do you want to increase leads for B2B? Are you trying to increase brand awareness or are you a publisher just looking for more readers? What you are trying to do with your site should influence how you set your site up to be most useful for your visitors.

Q2: Who is your target audience?

It’s important to know who you are targeting your website to in order to show them information that is both relevant and beneficial to their needs. If you have multiple distinct audience groups how is this reflected on your site? Do you offer them a different experience or pathway to get to what they need?

Q3: Are you interested in a specific region or language?

As best as you can you should ensure your website feels exactly right for every visitor to your site. This may mean having multiple domains or landing pages to give your users language, grammar, imagery and contact details relevant to them. Marketing in the UK? Perhaps you should be using a .co.uk rather than .com address.

Q4: What is your business unique selling point (USP)?

Businesses don’t often know what their USP is – but this is key to standing out against your competition. In a world where a single phrase relevant to your business can return 1,000s of like-for-like results in a search engine – what will make your business stand out? 

Q5: What is your biggest source of traffic?

We talk a lot about SEO in terms of website traffic but not all website’s prime drivers of traffic are actually search engines. In some cases you may have a stronger audience from email marketing or even social media. Recognising which source provides you the most visitors should influence your marketing efforts.

Q6: What is your most effective source of traffic?

Your biggest traffic source may not, however, be your most effective. Do you know which channel leads to the most sales? If you sell a product or capture leads via forms, or even have any other key actions on your website like blog readership or video views you need to find out which source of traffic actually results in the most success for your goals.

Content questions

Q7: What are your most popular pages?

This is one that most website owners do actually know, but it’s always worth keeping an eye on your top performing pages – especially if you are a content producer as this may change week-to-week depending on your audience’s interests. 

Q8: What is your cornerstone content?

Much like a cornerstone of a building marks the foundation of that site, your cornerstone content on your website should be the home of information that is foundational to everything you do. This should detail your major services or operations or key steps in your user’s journey. You should also have a detailed plan for linking other content to these critical pages.

Q9: What content is important for your customer’s buying journey?

There may be multiple steps to a buying journey and it doesn’t just involve knowing the price and details of a product. There may be other influencers that direct your visitors to a sale. For B2C this could include product guarantees, delivery information or return policies, while in B2B your audience may want assurances on counterfeit protection, brand stability or even values your business believes in.

Q10: Is it easy to find content on your site?

Is it actually easy to find something on your website? This is not always the case. If your website has a lot of content presumably not all of it fits into the main navigation. Do you then support this content with good links elsewhere? Do you have a search facility to look for content? Are the search results well setup to discover the content? All questions that must be asked.

Q11: Are you learning from your user’s behaviours?

Have you ever changed your website content because of something you learned about your users? If not, perhaps it’s time. This could simply be looking at the pages they view the most, videos they watch the most, why they read further on some pages and not others, or even what they searched for on your site.

SEO questions

Q12: What search terms do you want to rank for?

As we mentioned organic search traffic can be a huge driver of visitors to your website but do you know what terms you need to be ranking for? If you’re not clear with what users should search for to find you then it’s unlikely your website has been setup to attract them.

Q13: What pages on your website actually rank for search terms?

So you may receive some organic traffic from search engines but do you know which pages these actually refer to? Some pages are much better than others at ranking online and some pages are complete surprises to how they’ve become successful. Not all of your pages will rank online.

Q14: What search terms do they rank for?

If you do know which pages of yours are successful at ranking online, do you know the terms they rank for? If you have a page with a successful ranking, the last thing you want to do is make content changes that actually make it worse for the term it was bringing in traffic for you.

Q15: What do your search results say about your business?

When your website appears in a search result it shares a headline and a description – both of these you can manually amend. But do your title tags and meta descriptions say the right thing? Are they attractive to potential visitors, or do your competitors have the edge?

Q16: Who appears top for your ideal search terms?

If you aren’t the no.1 result for your ideal search terms, then who is? And how are they doing it? Competitor analysis is important for SEO marketing because there’s no “joint top” spot. If you aren’t no.1 then someone else is, and that leads to better traffic for their business and not yours.

Technical questions

Q17: How fast does your website load?

This isn’t a discussion based on vague parameters of ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ or ‘a bit laggy’, this is an exact measurement. Site speed is not only useful for your user’s experience of your website but it is also a ranking factor for most major search engines. Free testing is available online.

Q18: When were your site’s key pages last updated?

You may have a website that brings you lots of traffic and has done for a long time, but have you done anything to retain that? There is so much new content circulating the web that you could easily slip down the rankings. Make sure you update your main pages and even drive new traffic to them from internal and other links.

Q19: Does your site work on mobile devices?

Another major ranking factor for search engines is mobile compatibility – so much so that it is now the main consideration for Google. It doesn’t matter that your business is B2B and your users are primarily desktop-based, Google factors how they’ll use your site if they visit on a mobile for a full perspective.

Q20: When did you last test your contact forms?

Something that happens surprisingly often with sites who don’t check and update their content regularly is that contact forms don’t work! If you’re receiving fewer leads from your website than you’re used to then there might be a technical reason. Don’t leave business at the door.

Q21: Is your site GDPR compliant?

We’re not just talking cookie policies (although these are still very relevant) but all aspects of data protection. The last thing you want is a successful site that gets shutdown because it’s broken data laws. This should be monitored in particular with the more digitally stringent e-privacy law due for a revision in the next couple of years.

Got a question, about our 21 questions?! Get in touch!