Data miner

The most important way to run a new website project is to engage directly with end users and the goals of the business. By talking to people in person the insight gained is invaluable. However, this can definitely be complimented by a decent amount of desk research.

Over the last few weeks we've been pulling together all the data sources at our disposal to get a full picture of our current users. We also have a lot of extra information around key clients and opportunities in our increasingly powerful CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

Social media

One task which we're looking at is an overview of our current social media channels. This isn't a full review of their effectiveness to define the strategy, but more taking stock of where we currently are. After all, I have to have a project to keep me busy once the website is live! I'm looking at:

• The most shared content from us and our competitors
• Phraseology to determine discipline around industry language
• Positive and negative sentiment to inform the content strategy and customer service focus 

This will give us a good insight into how our current channels and the terminology used on the website will work together.

Existing site map

It's important to have this logged before work begins! A nice free tool for doing this to GlooMaps. It has all the sharing and export options you could possibly need and is really user friendly.

Contact us form

Our current form pipes queries through to the relevant part of the business based on the enquiry type. This means we can export a full report of all submissions from 2017-18. By mapping them to different parts of the business we can identify how this important section will take shape on the new website.

Internal search terms

We're pulling together a years' worth of search terms and am organising them by key themes. For example, those related to job searches. This informs the weighting of content for the new site and identifies specific times when certain content is more popular for the content strategy.

Referral terms

For this we're using SEMRush which is an extremely powerful SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) suite. This allows us to determine how users have found our website and the terms used. Rather than using Google Analytics data it has the added bonus of giving us a comparative positioning map. This identifies competitors and shows the strengths and weaknesses of their domains' presence in organic search results.

Branded traffic

SEMrush's split of branded vs. unbranded traffic is a really interesting metric for us. It identifies the 'best in class' competitor websites who have traffic we could gain by increasing our own ranking for non-branded keywords.

Keyword opportunities

Whilst SEMrush has a massive amount of data on the opportunities available we've been complimenting this with WordStream. Their free keyword tool shows search volume, competition and opportunity score. Structural/civil engineer have been identified as some of the terms we need to definitely rank for in the future!

Business insight

The challenge here is to first decide on what will be useful to inform the content strategy. To begin, We're identifying key clients by region and looking at separate HR job search data. CRM is essential in showing us how we currently map sectors and for identifying the stages of our current bid processes.

These are just some of the ways we're pulling together our current data. The key is ensuring everything we have gives us actionable insight. Ultimately, we want an informed content strategy for our new website which puts the user's needs first.

I'm already learning so much about the business, our online community and our competitors. This should mean that maintaining the website becomes a much easier, more strategic task post launch!