Your Website Isn’t a Focus Group: Where to Find Better Audience Insights

If you’re planning a website redesign and want to ensure you’re building the best experience possible for your audience, most businesses start with their existing sites. 

They review the pages that are getting the most traffic and engagement, and maybe ask around the team to confirm which pages are the most useful to each department.

These steps can all give you some insight about what your audience wants. But it’s not the kind of in-depth audience research that will provide true, lasting value. Your website is good at telling you what your audience did, but can be limited in terms of the why—if you’re not asking the right questions.

Redesign around too many assumptions and you could end up with a cleaner-looking version of your site that still has the same problems, and doesn’t provide the experience that your audience truly wants.

In this guide, we’ll look at the best ways to go beyond your website for more nuanced and valuable audience data, and ensure your next redesign actually serves your audience and drives results.

1. Start with People Who Already Talk to Your Customers

Your sales and customer service professionals probably already have access to a large and detailed library of audience insights.

Every recurring question and every objection can be a valuable clue that paints a more complete picture of your audience’s mindset. So can any reason that a prospect gave for choosing or not choosing you.

Start out by asking your team:

• What do prospects misunderstand about our product/service most often?
• What questions do prospects ask before they’re ready to buy?
• Which aspects of our product/service need the most explanation?
• What kind of details make people hesitate?
• What information do paying customers wish they’d had sooner?

It’s important not to just collect answers here—look for repetition and patterns.

For example, if several team members independently tell you that prospects keep asking whether a service is suitable for small businesses, it means they can’t tell from your website. The answer belongs on a core service page, FAQ, case study, or comparison page—some prominent placement where a buyer can find it without having to contact your support.

This is important for businesses that serve multiple types of customers. For example, in financial services individual borrowers have highly different questions from professional brokers. A business website needs to account for both. It’s a challenge that Spark Mortgage faced when building a website that could better serve its distinct audiences, without making the experience unnecessarily complicated.

2. Search Behaviour Shows the Names Customers Give the Problem

Your audience often won’t use the same language and terminology your business uses.

For example, your company might offer “conversion rate optimization”, while a potentially high-value customer might be more likely to search for “how to get more people to fill in my contact form.” The gap in the language here may be hiding valuable information.

Trustworthy search data can give you a detailed view of audience demand before customers ever reach your site. 

Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can show you monthly search volume—how many times, on average, specific search queries relating to your product or service are entered in a month. Meanwhile, website analytics tools can give you a better idea of what visitors do once they arrive. 

Google Analytics’ landing pages report allows you to see exactly which pages people enter through, and how these sessions go on to perform.

The most effective use of all this data isn’t to turn every single search query into its own page. Rather, you should try to group your queries by underlying questions:

• “How much does X cost” = pricing anxiety
• “X vs Y” = comparison consideration
• “Best X for small businesses” = fit uncertainty
• “How long does X take?” = timeframe expectations
• “Can X work with Y?” = compatibility

When you run this kind of analysis and categorization, you’re not simply collecting keywords. You’re mapping and understanding the questions that might move someone through the funnel towards a decision.

Then, you can create content that addresses those queries. 

3. Ask Smaller Groups Better Questions

You don’t need to include hundreds of people in a survey just to discover something useful. For many SMB websites, just a handful of well-planned customer interviews can uncover more actionable insights than a long questionnaire form with vague prompts.

When you’re planning to leverage surveys for audience insights, the trick is to focus on more specific questions about your customers’ behaviour and decisions, not direct opinions about your site.

Instead of asking “How was your experience of our homepage?”, try questions like:

• “What question were you trying to answer when you first visited our website?”
• “What did you look at before contacting us?”
• “What nearly stopped you before you reached out?”
• “Was there anything you expected to find but didn’t?”

If your business operates in a specialized industry, this kind of research can be especially valuable, as it may uncover niche-specific customer data that isn’t widely available elsewhere.

For example, a healthcare business would likely discover that their patients are searching for trustworthy information on treatment options when they first land on the website. Scenarios like this are why services offered by a medical or dental marketing agency often focus on helping demystify the gap between how a practice describes its services and how potential new patients actually view them.

The same principle applies to non-profit organizations, where audiences often have different priorities. Potential donors want to understand how their money will make an impact, while someone seeking support needs to find the right resources quickly. For organizations like Backpack Buddies, creating clearer paths to information and communicating impact are important parts of building a more effective website experience.

Running small, targeted surveys to uncover sources of friction can provide more complete insights and ensure that your customer research results in a specific to-do list that will help your customer touchpoints answer your audience’s burning questions more effectively.

4. Leverage Usability Testing to Identify Gaps

A time-intensive, but potentially highly rewarding, research method is giving a real person a task to complete and then analyzing how they use your website.

The specific goals you set might be something like:

• “Find the right service for xyz business.”
• “Figure out whether we work with companies of X size.”
• “Figure out a ballpark estimate of what a service might cost.”

Record the browsing sessions if possible, then watch the footage back and look for hesitation, misinterpretation, dead ends, and backtracking. These behaviours, set in the context of a specific task, are often far more revealing than a survey participant saying what they did or didn’t like, or even some of the more common methods of audience analysis.

UX research based on real browsing sessions is one of the most effective ways to identify issues with design and flow, and help your design team avoid the trap of assuming what first-time visitors will do.

5. Turn Findings Into Decisions, Not a Persona Document

The end goal of truly effective audience research isn’t a sprawling persona document. It’s a set of specific, actionable decisions, which the data shows are likely to pay off.

Using your research to figure out what your visitors are trying to accomplish, the kinds of language they use, and the objections that they need addressed should translate into informed decision-making about your content, information architecture, SEO, and UX.

With this approach, a vague notion that you need a better service page can become a statement that’s far more specific and valuable. For example:

“Because prospective clients are unsure whether this service is suitable for organizations of their size, adding a clear fit statement and highlighting relevant case studies should increase engagement with the enquiry path.”

With this in place, you’ll have something you’ll actually be able to build, measure, and improve upon, comparing page engagement, qualified enquiries, assisted conversions, and the kinds of questions visitors ask after launch.

6. Ask Smarter, Not Harder

The secret to a truly successful website redesign isn’t making your site look better based on established conventions and internal opinion. It’s about understanding your specific audience enough to make the right calls about improving structure, navigation, and content.

By combining insights from the people who interact with your audience the most, data on search behaviour, and targeted customer research, you can uncover the kinds of questions, expectations, and friction points that analytics alone can’t fully explain.

For more support on harvesting stronger audience insights and knowing how to apply them, be sure to check out Forge and Smith’s other blog posts, or get in touch to talk about making your site more usable for your audience.