Optimise your website for improved online visibility and more visitors!
If you want your website to be successful, optimisation is crucial. But whatever you do, don’t just start making random changes. A good website optimisation starts with a clear, step-by-step plan.
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Technical – Is your website functioning as it should be?
- Visibility – Can search engines analyse your website?
- Content – Is your website visible for relevant keywords?
- Conversion Optimisation
- User Experience – Can visitors easily complete their goal on your website?
- Call To Action – Are you convincing enough for your visitors to choose your products or services?
Search Engine Optimisation
Technical
You might have an aesthetically appealing and intuitive website, but if search engines don’t know it exists, you’ll get little to no visitors. The first, and possibly most important step in making your website visible, is clearly telling Google, Bing, and the like what your website talks about.
There are plenty of tools out there that will make a technical analysis of your website. And of course, you’ve come to the right place if you’re looking for an experienced online marketing agency!
Thanks to our in-depth technical analysis, you’ll know exactly what areas of your website need working on to boost performance, and why you might be struggling to rank higher in Google.
A few key technical factors to remember:
Page Speed
Your visitors will very quickly decide whether or not they’re staying on your website. One of the factors that influences that decision is page speed. Slow websites cause frustration and will make your visitors leave, so keep your page loading times as short as possible.
These tools will provide insight into your page speed:
Broken Links
“Sorry, the page you are looking for does not exist.” Every one of us will have seen this message, and gotten frustrated because of it. As a website owner, it’s a message that you hope your visitors never have to see. So to avoid that situation, remember to regularly scan for broken links and pages that no longer exist.
These tools will help you do that:
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
SSL certificates safeguard the connection between your website and the server. Your data is encrypted before being sent, so it can’t be read in case it’s ever intercepted by third parties. SSL is essential if you need to transfer passwords, credit card numbers and personal information.
Visibility
Can search engines read your website’s content? Do they understand your website’s structure? Which pages can and can’t they see?
A few common issues that are impacting your visibility:
XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is like a roadmap of your website. It clearly communicates to search engines what the location and hierarchy is of all of your pages.
Robots.txt
You can use robots.txt files to block search engines from accessing certain pages. A few examples of pages you wouldn’t want search engines to visit are shopping baskets, or your terms and conditions page. If you clearly tell search engines which pages they can and can’t index, you can made sure that your crawl budget is well spent and that search engines are able to index your entire website in one go.
HTML Code
HTML code is part of your website’s foundation. The closer that code adheres to the general, pre-defined standards, the better search engines will be able to analyse and understand it.
Content
For which keywords is your website visible? Are those keywords that your target audience actually uses? Are you including them in your texts correctly? Do you remember to write the meta tags for each page?
A few common issues with content are:
The Right Keywords
There are two groups of keywords, short tail and long tail. Short tail keywords generally consist of just one word (e.g. SEO). These keywords are widely used, so they offer plenty of opportunities for lead generation. However, competition for these keywords is extremely high.
Exactly for that reason, it’s important to also include keywords that are more specific to your website and business. Long tail keywords consist of 2 or more words (e.g. SEO optimisation website), and although they are not used as often as short tail keywords, they are more closely related to your website’s subject, so it’s often easier to achieve high rankings for these keywords.
A few useful tools for keyword generation:
- Google Ads Keyword Planner (You do need a Google Ads campaign to use this tool)
- MOZ Keywords Explorer
On-Page Optimisation
Once you’ve figured out which keywords are most valuable to you, you can start writing them into your content. We’ll quickly go over the most important SEO tags:
Title tag: this title is displayed on SERPs and in the little browser tab when you have your website open.
Meta description: a short page description that is included in your result in SERPs. Even though it doesn’t really impact your rankings, it is an important tool to bring in more visitors.
URL: make sure to always include your most important keyword in your page’s URL, that should be easy enough to do in most CMS.
Header tags: these tags are comparable with titles and headings in print. You can use the different levels of header tags (h1, 2, 3, …) to make clear sections in your content.
Text: a good web text should include your important keywords for that subject. Use them in a way that is as natural as possible for the best results.
Conversion Optimisation
User Experience
Once you’re successfully attracting visitors to your website, it’s now time to optimise conversion. If you want to turn those visitors into customers, you’ll need to cater to their needs and remember to build a website for people, not for Google.
Clearly Defined Goal
You should have a pretty good idea of what you want your visitors to do on your website, but do they?
Whether you want to find more customers, sell more products, or build a larger community around your brand, make the goal of your website abundantly clear and make it easy for visitors to complete that goal.
Useful Content
A pretty website or online shop is not enough to drive customers to conversion. Even if you did spend a lot of time and effort on it. You also need unique content that is relevant and caters to your target audience. Only then will you see good results.
Scannable Text
Most website visitors find long paragraphs of text annoying to read. Shorter and to-the-point sentences and paragraphs on the other hand, are much easier to get through. Consider adding lists, images, and graphs when appropriate to further improve your content. One last thing you can do to increase readability and scannability, is to add some bold and italic text. Do all of the above and your readers will definitely love your texts.
Call To Action
The call to action (CTA) is the last little push that your visitors need to achieve their goal, it should tell visitors what next steps they can take. ‘Read more’ and ‘Get a quote’ are without a doubt some of the most used CTAs. But whether or not a call to action phrased like that will actually boost conversion, is a different matter.
A good call to action is indispensable when you want to improve conversion. But there are no definite guidelines about what does and does not work. That would make things too easy, wouldn’t it?
So the best thing you can do, is to conduct experiments to see what colour, shape, and text gets the best results.
Colour
Recent research has shown that the colour that boosts conversion the most is orange. This concept is known as BOB, Big Orange Button, in the marketing world.
But keep in mind that this does not apply to all situations!
Most importantly, your CTA should be eye-catching. So pick a few colours that contrast with your website and experiment to see which one achieves more conversion.
Shape
The shape of your CTA is also pretty important, and there are a few things to keep in mind here. Your CTA should obviously be big enough to draw attention. You can then make it look clickable by adding a border, shading, and hover effect.
Depending on the message you want to convey, you’ll want to choose rounded or sharp corners. The latter is generally considered as being more ‘aggressive’ (Bouba/Kiki effect).
Experiment with different shapes of call to actions to find what button works best for your visitors.
Text
The message in your CTA may still have the biggest impact. Write a simple and clear line of text, in which you address the reader. Adding a second short message, or a choice, in your button will only strengthen the effect further.
In any case, avoid lame CTAs like ‘click here’ and ‘read more’, and use definite language.
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Professional website optimisation
Our useful tips for website optimisation are only the first step towards a professional website. Do you need some more help? We’re the team for the job! Thanks to our years of experience and expertise in SEO, SEA and web design, we’re the perfect partner for your professional website optimisation.
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