Website optimisation involves using controlled experimentation to improve your website’s performance. Web admins implement A/B testing to experiment with variations on pages to determine which strategies will result in more conversions.
Learning how to optimise your website for SEO is essential for the success of any business. Optimisation ensures that your website has better metrics such as time on page and excellent link building, meaning that Google can rank it highly. Technology is constantly changing, but some SEO strategies remain viable. If you focus on the SEO essentials, you will rank highly on the SERPs. This article will look at these SEO essentials and teach you exactly how to optimise them.
Why Do You Need to Optimise Your Website?
We’ll begin by breaking down some reasons why you need to optimise your website for SEO.
Make Your Site Valuable to Your Audience
As a digital marketer, sometimes you feel like you are at odds with search engines. Google may fail to rank you even after putting much effort into SEO, or you may see a significant drop in traffic after an algorithm update. However, your goals always align with Google’s. For instance, both you and Google strive to serve the best possible content for users, and you both want to create a positive user experience. The only challenging thing is that you both go about it in different ways.
Google analyses millions of websites while you analyse a single website. When you focus on optimising your website for SEO, you create content that your audience wants. At the same time, you provide meta information to help search engines understand your content. So, optimising your website furthers your goals and creates a better relationship between your website, search engines, and users.
Grow Your Organic Traffic
Most companies spend a lot of money on advertisements, while attracting traffic through SEO is free. Although you have to pay a digital marketing professional to promote the content, it is not as expensive as pay-per-click. If you compare the rates between users who arrive at your site through organic search and those that come through ads, you will see a significant difference. Organic search closes at about 15%, while paid ads close at less than 2%. Most people trust websites that naturally rank highly on the SERPs. So, investing your money, time and effort into growing your organic traffic will lead to increased conversion in the long term.
Capitalise on Existing Traffic
When visitors land on your website, you want to make a lasting impression and encourage them to return. Website optimisation requires an understanding of your audience and knowing how they wish to interact with your website. How do they navigate your website? How often do they click on your calls to action? Contact people who sign up for your email list with incentives and offers. Encourage visitors to follow you on social media and read your articles. Capitalise on your existing traffic to improve your conversion rate. Learning your audience will help you know how they will respond to your content and how you can accordingly present it to them in an appealing way.
Enable Your Website to Work Harder
Anyone can create a beautiful website, but few can create a website that leads to conversion. You want your audience to convert at high rates. To achieve this, you must optimise your website. Research your audience and apply this data to your website. Let people find what they want quickly, and they will appreciate your brand. Website optimisation leads to brand loyalty, which increases your traffic. Build a website with valuable, shareable content and opportunities for visitors to convert.
How to Optimise Your Website
You must optimise your website for SEO to draw more traffic. These tips will set you up for SEO success. Remember that website optimisation is an ongoing process, and do not give up if you do not experience instant results.
Mobile-First
By now, you probably know that the majority of all web searches come from mobile devices. In 2018, Google officially began rolling out the mobile-first index. As a digital marketer or someone delving into the digital space as a business owner, you must realise that it is time to move from a desktop-only website and embrace mobile. This is where you will meet most of your audience, and you must deliver an exceptional experience or risk losing them to your competitors. Here are some basics for making your website mobile-friendly;
- Make your website adaptive to any device, including desktop, tablet and mobile.
- Scale your images when using a responsive design.
- Use short meta titles
- Avoid distracting pop-ups
- Less can be more in terms of content on mobiles
- Your desktop and mobile users need to see the same content
Technical SEO
Technical SEO ensures that your website meets the technical requirements of search engines. The crucial elements of technical SEO include crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture. Search engines must be able to find, crawl, render, and index your web pages. However, it does not mean that your job is done once Google indexes your website. Your website must be secure, mobile-friendly, fast loading, and free from duplicate content for it to be fully optimised for technical SEO. Please check out this guide to learn how to improve your technical optimisation.
User Intent
Publishing excellent content, optimising it, and improving your link building strategy is the beginning of a higher ranking. Google’s primary role is to understand the context and offer readers the best results based on search intent. So, you must research your keywords thoroughly and select the ones that meet user intent. The relevance of your keyword must align with the search queries. Look at the current ranking of a keyword before you dedicate time and effort into trying to rank for that phrase. Ensure that your website and landing page are similar to what is ranking.
Schema
Once added to a webpage, schema markup creates a richer snippet. A snippet is an enhanced description that appears in the search results. Schema refers to the organisation or structure of a database. Schema provides value, in that it can provide context to a webpage and improve the search experience. Google introduced website schema in 2011 to help search engines display more accurate results. Unlike humans, search engines cannot understand the context of search. They can only show results from the structured data they read on your website.
Website schemas are words or tags in a shared vocabulary you can use to talk to search engines. The website Schema.org provides a list of these shared vocabularies in an easy-to-use format called microdata. The microdata is then separated into different categories. Each category has a unique code that enables your website to stand out on the SERPs, increasing your chances of a user choosing your webpage. You can include schema in several places like articles, FAQs, local businesses and reviews.
User Experience
User experience involves understanding your audience, their needs, values, abilities and limitations. The best practices include improving the quality of user experiences. Some of the strategies you can implement to improve user experience include;
- Creating helpful content that satisfies a need
- Having an easy-to-use and navigable website
- Using design elements that evoke emotions and appreciation
- Having a secure and trustworthy website
Optimise for On-Page SEO
On-page SEO involves organising your website when building specific pages. This practice involves considering things like headlines, sub-headlines, URL slugs, and meta tags. Always use your primary keyword in your headline and place it as close as possible to the beginning. Let the primary keyword appear for about 2.5% of your article. Avoid going higher than this rate since it could lead to keyword stuffing. Sprinkle your primary and related keywords throughout your body copy, sub-headlines, and image alt text.
Optimise for Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to the various ways you optimise your website through external means. Off-page SEO strategies include guest blogging, social media, influencer marketing and brand mentions. Backlink building is also an excellent off-page SEO tactic. However, you do not want links from low authority websites. Instead, target authoritative websites when researching backlinks.
Page Load Speed
Page load speed is crucial in both SEO and conversion. If your website takes forever to load, visitors will click the back button and go to your competitor’s website. If visitors try to purchase something but the payment options won’t load due to low speed, they will abandon their cart. Google’s PageSpeed Insights will inform you on how fast your website loads. Remember that you must ensure that your page loads quickly across all devices.
Content-Length
Ideally, you’ll have at least 500 words of content on a page. However, this is not always possible, especially if you consider the design. A single page has to serve several purposes, and ranking is one thing to consider. Think about what purpose your page serves and how essential it is to rank for long-tail keywords or non-brand terms. If you wish to rank for a broader spread of words, you must increase the length of your content. The homepage will require less content since you will focus on the essential generic keywords. However, your informational pages need more content since this is where you will convince your readers to follow you or make a purchase.
Conclusion
Website optimisation can be a complex process, but learning the basics will give you a head start. Begin by researching your audience and keywords. Write quality content that meets your customers’ needs. Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and that you are attracting backlinks from authoritative websites. You can then figure out how to optimise your website to avoid wasting all this traffic.
