How long has it been since you’ve optimized your website, or measured it’s success? The answer should be recent, the potential for online marketing and communications is huge. Your website never sleeps, or takes smoke breaks, it’s constantly there for your customers 24/7 to provide them with all the information they need and if you have a poorly optimized website, your conversion rate will drop.
Follow these 10 solid tips to get your website ROI back into the green (and then some!)
10: Content Management System (CMS)
Or as I like to call it, wordpress. While it’s not the only CMS out there, it’s definitely a great choice and will provide you with an easy way to keep your content fresh and boost your search engine traffic. As well as the boost in SEO, it’s extremely easy to use and customizable if you need to extend it’s functionality (e.g. shopping carts, forums, live-chat systems).
9: Well-structured code, and smart technology choices
While this is probably not something you can personally take care of, it’s relatively easy for a developer to take a quick look through your website code and analyse how it could be improved. Well-Structured code sets the foundation for good SEO. As for smart technology choices? Technology choices, such as flash, are very quickly becoming obsolete and not only negatively impact your SEO but are also very unlikely to work on the majority of smartphones & tablets (more on them later).
8: Speed!
This is an often overlooked aspect of web design, yet it’s one of the most important factors in your websites success. If your website takes anymore than 3 seconds to load important content, your visitors are likely already gone, straight to your competition. It’s also been proven that google valuates website speed and uses that information in it’s algorithm for positioning your page in the results. So if you notice your page feeling a little slow, it’s definitely worth looking into, google offers free tools to measure your page speed here Simply enter your website address into the URL field and click analyze.
7: Use an SEO plugin
If you already have a CMS as mentioned in tip #10, you probably have access to “plugins” or “extensions” depending on which CMS you have. WordPress has many great SEO plugins that will vastly increase your page rankings if used correctly. Our favourite is “WordPress SEO by Yoast” which lets you customize everything from title tags, descriptions, focus keywords and more for every page on your site. This is a very powerful way to increase your organic traffic.
6: Content Optimization
This one might sound easy or obvious but truly effective content optimisation can be a whole job on it’s own. The best way to start is making sure you have no broken links, giving all your images “alt” attributes for accessibility, and including header tags when appropriate (as search engines can value header/H tags with more importance). It’s also good to make sure your “focus keyword” (the single most important keyword of the page) is sprinkled throughout the content, be careful not to over-sprinkle.
5: Make your action button really easy to find.
Every page on your website should have (ideally) one main call to action that the user is encouraged to take. This should be nice and big/contrasty on the page so there is no confusion on what the user is supposed to do. Page analytics can greatly help in this regard, so you can see if your buttons are actually being clicked.
4: Blogging
Fresh, useful content is one of the best ways to greatly increase your page rankings and encourage return visitors. Sharing your work, promotions, experience, advice, what ever you can think of will keep your website updated and make your visitors come back for more. It’s a great way to show your companies unique side and set you apart from the competition.
3: Social Networking
Lets face it, you simply can’t skip this step anymore, social networking has changed the way people interact online, users are much more likely to take action on your website if they see others having a great experience. It’s also a great way to share your latest blog posts and let users interact with your company on a more personal level. So if you haven’t, set up your social profiles and integrate them with your website.
2: Usability / User Experience
A lot of the points I have already mentioned will fall into this category (optimization, easy to find call to action, and page speed) but it shouldn’t be limited to these factors. Your whole website should be nice and clean, simple and easy to use. Make sure your navigation structure isn’t too complicated (i.e 5 levels deep jumping all across the screen) and think about your target audience, for example if your main audience is older users, they might benefit from larger font, more contrast, etc. If you can nail down who is using your site, you can make sure the experience is tailor-made to suit them.
1: Fresh Responsive Design
Finally, the big one. If your website is looking dated and doesn’t accommodate for mobiles/tablets you’re falling behind the curve, mobile growth is exploding and more users are relying on them to access your website online. If the experience is bad on their phones, don’t expect them to return on their computer you’ve just lost a potential customer. If this sounds like your website, maybe it’s time to consider a brand new re-design. If you do go this route, make sure you take the previous tips into consideration from the start.
Conclusion
And that’s 10. It might look like a lot of work, and some of it does require some dedication and effort but the end result will be happier customers, more visitors and improve website conversions. If you have any doubts or would like to hire a professional company to take you to the next step head over to our web design page. Or Contact Us today.
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