Five Ways to Optimize Your Website
Your company’s website is the face of your organization and a crucial part of your marketing plan. Your website has to speak clearly and function perfectly, performing well both with users and with search engines and rankings. If optimizing your website has been on your punch list, here some specific tips for success with five areas to focus on.
1. Start with a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Audit
Complete a comprehensive, technical SEO audit of your site. Innovative Advertising can help with this audit, utilizing third-party tools like SEMRush and Moz to understand areas for improvement and focus. These tools also allow you to understand how your brand ranks against top competitors. Typically, we see a series of updates being recommended, including:
- Linking Strategy: It is important to cross-link throughout your own website and to have links to reputable external websites. An SEO audit will also outline any links directing to your website that appear to be malicious or spam-related.
- Unique Page Content: Make sure all your pages have unique meta titles and descriptions for crawlability and search engine results page (SERP) rankings.
- Alt Image Attributes: Check to ensure that all images have alt attributes for accessibility and usability.
- Text to Code Ratio: Ensure your site has a healthy balance of text to code.
- Site Security: All websites should be secure, creating trust with users and Google.
2. Add Some Fresh Content
Take this time to add some new, relevant content to your site. Fresh content will help your website’s relevancy, increasing SERP rankings. Here are a few ideas:
- Update your portfolio, library or member/sponsor listing
- Post an employee spotlight
- Develop a blog strategy
- Add customer testimonials or product ratings and reviews, including user-generated feedback
3. Evaluate the Site’s User Experience
How is the user experience for your site? Now might be a great time to re-evaluate the entire website on mobile, from page content to paths to conversion. Examine your format types. How do your videos render on mobile — are they horizontal when they should be vertical? Are all the graphics visible? Also, ensure your website meets WCAG accessibility standards.
Make sure your site has clear paths to conversion and calls-to-action that align with your main objective. What do you want the site visitor to do – call, complete a form, download a PDF or make a purchase?
Gain some knowledge on how your website performs for the end user. Try testing your page load time on desktop versus mobile. Google’s Page Speed test is a good tool for this task. Research usability and heat mapping tools like HotJar and CrazyEgg to understand user paths and scroll depth to outline where improvements can be made.
4. Create a Keyword Strategy
Keywords are hidden gems within your site that are often overlooked despite their value. Use tools like SEMRush and Google Ads to evaluate the keywords that your site already optimizes, as well as where opportunities exist based on search volume and competition.
Plan your site content around these terms, from blog thematics, to the pages’ meta data and H1 tags. When possible, compliment your organic keyword strategy with a paid search campaign to increase discoverability and visibility for your brand.
5. Do Your Research
Research new tools or platforms to improve the productivity or functionality of your site. This could include reporting tools or new partners.
Use this time strategically to improve your website and SEO ranking. If you need assistance with your website optimization, contact Innovative Advertising. We’d be happy to help.