8 Things to Remember When Optimizing Your Website

Tips for Optimizing Your Website

Search Engine Optimization can be overwhelming at times. There’s a lot of techniques and strategies to remember, which remembering can be a job in itself. To help our readers, we came up with a list of things to remember when optimizing your website.

Ranking high doesn’t exactly mean more traffic to your website.

1.) Ranking #1 doesn’t always mean more traffic. There are ads and snippets available at the very top of the first search engine result page. People aren’t going to pay for ads on second and third pages of search engine result simply because very little traffic reaches those pages. Maybe a student doing a research project would end up on the third page of Google, but the majority of people will click a link on the first page. Want your site to show up in an ad? That’s a whole other can of worms. Consider paid-ad management by Custom Design Partners SEO experts.

Focus on optimizing your website’s content.

2.) Focus on optimizing your website’s content for your visitors, not search engine robots. Instead of focusing on just being #1 in SERPs, focus on maximizing your Click Through Rate (CTR) and reducing your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). Read our blog about How to Reduce Your Online Marketing Campaign’s Cost Per Acquisition here.

Testing different optimization techniques helps a lot.

3.) Do A/B Testing of your site’s optimized pages and optimized social media posts. Having variations of a social post or landing page can come in handy for many reasons. Say you have a Facebook and a Twitter account you use to build your brand. Posting the exact same post on both sites and getting no engagement from your audience is now going to be a thing of the past. You can use the same topic, but switch it up a little to see which methods get better results. Change an image here, a button there… You get the idea. Pro Tip: Keep a log of each post/page and techniques used for testing and refer back to it when creating new posts / pages.

An easy-to-read website is an optimized website.

4.) Don’t keyword stuff your site’s content. If your optimized content doesn’t read well when you’re writing the content, then the customer won’t be able to read it well either, forcing the customer to leave (hence: bounce rate) and possibly go to your competitor. There goes a possible sale because you were optimizing for search engines, not people. Try using variations of your keyword instead. Pro Tip: use a thesaurus, but remember to keep the content understandable

An optimized website has informative content a user wants to read.

5.) Search Engines are becoming more and more intuitive as the internet evolves, so your content seriously needs to be relevant and useful to your audience. Your site doesn’t have to be optimized for any one specific keyword, as long as it’s relevant to the page. Web crawlers can now figure out the point you’re trying to make by scanning your written content. This sounds hard, and it can be, but again, use a thesaurus for inspiration. Optimizing your website with keywords and variations of your keywords are considered best practices and exactly what web crawlers seek.

An organized website is an optimized website.

6.) The products, services, and content on your website should be easy to find, easy to read, and solve customer’s questions or problems. In turn, this will create an even better user experience. Organize your navigation menus, categories, and product/service pages so they make sense and are easy to navigate. If you have an extensive list of products or services, be sure to keep like things together. For instance, all wooden toys can go in a “Wooden Toys” category, the brand of wooden toy in a “Toy Brands” category, and the recommended age group a toy has helps to organize in a “Toys By Age Group” category. There is no problem with having multiple categories on your website, as long as they aren’t duplicating the exact same content from one category page to the other. Each category page should have it’s own relevant content. So Wooden Toys would have its own relevant content, Toy Brands would have its own relative content, and so on.

An optimized website can be as short as 3 pages.

7.) Know that if your site only has 3 pages, that’s totally okay. Don’t think your website has to have a ton of pages just to get your message across. Google doesn’t rate the quality of a website as a whole, just each individual page is evaluated. Why? For relevance and usability. You can have a thousand pages on your website but if those thousand pages aren’t informative,  they’re just another reason why people bounce to another SERP listing.

A helpful website is an optimized website.

8.) Focus focus focus on creating quality, relevant, useful content for every webpage. Create content that can actually help someone visiting your site. Since quality content on your website is what search engines look for when crawling, try optimizing your website’s home, category, and product / service pages the best you can. Add high quality text and relating images and you’ll see an improvement for sure.

Website optimization takes time to implement. But optimizing your website isn’t just a once-and-done kind of task. Websites need to be updated with updated, relevant content frequently to maintain or gain rankings. If you feel this is too much to add to your plate or you just don’t have a creative bone in your body, consider having SEO Experts from Custom Design Partners perform a free site audit. Call us at 904-299-6868 to get started today!