Optimising Your Website With an SEO Strategy
If you have a website, surely you want people to find it, right? Well, the best way for people to do so is through search engine optimisation (SEO). Optimising your site for search engines can improve your visibility in search results, leading to more visitors and, ultimately, more customers.
But SEO isn’t just about improving your visibility in search results. It’s also about improving the quality of your website so that visitors stay longer and are more likely to convert into customers.
Several different factors contribute to a website’s SEO strategy, and it can be a complex and time-consuming task to get it right. However, it’s worth the effort as it can significantly impact your business.
Website Content; The Quality & Quantity
Your website acts as your virtual ambassador representing your brand, ready to both visually and emotionally engage with your target audience. However, the quality and quantity of your website’s content plays a vital role in search engine optimisation as it is one of the main factors that search engines use to determine a website’s relevancy and authority.
The higher the quality, relevance, and helpful content your website contains, the more likely it will be to rank higher in search engine results.
The Power of Well-Written Content
Containing the voice of your brand, your website content is key to being found especially through organic search results, so every word matters. To create a positive and lasting impression, your content needs to be well-structured and sound human, but should also:
- Be well-written and remain free of grammatical errors. Put simply, this helps your audience recognise that you’re not only competent but that you take pride in providing a quality experience whilst they’re on your website which can directly reflect the quality of your product or service.
- Remain relevant to the website’s purpose and target audience. Imagine walking into a restaurant for a meal, sitting down, and being handed a menu in a language you don’t understand. You’d be confused right? Similarly, your website content should align with your target audience, speak their language, and remain relevant to the overall purpose of why they’re there.
- Be updated regularly to ensure that relevant content is current and accurate. Ensuring your sites information is up-to-date and accurate demonstrates your commitment to providing relevant, valuable information.
Leveraging The Quantity of Content to Rank in Search Engines
While quality is undeniably paramount, quantity plays a pivotal role with onsite SEO. By combining quality with quantity, optimising for keywords, and structuring your content effectively, you’re not just creating a website; you’re building an SEO powerhouse. The quantity of quality content on your website will:
- Help people find your site organically through search engines such as Google. Search engines will prioritise sites which contains an abundance of high-quality content over a site with minimal copy. Put simply, the more quality content you produce, the more Google will be likely to see you as competent and knowledgeable in your field.
- Improve your organic search engine rankings through relevant targeted keyword analysis. Keywords act as beacons which guide both search engines and users to find your content easier in the vast digital landscape. The right balance between targeted keywords and informative, engaging content helps to ensure your website ranks well not just in quantity but also in relevance.
Website Design & User Experience
The design and user experience of an entire website dramatically affects how users interact with the site and how easy it is for them to find the information they want. A well-designed website should not only be visually appealing but needs to be simple for users to navigate their way through the pages and locate the information they need.
In contrast, a poorly designed website will be challenging to use and may frustrate users, causing them to leave the site without finding what they were after. I bet you can think of at least one website you’ve visited before which looks as though it was designed 20+ years ago and is difficult to navigate…I also imagine you didn’t stay there long. Search engines use user experience as a factor in their ranking algorithms which is why design and user experience is paramount.
How to Improve Your Website’s Design & User Experience
- Use cleaner, simpler designs. Create a stress-free, clutter-free visual experience for your customer! If the site is too busy it will quickly turn people away who find it overwhelming.
- Improve navigation and overall user experience. Simple navigation will guide your customer in the right direction and ultimately lead them to take action such as an enquiry, a call, or a purchase.
- Pay attention to typography and whitespace. Ensure typography is arranged and displayed in an appealing manner with an acceptable amount of whitespace surrounding images and copy.
- Make sure your website is responsive. To ensure your website can be viewed on all devices, its critical to prioritise responsiveness. Typically, a website is designed and developed on a PC, however a recent survey (Jan 2024) shows that 59.01% of website traffic comes from people on a mobile devices, so it is crucial your site is responsive on a range of devices.
- Use clear and concise titles with supporting visuals. So that users can easily find the information they want, we recommend using clear, concise titles to support the visuals on your website. This is not only useful for the everyday visitor on your site, but for individuals who utilise the accessibility function to navigate your site.
- Use strong calls to actions. To encourage users to take the desired action, its good to add various CTA’s (call to action) throughout the pages. You can create unique CTA’s which directly reflects the surrounding content or simply add a ‘Get in Touch’ button for example, allowing users to take action at any stage whilst visiting your site.
Website Load Speed
The loading speed of a website is a crucial factor in search engine optimisation as faster-loading websites will generally be ranked higher on search engine results than a slower-loading website. One factor of this is, the quicker it is for search engines to crawl a website which seamlessly ticks all the boxes, the more likely it will be shown in results for users.
The speed of your site can also have a significant factor on your budget. As humans, we place a lot of value on time, “time is money” as they say, so a slow-loading website is not going to suffice to someone who is online looking for answers.
Five Areas You Can Work on to Improve Your Website Speed
- Use a content delivery network (CDN)
- Optimise your images
- Minimise HTTP requests
- Use caching
- Minify your CSS and JavaScript
For a more comprehensive breakdown of improving your website speed, explore our article on The Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Website Speed.
A Mobile Friendly Website
Have you ever explored a website which isn’t mobile friendly?…it’s difficult to navigate, you can’t see the whole webpage, functions may not work, and the content may be displayed incorrectly leaving you frustrated and fed-up without the answers you were looking for. As we mentioned previously, more and more people are using mobile devices to access the internet as a quick, convenient option, so a website’s mobile friendliness is an essential element during development.
Additionally, search engines are increasingly considering mobile-friendliness when ranking websites in their results as it has recognised user behaviour and found that a lot of their traffic are using mobile phones.
Tips to Improve Website Mobile Response
There are a few key ways to improve your website’s mobile friendliness and responsiveness:
- Use a responsive design: This ensures that your website automatically adjusts to fit the screen size of multiple devices.
- Use large, easy-to-tap buttons and links: Mobile users often use their fingers to navigate, so it’s essential to ensure that your buttons and links are large enough to be tapped easily.
- Use clear and concise copy: Mobile users typically have a shorter attention span than desktop users, so it’s essential to ensure your copy is clear and concise.
- Avoid using pop-ups: Pop-ups can be very annoying on mobile devices and can often block the content that users are trying to view.
Website Backlink Profile
A backlink is an inbound link to a website. This feature is often used when a specific section of copy links through to another website which is relevant and/or is the source of specific information which has been gathered such as data or statistics. It is a great feature to use when quoting legal information for instance, as you can backlink to the official legal site which the information was sourced.
Backlinks are essential for search engine optimisation because they factor in how search engines rank websites. A website with a higher number of backlinks is seen to be more trustworthy and a reliable source of factual information, and therefore will be more likely to rank higher in search engine results.
The Quality of a Backlink Matters
A backlink profile is a collection of all the backlinks pointing to a website. As mentioned above, the quality of your link building is vital because it is one of the major factors that search engines use to rank websites.
A website with many high-quality backlinks will tend to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) than a website with low-quality backlinks.
Citation & Directory Backlinks Explained
A directory or citation backlink is a link from a directory website to your website. These backlinks help to improve your website’s search engine rankings by increasing the number of inbound links pointing to your website.
These sites allow businesses to fill out their name, address, phone number, website URL, description, and hours of operation.
If you want to build your directory listings, here is a link to a list of Australian Business Directories.
Social Media Activity
A website’s social media activity also plays a vital role in search engine optimisation and search engine results because it creates backlinks to the website, which in turn helps to improve the website’s search engine ranking.
Additionally, social media activity can help generate website traffic as users can click straight through from social media via an ad or bio link. These visits can ultimately lead to search engines recognising a websites legitimacy to rank it higher in search results.
Conclusion
As you can see, an SEO strategy is vital when building a website. It helps your site to be found by potential customers and makes it easier for them to find what they are looking for.
A well-optimised website will also help to build trust with your audience and show them that you are an expert in your field. SEO should be at the top of your list of priorities when developing your website if you want to succeed online.
If you’d like to learn more about on page SEO, discuss your current digital marketing efforts, or cover any other SEO efforts, feel free to get in touch with our team to discuss how we can help.
