So, your website is finally complete. Now what? It’s time to optimise your website!
Optimising a website is essential for improving visibility, user experience and overall performance in search engine rankings. But what does website optimisation involve?
This article outlines four straightforward yet effective steps for website optimisation. These steps are designed to help website owners and digital marketers enhance their site’s functionality and attract more visitors.
By implementing these strategies, you can significantly improve your website’s performance and user engagement.
1. Page Speed
One of Google’s main ranking factors is page speed, which highly affects your website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
A recent study found that 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page if it takes more than three seconds to load. Almost 70% of consumers have said that the length of time it takes for a page to load impacts their willingness to buy from the website.
Once your website is live, you can run a website speed test to see how long it takes to load. If your site loads incredibly low, then you can use the strategies below to speed it up.
- Remove unnecessary code: You can optimise your site’s code and speed up the entire site by removing any unnecessary characters, such as spaces between lines.
- Leverage browser caching: There are plugins and applications available to help browsers cache files downloaded from your server. This action improves the page speed of websites with a lot of static pages.
- Optimise your images: Low-quality images take a long time to load. Therefore, you should place high-quality images on your website that take less time to load, improving the page speed.
2. Content and Keywords
When it comes to search engine optimisation, content and keywords (on-page SEO) are some of the most important elements.
To attract the customers you want, you need to know the keywords they’re searching for and provide content that answers their questions and provides a solution to their problem.
Keywords are extremely important for search engine optimisation, and they can be seen all over the website. Keywords are to be included in titles, headings, alternative text and content.
When researching keywords to use, the first thing you need to do is think like your customer. What would you put into a search engine if you were to look for the products or services you sell?
Once you’ve figured that out, you can use tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush to search those keywords and see the volume and competitiveness. If the monthly search volume is high and the competitive level is low, those are the keywords you want to choose.
Once you have chosen all of the keywords you want to use, start adding them to titles, headings, blog posts and content throughout your site.
When Google sees that you are targeting specific keywords and creating valuable and insightful content, your website and pages will slowly start ranking on SERPs.
3. Consider The User Experience
Can users find important information on your website? Is it easy for them to complete their desired action, such as purchasing your products or contacting you? If it’s not that simple, then you need to optimise your website’s user experience.
But what is user experience? User experience (UX/UI) involves a website’s accessibility, usability and performance.
It’s essential to consider your business goals when implementing UX/UI design. The layout of your website should make it easy for a customer to get to where they need to be. For example, an online store should make it easy for customers to make a purchase. Optimising your website’s user experience will see an increase in conversion rates.
Here are some ways to optimise your website’s user experience:
- Optimise the menus: Have you ever been lost on a website because you couldn’t find the menu? Add a straightforward menu to the header of your website that is easy to find and navigate. By doing this, it’ll be much easier for customers to visit different pages on your website.
- Include visible call-to-action (CTA) buttons: Having visible and clear call-to-action buttons makes it easier for customers to make a purchase.
4. Measure Your Performance
Finally, the last step to optimise your website is by constantly measuring your performance.
There are four ways you can measure the performance of your website, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, heat mapping and keyword tracking. Let’s dive into each of these elements.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered by Google that allows you to track and analyse your website traffic.
Google Analytics allows you to see the number of sessions, users, new users and the number of sessions per user. By seeing these metrics, you can see which pages are working well and drawing in more visitors and which aren’t. From this, you can then decide which pages you need to work on and optimise next.
Google Analytics also shows you where your visitors are coming from, whether that be directly from search engine searches, social media, etc.
Google Search Console
Much like Google Analytics, Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google.
Google Search Console allows you to track information about your website, boost search rankings, set up alerts to respond to website errors, learn about which pages on your website are indexed and more.
Below are the most common measurements you can see on Google Search Console, which can help you to optimise your website in areas that aren’t doing well.
- Impressions: The number of times a person saw your page or site in Google Search results.
- Clicks: The number of times a person clicked a link to your site from Google SERPs.
- Average position: The average position of your site in Google SERPs.
- Query: What the user was searching for in Google when your site came up in search results.
Heatmapping
Heatmapping is another way to measure the performance of your website. Essentially, a heatmap analysis helps monitor activity on your website through multicoloured spots/zones.
There are three main types of heatmaps:
- Move map: Colourful spots show the popular sections of your website. For example, red areas are where visitors move their mouse most often.
- Scroll map: These maps allow you to see how far people scroll your website from header to footer and see which parts of the page are the most popular.
- Click map: These maps allow you to view the percentage of clicks on a specific button or link.
There are plenty of free heatmapping websites on the internet. Heatmaps are a great way to see where your website needs improvement and optimisation.
Keyword Tracking
Finally, the last way you can measure your website performance is through keyword tracking.
As mentioned earlier, keywords are an important aspect of SEO, and monitoring the positions of your target keywords can provide valuable insights.
Keyword ranking tools, such as Ahrefs and SEMRush, can show you which keywords are performing well and which aren’t. By seeing this, you can then adjust your keywords accordingly or create more content using those specific keywords.
Effective Website Optimisation with Anchor
Having an optimised and user-friendly website is key to attracting new customers and driving conversions.
If you have a website that isn’t doing too well, look no further than Anchor for help.
Our dedicated and experienced team are up-to-date with the latest search engine and website optimisation best practices, so you can guarantee your website will do well with us.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can help your website become the best it can be, drop us a line today.
