Organic traffic accounts for more than 50 percent of all website traffic. When you learn how to optimize a website, you can increase traffic, improve website conversions, and give your business a boost.
Not sure how to upgrade your website to see these kinds of results? Listed below are seven key things to understand about website optimization.
- URLs Should Be Short
If you’re in the early stages of creating a website for your business, make sure your domain name is short, easy to read, and easy to remember.
The URL should be relevant to your business. If possible, it should also feature your business’s name. This makes it easier for people to find you when they’re searching online for products or services like yours.
Remember that the URL for each page of your website also needs to be optimized.
Don’t leave it as a random collection of numbers and letters. Update it so it includes the name of the post or describes what’s on the page. For example, www.MyBusiness.com/Services.
- So Should Page Titles
If you’re interested in learning how to grow a website, make sure your page titles are short and simple, too.
As a general rule, your website page titles should be less than 70 characters. If it’s longer than this, search engines will cut it off. If this happens, people won’t be able to tell what the post or page discusses before clicking on it.
Keep your page titles clear, informative, and descriptive, too. They ought to include a keyword that you want to rank for on search engine results pages.
It’s tempting to get creative and clever with your page titles. If you go overboard, though, people won’t know what the page is about and won’t want to click on it.
- Keep Meta Descriptions Clear and Concise
The meta description is the short paragraph that shows up below a page title on a search engine results page.
When you publish a post or create a page for your website, search engines will automatically include the first paragraph or a couple of sentences of the page underneath the page title.
Sometimes, this is okay, and it provides enough information to tell people whether or not they should click on the page. In other cases, it can be confusing and deter people from clicking over to your website.
To ensure people know what they’re getting before they visit your webpage or blog post, write a clear, concise meta description. Limit it to 160 characters or fewer, and include the primary keyword for which you want to rank.
- Content Needs to Be Easy to Read
At this point, you’re probably starting to pick up on a theme when it comes to website optimization. Everything needs to be clear, concise, and easy to read. Your website content is no exception.
You may have gotten someone to click on your site and visit a page or article with a clear page title and meta description. They’ll click away in an instant, though, if they can’t decipher your content.
Use short sentences as much as possible. Keep paragraphs short, too (three sentences or fewer), and use a font size that’s large enough for people to read on their computer screen.
Make sure there’s plenty of white space between paragraphs as well. If your pages look cluttered, people are going to have a hard time reading what you have to say.
- Mobile Matters
More people conduct searches from their smartphone browser than their computer browser.
Unless you want to miss out on valuable website visitors and potential conversions, you need to make sure your content is easy to read on desktop computers and mobile devices. Make sure you check every element of your site on a desktop and a mobile device before you launch it.
Don’t forget to think about the images on your site, too. If images are slow to load or look distorted on a phone screen, people might be turned off from your website as a whole.
- Page Speed Matters Too
What do you do when you come across a website that is slow to load? Do you sit around for several seconds or minutes waiting for the content to show up?
Sometimes, you might be willing to wait. In most cases, though, you probably click away and go somewhere else.
If you want to learn how to increase website clicks, make sure you’re increasing your page load speed as much as possible.
One of the best ways to increase page load speed is to compress files and shrink down images. Caching pages (for CMS-powered sites) is helpful, too.
Consider your hosting plan as well. If you’re using a shared hosting plan, you might be more likely to deal with slow page load times.
- Quality Data is Essential
Are you looking at your website data and analytics on a regular basis? If not, now is the time to start.
When you take the time to learn about who is visiting your website and how people are engaging with it, you can make positive changes that help you optimize it and see better results from it.
Make sure you’re assessing your website data on a regular basis. You may want to invest in tools that help you gather better metrics, too.
These tools can give you quality insights. That way, you can make the best decision for your website and your business.
Improve Website Optimization Today
Now that you know more about how to improve website optimization and how to increase conversions, it’s time to get to work. Keep the information outlined above in mind so you can grow your website audience and your business.
Do you want to learn more about optimizing your business’s website? Check out some of the other digital marketing articles on our site today.
