An optimized business website is a better performing site which is highly visible on search engines. Without website optimization, your company won’t get the traffic it requires to remain profitable and stand out. Improving your site makes your business more visible on SERPs, raising web traffic. Discussed below are nine tips for optimizing your small business website.
Conduct an SEO performance audit
An SEO performance audit diagnoses any issues or weakness areas your business website might have. It focuses on reviewing ranking signals that show what’s working properly, the elements that need working on, and the website sections that require attention. Through an SEO audit, you can track your keywords’ progress to determine how they’ve been performing. It also helps you unearth your competitors’ weaknesses and strengths.
You can discover the keywords they’re ranking highly for so you can concentrate on the keywords they aren’t targeting. There are various SEO audit types you can conduct to improve your business site. An in-depth and effective SEO audit requires the right skills and expertise, so consider hiring a professional SEO service.
Invest in keyword research
Your website’s primary purpose is to ensure prospects find you when they search online for keywords relating to your industry or niche. For potential customers to find you online, the content on your website pages must be optimized for search engines, plus those looking for a business like yours. This ensures your site ranks top on SERPs for the keywords you’re looking to rank for.
When looking for the search terms to target, consider optimizing for long-tail keywords because they’re more precise and have less competition. Since manual keyword research requires too much time, investing in keyword research tools can help you save time.
Make your website responsive
A responsive website design makes your site feel and look consistent across various devices and screen sizes. This lets you engage and communicate while educating your site visitors. Responsive design strategies like testing for mobile optimization and picture resizing help optimize your small business site.
Since this makes it easy for more users to view your site on mobile devices, your business’s accessibility and visibility on the web rise, improving your rankings on SERPs. Responsive sites are cost-effective because you don’t have to own multiple sites for mobile and desktop users. This lowers your website maintenance costs.
Ascertain an easy-to-navigate website
94% of customers say that your site should be easily navigable. Users should be able to find whatever they’re looking for quickly, or you risk losing potential clients. Keeping your pages organized and displaying contact details while keeping your content clear and concise can help keep site visitors engaged, reducing bounce rates. Making your site easily navigable makes your business more competitive, which helps attract new customers.
Optimize your images
Huge images usually slow your web pages down, creating a bad user experience. Minimizing large image file sizes speeds up your web page’s load time and lowers bounce rates. Since image optimization makes your site load faster, its rankings on SERPs also improve.
Build a backlink profile
When authoritative websites link to you, it demonstrates to search engines that your site is trustworthy. It’s an affirmation that your content is premium and valuable. A trustworthy site generally ranks higher. Getting high quality backlinks from reliable sites should be included in your link-building plan. Besides being an essential ranking element, they’re also important for:
- Boosting brand exposure: The higher the number of backlinks your site receives, the more exposure your business will get as people click on them
- Generating traffic: Links on high-traffic pages may lead to a lot of users visiting your website, creating referral traffic
- Improved relationships: An outreach campaign for securing backlinks can help develop relationships with other websites within your niche
All backlinks aren’t the same. As such, you should concentrate your efforts on building top-quality links plus niche content instead of taking every chance to create backlinks. Avoid spammy and low-quality backlinks because they can hurt your reputation and site. The best backlinks should be:
- Reputable: It should appear on an authoritative, trustworthy site
- Natural: A high-quality backlink should appear in your site content organically. It shouldn’t seem like it was forced
- Quite relevant: Your backlinks should appear on sites relevant to your brand, niche, and audience
Avoid backlinks from new websites, link farms, and directory sites because they’re less valuable.
Identify your target market
Before optimizing your business website for user experience, know your target audience. To find your ideal target market, understand the services/ products they’re searching for and how much they’re ready to spend.
Consider their priorities with regard to communication and contacts. Using tools such as Google Analytics, you can uncover vital details concerning your site users and then create precise, in-depth reader personas. A good user experience translates to increased satisfaction and can affect your search ranking. To enhance user experience, you must first know your users’ expectations and challenges.
Consider user intent
Regardless of what your website goals are, you should optimize for a particular user intent, or else you might find the site ranking high and not contributing to your business revenue. Understanding the various search intent types helps determine a query’s relevancy and the content needed to rank. To optimize your website for the correct user intent:
- Know the keywords driving visibility to your site: This will help you understand the search queries with the most significant effect on organic search visibility and the available keyword gaps. This will help you determine if what you’re offering is aligned with user intent
- Analyze the query intent: Upon identifying the search queries that drive impressions and clicks to your website, conduct an in-depth evaluation of what appears in search results for these terms. Analyzing the top SERPs around these search queries helps ascertain you understand search intent or what search engines have identified as most relevant to every query
- Implement your discoveries to your content: Apply your discoveries to your content development and optimization efforts. It may include creating fresh content or optimizing the content you’ve already published
Speed up your website
Your website speed significantly affects your site’s ranking ability and bounce rate. Users find slow websites annoying and are likely to abandon them for others. Boosting your site’s speed creates an outstanding user experience. It also increases your SEO rankings and results in more conversions.
Endnote
Optimizing your company site makes it easy for prospects to find you on search engines. Implementing these tips can help optimize your small business website.