As we head into springtime, we often associate it with change, growth of new life and revamping our homes. It’s a little-known secret that seasoned webmasters know, it’s also a great time to refresh your website. Here are 10 of the most productive tasks to get started on.
Improve Load Time
Nobody likes to wait these days… We live in an era of same day delivery, fast food, and an even bigger appetite for content on demand.
Amazon has stated that for every 100ms of page speed reduction that occurs on their site, they stand to lose 1% of their revenue. Even for smaller sites this can lead to a huge drop off in traffic which can be up to 53% according to a recent Google study. This is the reason why it’s so important to improve the load speed of your website.
The first thing you can do is to use Google PageSpeed, which is a free tool that will analyze a website and show you a page speed score. If it’s good then well done, if not then it will show what’s causing your website to load slow with a detailed breakdown.
Another way to make your website load super-fast is by using Google’s AMP framework which is an open source framework developed by Google. It allows for better, faster experiences on the mobile web. The framework allows you to build lightweight experiences for mobile by simplifying code and following streamlined CSS rules. Learn more about Google’s AMP framework here.
Check for Broken Links
A broken link is when a page on your site links to another page that no longer exists. This is bad for two reasons:
Bad user experience: When a user clicks on a link on your site and it leads to nowhere, it will severely reduce their trust in your site’s authority and integrity. 404 errors encourage users to move on to the next site rather than stick around and hope they will get the information they need from a broken page.
Google penalization: As it is most probably your goal to rank fairly in Google’s search listings, it’s to your advantage to not do things that make them angry… Ok maybe not angry but they will reduce your websites search rankings.
If you have a few pages on your website, then you can manually check your outbound links regularly to avoid any negative results. However, if you have a larger site then the manual method can be a tedious task. To speed up the task you can use Dr. Link Check to automatically crawl your website and look for broken links.
Test with Different Browsers and Devices
The reason you want to do this is because your visitors are now accessing your site from more and more varied devices and browsers than ever before. Such as smartphones, tablets, TV screens and even in a Tesla… Maybe. So, it’s important that you make sure your website design looks good and congruent across all platforms.
In order to make sure your website looks good on any device and in any browser, check out the free Browsershots service and perform a compatibility test.
Make Titles More Search-Friendly
In the book publishing industry, the title, as well as the cover is an important factor of its success. It is used to convey the books contents in a way that grabs attention while simultaneously sparking curiosity. In essence the main goal is to get someone to pick up the book and read it which is referred to as click through rate (CTR) online.
Now in the world of the webmaster, page titles are even more important. As it is our goal to get readers on our page, we need to make sure that our titles stand out from the endless listings that appear on the search results. We can do this by:
Including your main keyword in the title (H1 title): This tells google exactly what you want to rank for.
Editing your page meta description: Search engines usually auto generate the meta description from the pages content. This usually doesn’t look too appealing and writing your own description helps you to stand out because most people are too lazy to change it.
Adding image alt description: These fall into place of an image on your page if the image fails to load on a user’s screen. The text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engines to better crawl and rank your website.
Search for New SEO Opportunities
One of the best ways to freshen up your website is to simply add new content regularly. To make things easy for yourself it’s a good idea to create systems to organize the process. For example, allocate a day to plan out the articles you want to write for the week. Choose how many articles to write and stick to it.
To help you come up with endless ideas, use tools such as Keywordtool.io and Ubersuggest. You can use these tools to help you find long tail keywords that people are actually searching for. Another pro tip is to use Ubersuggest to search for all the keywords your top competitors are ranking for to get ideas. Then with the data you’ve acquired, you can plan out your new content and get writing, and the best part is that it’s totally free.
Review Your CTAs
Every page on your site should have a goal or aim. This could be to sign up readers to an email list, buy a product or to link them to more useful information onsite. So successfully do this, you need to optimize your pages Calls-to-Action or CTAs.
You can do this by:
Not using generic phrases
Things like “Buy Now”, “Try Me” and “Download” are surprisingly not that effective. Your call to action text needs to be related to your product, service, or content.
For example, instead of a CTA button that says, “learn more”, a more effective way to say it would be “Yes I want to learn how to train my puppy”. As you can notice, the call to action is related to the benefit the customer will get and is more likely to convert.
Utilize hero images
Most likely you will have a hero image (main image) on your home page. Utilize these so that they draw focus to your CTA.
For example, if the main image is of a person, they should be looking towards your CTA and not directly at the reader.
Add time sensitive words
Words that evoke scarcity such as “Free Trial” or “Try Now”. Again, it should be related to your product or service.
For example, you could say “Potty Train Your Child Today”. This is related to your product or service and conveys to your reader that they should take action now instead of taking their time.
CTA placement
Lastly, it’s important that you place your CTAs in the most accessible places on your website. You wouldn’t want to be placing your main CTA at the bottom of your page or above the fold, it should make sense.
So, if you break down the benefits and features of a product on your page, it would make sense to have a call to action underneath each section to let people know that they can get started.
Add Social Media Meta Tags
Social media meta tags help conversion rate optimization for social exposure. This allows you to optimize for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest by defining exactly how titles, descriptions, images and more appear in social streams.
There are multiple apps and tools to help you with social media meta tags such as megatags.co.
Optimize the Sign-Up or Order Process
Whether you’re selling a physical or digital product or growing your email list, it is always important to optimize your funnel. This includes everything a customer will see or experience from clicking on your CTA to the thank you page or follow up email sequence. You should know your funnel like the back of your hand, or even better.
The easiest way to do this is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and go through your whole sales or sign up process. What is it like? Does it scream scam? Are things in place? Would you buy it? Ask yourself these questions and adjust things accordingly. You will be surprised at the things that you’ve missed.
Freshen Up Old Content
Earlier we spoke about making sure to regularly add new content and articles to your site. However, it is equally important to go back and rejuvenate some of your existing posts. It doesn’t have to be very time consuming and could be as simple as replacing dates, pricing or links (never forget the links).
Another key aspect of Google’s algorithm is content relevancy, if people are searching for iMac troubleshooting solutions and you are describing older generation operating systems then it could cause people to leave the page and increase bounce rates.
Add Internal Links
Internal link building is one of the most important on-page SEO strategies that you are probably not utilizing. Google has stated on numerous occasions that the number of links pointing to a page is a signal to search engines of the relative importance of that linked page.
Now I’m not telling you to link all 300 pages of your site to one sales page as that would look ridiculously unnatural and quite frankly… spammy. But linking relevant pages using anchor text strategically will help search engines to understand the structure of your website.
It can also increase your sites internal traffic and organic reach. For example, NinjaOutreach used internal links to help grow their organic traffic by 40%.
Pro tip: Review your pages and blog posts for opportunities to add internal links (using keyword-rich anchor text).
Conclusion
There are many ways to refresh your website and many of them do not take much time at all. What’s important is to take a proactive approach to managing your website’s health and growth by creating a routine whereby you keep on top of small tasks that really improve your site’s optimization.
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