Sure, you’ve got a great website; it’s performing well – but did you know there are steps you can take today to boost its performance?
Here are six simple steps that will send more traffic to your site, deliver a better user experience, and kick more digital marketing goals. Go!
1. Add alt text to images
Google can’t see the images on your website, but it can read the alt text assigned to them.
Adding descriptive alt text to images will help improve your site usability and visibility, which will ultimately help your search ranking.
But be careful, as it’s important not to force in your SEO keywords (known as ‘keyword stuffing’). Try and be as semantic and descriptive as possible. Accessibility here is always more important than the SEO benefits.
Alt text also means that the picture can be explained to people who are visually impaired, making your website more accessible.
For more tips on alt text, check out this great article from Moz.
2. Go mobile-friendly
According to international statistics portal Statistica, in 2017, 50.3 per cent of all web traffic was consumed on mobile devices – so if your website is not built for mobile, you’re missing out.
Websites that don’t display well on mobile or are hard to read are problematic for a number of reasons.
Firstly, people quickly lose patience and will leave before doing what you want them to do.
Secondly, Google penalises sites that aren’t mobile-friendly – an immediate reason to make the change.
3. Redirect the www subdomain
You may have noticed other websites that do this: you type www into the browser, but when you arrive at the website, the browser will appear minus the www, or vice versa.
That’s because the website uses a 301 redirect.
It’s really important to redirect the www because if you don’t your website will look to search like two different sites to search engines like Google.
301 redirects are easy to set up. Use a CNAME (canonical name) record to point the www version to the same place as the naked domain, then use a 301 redirect to point to the preferred version of the domain name.
Once this is done, Google will see it as the same site and will not penalise it as being duplicate content.
Making your website mobile-friendly is one way to boost its performance.
4. Set up reporting tools – and use them
Free reporting tools such as Google Analytics or Search Console will provide you with detailed information about how your website is being used.
Take this information and ramp up elements that are achieving your objectives, and ditch those that aren’t.
Analytics tools will also help trial new marketing strategies.
Test and analyse, test and analyse: this should become your mantra.
5. Fix broken links and 404 errors
It is amazing how broken links find their way into your website.
Maybe pages or websites that are linked to have changed or been deleted; maybe links have been renamed.
Whatever the reason, dead links are bad news.
Links that go nowhere appear as 404 errors and Google search will penalise your site.
301 redirects are required to alert Google to the fact that the content has moved.
6. Clean up messy URLs
According to US digital marketing guru Rand Fishkin, there are many benefits to making your URLs human-readable.
Messy URLs are a usability and user experience issue.
Messy, very long URLs or URLs with lots of symbols and code can be unsettling for the reader.
More importantly, though, shorter URLs are easier to remember and to share on social media.
Long, messy URLs can also make it difficult for search engines to detect and index key words it contains.
Don’t forget: whenever you change a URL, remember to create a redirect.
To recap, 6 easy ways to improve your website include:
- Adding alt tags to all images
- Optimising your site for mobile devices
- Redirecting your www sub-domain
- Setting up and using reporting tools
- Fixing broken links and 404 errors
- Making human usable URLs.
Call in the marketing experts
Need help with any of these steps or not sure where to start?
Assemblo is a Melbourne-based digital marketing agency that can help grow your business.
Give u a call on (03) 9079 2555 or drop us a note via our contact form below.