Are you struggling to get noticed online? How can you not be, when thousands of companies are competing for visibility? Your website is your only sales tool that is “at work” 24/7, so t’s vital to make sure your site is working for you. The good news is that a few small changes can go a long way. Here are our 7 tips to optimize your website and ranking higher in search results.
1. Write powerful meta descriptions
The first step to optimize your website is to make sure that your title and meta descriptions are short, descriptive, and unique for each page.
The meta description is the snippet that appears below the title on a search engine results page (SERP). Its job is two-fold: it gives the search engine the information they need to rank your page, and it shows users what to expect when they click the link. Including a focus keyword helps both Google and the user, which leads to better traffic and rankings for you.
2. Optimize your images
Whether you’re adding a new image or updating an old one, remember that images are an important part of your website’s overall performance.
Here’s what to keep in mind when optimizing your images:
- Make your image as small as possible while still maintaining its quality. A small file size will load faster and use less bandwidth, which improves the user experience on your website and reduces page load time.
- Give your image alt-text. Alt-text improves your search engine ranking by telling the search engines what your photo is of. Alt-text is also vital because it makes images more accessible to users with disabilities.
- Use the right file format. There are many different types of images you can use on your site, but there’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach here—each type comes with specific benefits and drawbacks for certain types of applications. The most common formats include JPG, GIF, PNG and SVG.
3. Make your site mobile-friendly
Optimize your website by making it mobile-friendly. Mobile devices have taken over the world and most people now use them as their primary browsing device. In fact, 80% of Google searches are done from a mobile device. If your site isn’t optimized for these devices, you risk losing out on several potential customers.
In general, mobile-friendly websites are easier to use than non-mobile friendly ones. They’re designed with smaller screens in mind and make it easy for users to navigate around and interact with content on the page. This makes it more likely that people will stay on your site longer, leading to increased engagement and conversions. Additionally, mobile devices are often used for research purposes before making purchases or signing up for services/subscriptions: having an optimized website will increase the chances that users find what they’re looking for quickly and easily enough that they won’t move on after five seconds!
Check that your website is optimized for mobile browsing with Google’s Mobile Friendly Test.
4. Fix broken links
It’s important to check for broken links on your website. If you don’t, these bad links can hurt your SEO and make visitors leave.
Don’t have time to search your entire website for broken links? Request a Free Marketing Action Plan from us and we’ll do it for you!
5. Improve internal linking strategy
An internal link is a link on one page of your website that takes visitors to another page on your site. To fully optimize your website, you need to improve your internal linking strategy. This step can be overwhelming, but it’s not as difficult as you may think.
Here are the steps involved in improving internal linking:
- Identify content that should be linked together
- Link related articles together using hyperlinks. For example, we linked our Marketing Action Plan request page above
- Link pages together that are often visited by users who visit one page on your site (i.e., ‘home’ or ‘contact’), but don’t necessarily move between other pages on the website (i.e., ‘about us’)
6. Write more engaging content
The best way to get people to read your content is by writing it in a format that they love. In other words, write for your audience and not search engines—Google will find you in time!
Here’s a quick list of what we mean by “engaging” content:
- Use keywords that are important to your target demographic
- Make your content easy to read: use subheadings to break the text down and use bulleted lists (ordered or unordered) where appropriate
- Include images where possible—they are great for increasing dwell time as people love looking at pretty things!
7. Start blogging
Blogging is a great way to build trust and authority, share your expertise, get more traffic, build your brand, and get more leads. Plus – blog posts keep people on your site for a good chunk of time. he fact that you’ve made it this far is proof that blogs work!
Remember: Small changes can make a big difference to how your website performs.
Or, as My Town Media General Manager Phil McComb always says, “by the inch it’s a cinch, by the yard it’s hard.”
One of the biggest changes you can make to your website is to optimize for search engines. This means making small changes that help your pages show up better in search results. You might think that these small changes don’t matter, but they can make a big difference!
Many small business owners don’t think about optimizing their websites for SEO. Although SEO can be a complicated and time-consuming process, it doesn’t have to be. There are many easy changes that you can make today which will help optimize your website to rank higher in the search results. Our goal is to help you implement these changes as quickly and efficiently as possible, so that you can start seeing results sooner rather than later!
