Working on a big website project and don’t know where to start?
We’ve all been there. It’s not always easy to pick which elements should be fixed first, especially when the design is already pretty complete. Even more so if you’re working with a set of tools that you’re not too familiar with.
One thing that I find myself doing, every time a new website project begins, is running through a quick checklist that allows me to identify the most important elements of my websites and quickly diagnose what needs fixing first.
That’s what I’d like to share with you today —the elements that I choose to optimise first are the ones you should keep in mind as well.
What Is Website Optimisation?
Website optimisation improves user experience, accessibility, search performance, traffic, and conversion rates. Implementing website optimisation practices will help determine what currently works and what needs improvement.
The primary purpose of web optimisation is to attract more visitors and create a smooth experience for them, encouraging conversions and repeat visits.
The following 4 strategies will help to improve your website speed, user experience, mobile friendliness, accessibility, and search engine ranking.
1. SEO
2. Image optimisation
3. Mobile optimisation
4. Maintain clean and updated content with keyword density
SEO
If you’re not focusing on SEO, it’s like building a house without any windows: you might end up with something that looks good from the outside, but if no one can see inside, then what’s the point?
If you want to rank well in search engines, then it’s important that your website is optimised for search engines. This is why we focus on SEO when optimising our clients’ websites.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and it refers to the process of making your website more visible in search results.
There are a few different ways to do this, including by:
- Creating high-quality content that accurately describes what your business does and who it serves.
- Use keywords related to your industry and services on your page titles, body text, and meta descriptions.
- You need to make sure that your website is visible to search engines so people can find it when they’re looking for what you have to offer.
SEO can be complicated! That’s why we recommend focusing on it with an experienced professional—our team at Merce Web has been helping businesses optimise their sites since 2009(Enter Correct Year), so we know how to get results!
Image Optimisation
When it comes to optimising your website, images are one of the most important things you can focus on.
The way your website looks is the first impression you give to new visitors. To ensure they have a positive experience and don’t bounce off your site, it’s important to optimise everything from the images on your landing page to the font size used in your title tags.
Images are one of the most common factors that influence bounce rate. If a visitor lands on your homepage and sees a jumbled mess of text and images, they’re likely to leave before even reading your content.
This is why it’s imperative that you optimise all of your images for speed, so that when users do visit your site, they can actually read what you have written and don’t get distracted by a slow loading image or video file.
Here are 3 in-depth reasons for Image Optimisation:
- Images will help increase the quality of your content and make it more engaging for readers.
- Optimised images can help improve your SEO ranking in Google, which means more people will be able to find you when they search for what you have to offer.
- Optimised images can help with conversions—if people see what they’re looking for quickly and easily (through an image), then they’re more likely to convert on whatever offer you’re running at that moment!
If you don’t optimise your images, they may be too large for the page and cause it to load slowly—or even worse, they could crash your whole website! This is why optimising images is so important: When you optimise them, they’ll load faster and look great on any device (including phones and tablets).
Mobile Optimisation
It’s not just about being mobile-friendly, it’s also about being user-friendly.
According to the Measuring Success report, 69% of smartphone owners use their phones to search for ecommerce businesses. For small ecommerce businesses, this can be a goldmine of new customers—if you’re able to capture their attention and get them to your website in the first place.
But if your website isn’t optimised for mobile, you’ll miss out on that opportunity. In fact, according to the same report, more than half of all online shoppers say they’d stop shopping with a retailer if they couldn’t find what they were looking for on their phones.
By making sure your website is mobile friendly, you’ll be able to get more people to visit your site and buy from it. This can help you increase your revenue and profits!
Maintain clean and updated content with keyword density
A website’s content is the most important thing on its homepage. It’s what a potential reader sees first, and it’s probably what they judge your site by. If your content is poor, you’ll lose a lot of business.
Maintaining clean and updated content with keyword density when optimising your website is important because it makes your website more reliable and trustworthy.
If you have a site that has been around for a long time, it’s likely that the content on your site is outdated. You can easily tell this by looking at the dates on articles or blog posts—if they’re from 2020 or before, chances are they don’t reflect current trends or recent updates in the industry.
This may seem like a small thing, but in fact, it can hurt your search engine rankings if users think you are outdated or unreliable. That’s because Google wants to show its users the most relevant results possible whenever they search for something—and outdated content isn’t very relevant to today’s users!
If you want to keep your website up-to-date, there are several ways to do so:
- Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. If they are updating their content regularly, then you should do so too!
- Keep an eye on what’s trending online (with Google Trends). This will help you know what topics people are interested in right now so you can write articles about those topics that will help bring traffic
Content is the bread and butter of your website. It’s what makes people want to come back, and it’s what will help you get found on search engines. To make sure that your content is as effective as possible, you need to optimise it for search engines. One way to do this is by making sure that your keyword density is high enough.
Keyword density refers to the number of times a specific word or phrase appears on a page compared with the total words on the page. For example, if a page has 100 words and your keyword appears 10 times, then that page has a keyword density of 10%. This means that 10% of all words on a given page are related to your topic/keyword.
The optimal range for keyword density depends on the type of content and audience you’re targeting:
- Blog posts: 1-3%
- Product pages: 2-5%
- Articles: 0-5%
Conclusion
In this article, we learned about 4strategies to implement when optimising our website. These factors can be used to evaluate how well our websites are performing online. If any of the basic factors are lacking, we can improve the areas where our websites fail to meet them.
At Merce Web we offer you a FREE website audit to determine what needs to be optimised on your website.
