Simple strategies to optimise your website
Written by Natalia Selby
“Content is king” announced Bill Gates in 1996. As time goes on and the digital landscape changes, the jury’s out on whether that’s still the case. Regardless, content is still central to your marketing strategy – but there’s little point in creating it if you’re the only person who’s ever going to see it.
Keeping search engines and visitors happy
Getting the basic elements right is crucial to appearing in search results and getting visits. Included amongst these important elements are:
Title tag
These should be under 70 characters long, unique to each page to avoid being seen as duplicate content and they should be compelling – to encourage click-throughs. Place your primary keyword as near to the beginning as possible, but don’t stuff it with lots of keywords – it’s unnatural and you could be penalised for it.
Meta description
This is the piece of text that appears underneath the title and URL on the search results page and is another important factor in gaining click-throughs from search engine results pages. The optimum length for a meta description is 155 characters. Use relevant keywords in your descriptions and, again, make them compelling enough for visitors to want to click.
Header tags
Starting from H1 all the way through to H6, these tags help Google and other search engines identify the most important content on the page. H1 tags are the most important of all – this should be your main page heading, and you should only have one per page. H2 tags are for sub-headings and you can have as many of these as you need.
Keywords and key phrases
These are the words or phrases that specifically describe the content on your page. Using keywords helps to direct visitors to relevant content. Ranking for the right keywords in search engines is critical, making keyword research one of the most important factors. Use a keyword planner like Google’s Keyword Tools. For more on keyword research, Moz has a very useful article.
Reputable links
One of the biggest factors in search engine ranking is inbound links. These are links that point to your site content from anywhere else on the internet – the more reputable and authoritative the site, the better. Writing high quality, relevant, keyword-rich content is a must if you want to get noticed and linked to from other reputable sites.
Update your website content regularly
Isn’t it frustrating when you visit a website to find out of date, incorrect or irrelevant information? A cardinal sin committed by many businesses!
You should be producing content that adds value: it should be relevant to your visitors, it addresses a need or it helps prospects through the conversion funnel. Content can be blog posts, images, videos, whitepapers, interviews, case studies, statistics, testimonials – anything that a visitor would consider useful and relevant.
Call tracking helps improve online performance
Telephone calls provide valuable insight about your online performance and customer behaviour. For instance, prospects could be calling you to find out information about your product or service that they can’t find on your website.
Capturing and analysing your call data allows you to review data not readily available in standard analytics tools. Using call tracking technology in conjunction with your reporting and CRM software provides you with a complete picture of your performance across all channels. For starters, our recent post lists 3 ways that call tracking can help improve website performance.
For more information, please get in touch with us directly.