“I’ve built this entire website myself, but I’m not seeing any traffic or keyword rankings! What am I doing wrong?”
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, has always been a key factor in any business’s success online. Search Engine Optimization is defined as “the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.”
SEO is becoming increasingly important every year as more businesses switch to more online-focused marketing models, so today we will go over three quick ways you can boost your business’s SEO and rankings quickly!
The Spinning Wheel of Death
Step 1: Analyze Your Site's Speed
We’ve All been there… The infinite “spinning wheel of death”. A slow website is not only frustrating for everyone viewing it – it is also directly impacting how others, including search engines, perceive your business. Sluggish loading times greatly affect a user’s likelihood to stay on your site and almost guarantee that they will not return to or share your site with others.
On average, there is only about 15 seconds to capture a user’s attention to keep them interacting with your website. If a user spends most of this time waiting for the page to become interactive at all, they are more than likely to leave the site without even viewing any of what your site has to offer. Other than the frustration that a slow site can bring on to its users, these loading times will also affect your site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google purposely ranks slow, unoptimized sites lower on rankings as they are not considered to be high-quality content.
Here are a few quick steps you can take to help improve your website’s loading times:
- Optimize files, especially images or videos, to be smaller and compressed.
- Lazy load media files or use a content delivery network (CDN).
- Keep your site updated, including themes and plugins.
- Use an optimization plugin that will allow you to minimize CSS, JS, and HTML files to reduce loading times.
- Defer loading of render-blocking assets including JavaScript and CSS.
Not sure how quick your website is? Take a website speed test to see exactly what changes your site may need.
Website Optimized for Every Device
Step 2: Is your Site Optimized for Multiple Devices?
After ensuring your site is up-to-speed (😉), another major thing to consider is how well it appears on multiple devices. Google will, again, purposely rank a site lower that is not considered to be “mobile friendly” as it is potentially low-quality content it does not want to push to users.
Most sites are built for desktop devices, but unsurprisingly, over 65% of all Internet traffic is on a mobile device such as a phone or tablet and this figure is only set to increase every year. The best way to setup a site for multiple devices is by using a responsive design theme.
A responsive theme will have a CSS Style Sheet set aside specifically for devices of a certain screen resolution that automatically enable when the site detects those resolution. These themes are very powerful and make it simple to ensure your site will look just as good on mobile devices as it would on a desktop computer. There are many amazing responsive themes for WordPress on ThemeForest with tons of support and documentation that are affordable, less than $100, or even free!
Search Engine Visibility
Step 3: Can your Site be Found?
Now that we know your website is quick and easy to view on any device, we need to make sure that it can be found by users and search engines with good search engine optimization. SEO is a major aspect of any website’s success, and a lot of components are factored when determining where your site ranks. Here are a few quick things you can look at to get your site’s SEO and ranking improving:
- Have a meta description written for every page on your site.
- Track your site’s SEO performance using Google Search Console or a similar application.
- Use alt-descriptions for media files.
- Update your site’s content regularly and keep it relevant.
Are you ready to get your website ranking higher, or do you still have some questions or need some help completing these steps? Contact us and we will be more than happy to help answer any questions you may have!
