What are Website Optimization, Strategies, and Tools

Forbes said you and your business have 7 seconds to make a first impression. This is especially true for a website. Time is an important factor if you want to gauge how well your website impresses search engines and visitors.

Having a website is just the beginning. Now that you have a website, it’s time to make sure the people you designed it for can actually find and use it. It’s time for website optimization.

By the way, what is the most important ranking factor? Keep reading to find out.

What is Website Optimization?

Website optimization refers to different techniques and strategies you can devise to make it easier for your target audience to find and carry out the needed action on the website.

Think about this for a moment. Imagine spending loads of money building the most beautiful website you can envision. However, months after building this website, you realize that no one visits it and that the few visitors that manage to stop by would end up leaving within seconds.

Sad right? As it stands, this is the fate of anyone who builds a website today without making out time for website optimization.

The goal of a well-optimized website is measured using three major metrics:

• Performance on search engine result page
• Customer/User Experience
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Why is Website Optimization Important?

The internet is believed to have come to life on the 1st of January 1983. Between that time and the next decade, only a selected few had access to and could use it. Whatever you put on the internet at this time would be seen by everyone without you even making so much effort.

Fast-forward to today, when internet penetration is at an all-time high—a whopping 63.1% of the world population now has access to the internet. Similarly, there are currently about 1.14 billion websites spread across the internet, and every day about 252,000 new websites are added. These numbers point to one thing—there is a lot of competition on the internet, and only those who can plan and execute proper website optimization would stand out.

Website Optimization Strategies

Website optimization efforts should spread across 6 major strategies. They include:

Core Web Vitals

Google’s latest ranking algorithm update says there are new factors that influence performance on the search engine, and they are collectively known as Core Web Vitals. The three key factors that make up Core Web Vitals are site speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

Site speed

Website speed assesses how quickly your website loads for users to access. You know how attention span is quite low and no one has the time to wait minutes for a single page to load. So, they typically abandon websites that don’t load fast, which would, in turn, hurt the site’s performance on search engines over time.

Interactivity

This still has to do with the website speed, but this time in relation to activities users perform on the website. For instance, how long did it take for a button to respond after a user clicked? While website speed is measured in seconds, this is measured in less than 100ms.

Visual Stability

Have you been on a website and clicked a button only for you to find yourself on another page that you know for sure you didn’t click? Or that time when you were about to take an action on a website, but the button quickly disappears, moves, or gets replaced by something else—resulting in you taking an unintended action.

These are all cases of websites that lack visual stability; an apparent no-no for Google when selecting sites to include in search results.

PageSpeed Insights is a Google free tool you can use to test and assess your website speed and other core web vital components. The tool also gives recommendations and what you can do to improve your website in this aspect.

Mobile Experience

92.1% of internet users access the internet with their mobile devices. This explains why every website optimization effort must prioritize mobile friendliness.

A mobile-friendly website is one that automatically adjusts to fit and suit different devices and screens.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Optimizing for search engines is quite crucial in your overall website optimization efforts. 70% of marketers say SEO is a more effective digital marketing approach than PPC.

The first step to optimizing your website for SEO is to ensure that Google is indexing all your pages correctly without any major SEO errors.

Google Search Console is one of the most powerful website optimization tools for SEO. Signup and properly link your website to the Google Search Console to get started. The tool would help point out all the fundamental issues your website has and give helpful insights on keyword research.

Analytics

Analytics is strictly about data. Analytics is where you visit to see the actual effect of your website optimization and SEO efforts.

Some of the questions analytics seek to answer include:

• How does an average visitor spend on your website? (bounce rate)
• What is your website speed?
• How much traffic do you currently have?
• How is your website performing on search engines?
• What is the demographic of your website visitors?
• Which page(s) gets the most visitors?

… and so on. The answers to these questions would give you valuable insight into your website performance over time.

The two crucial analytics tools you need are Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Google Analytics has a smooth integration with Google and helps to provide real-time information and data about your website and its visitors. Search console, on the other hand, focuses mostly on insights and recommendations on search engines.

Content Marketing

This strategy helps to direct organic search results to your website through useful and relevant content. It involves planning, writing, and sharing educative and informative content about your products and services.

Aside from driving traffic, the goal of content marketing is to boost brand awareness, engagement, and loyalty. This strategy is so important that 60% of marketers claim content marketing results in higher demand.

You can plan and execute your content marketing strategy through different channels. Some of the most common channels include:

Social media

Engage your community of followers on social media with content that would add value to them. Keep them informed about happenings in the industry as a whole and your business specifically. Employ the power of storytelling for your social media posts.

Blog post

Blog posts allow you to do the same thing you do on social media, but this time with more space and texts at your disposal. Make good use of it.

For your blog posts, start by researching relevant keywords and use such keyword research to come up with content that your target audience expects to see in search results on search engines. For the best result, your blog post should, among other things, contain both internal links and external links.

Email Newsletter

Email allows you to send your community personalized, direct messages from time to time. Build some kind of connection with your audience by sending them regular email newsletters about your products, services, and industry as a whole.

People get several emails daily already. They open and engage some, report others and ignore several others. You want your email to be among the ones they open.

The secret to that begins with choosing the right subject line. That’s not all, follow that up by keeping the email simple and focusing mostly on adding value, as against making sales.

User Experience

One of Google’s primary goals is to provide the best possible user experience to all its users. And to this, they often make sure to recommend websites that appear to have a similar goal.

Focus on having a website that’s built for the best possible user experience—improve your content, work on UI/UX, work on website structure and hierarchy, link to relevant sites, and use relevant keywords. All of these and more would give users the experience they desire and put you in search engines’ good books.

FAQs

What are Google Ranking Factors?

Google has a number of ranking factors, and almost no one knows it all. The few Google ranking factors that are known can be broken down into the following groups:

• Domain Factors
• Site-Level Factors
• Page-Level Factors
• User Interaction
• Backlink Factors
• Brand Signals
• Special Google Algorithm Rules
• Off-Site Webspam Factors
• On-Site Webspam Factors

What is Local SEO Strategy?

Local SEO refers to an SEO strategy that helps increase a website’s visibility in local search results. This is typically beneficial to businesses located or present in a particular geographic location, otherwise known as a local business.

What are the components of local SEO?

• Claim your Google My Business page
• Register in local business directories
• Take advantage of every media and organic mention
• Get and maintain reviews
• Optimize landing page

Conclusion

Having a website is great. Unfortunately, you may be its only visit if you don’t optimize it properly. You can bank on this guide to know the right areas to pay attention to for your website optimization and learn all the necessary website optimization strategies. Nevertheless, you do not have to do all of this by yourself. Trusted SEO experts from agencies like Aussie SEO can help you implement these SEO strategies.