It goes without saying that a brand without online presence is going to struggle to compete in a market that is all about digital interaction.
The marketing landscape has evolved and this evolution has seen the internet dominate brand growth.
So what does this mean for your business?
Well, at the very least, you need a website that is optimised enough to compete for its spot on any given SERP (search engine results page).
How do you achieve this?
There are various best practices that are recommended you implement so as to achieve better results for your site including increased rankings and more traffic.
Here are just four techniques that you can use to help optimise your website:
1. Use an effective SEO strategy that can be adapted to all search engines so as to increase ranking
There isn’t only one search engine that exists. There are many. How your website fairs in terms of ranking on those search engines is dependent of various factors. Here are what Google and Bing suggest you should be doing:
- Strive to write pages that describe your content in a very concise manner. Make the information useful. Utilise keywords that users are actually searching for. Be consistent in producing content regularly.
- When designing the pages of your site, ensure that they’re created with the user in mind, not search engines.
- Don’t use “cloaking” – a technique that is used when you deliver different content to search engines than you display to users. It is used to increase a website’s ranking on search engines through different keywords. It is a black-hat practice however that most SEO agencies and web publishers are opposed to and can result in big penalties from search engines.
2. Address the needs of your target audience
The only way to retain an audience is to deliver what they’re looking for.
So you need to ask yourself, do you know what visitors to your site are searching for and will those visitors be satisfied with what they find?
Doing business online today is everything to do with inbound marketing. And according to HubSpot, inbound marketing is all about creating quality content that pulls people towards your company and product, where they naturally want to be.
This means you need to identify the questions your customers are asking in their search for a particular product or service online and then ensure that your website delivers targeted content that will answer those questions.
3. The user experience
You need to make using your website an epic experience for every single user.
How?
- By ensuring your site is easy to navigate.
- By using a responsive website design that allows for a great user experience across multiple devices and screen sizes.
- Making certain that your site is easily found on all web browsers.
- That the information to be found therein is relevant to and answers the questions that people are asking online.
- That the content on your website is incredibly useful, most definitely informative and likeable enough to turn visitors into loyal customers.
4. Mobile friendly
The growth of mobile internet users has literally exploded. Now, more than ever, people are using their mobile devices to conduct searches online.
This means your website has to be absolutely mobile friendly.
Aside from the fact that your website will attract more customers (and as a consequence more profitable return); Google will also rank your site higher than other websites who aren’t mobile-friendly.
These four techniques are by no means an all-inclusive list of what you need to do to optimise your website’s performance. They are however critical components in an overall website development plan.