A successful SEO campaign process is not all about rankings, metrics and keywords. To get to this point, you need to do some initial assessments. For instance, have you seen your website yet? Is it providing quality content? Perhaps your page took forever to load before you can even check.

In that case, it’s best to learn how to optimise your website first. Going the extra mile should give you a user-friendly site and better SEO performance.

Why Optimise Your Website for SEO

Business owners often take the search engine optimisation (SEO) plunge with one thing in mind: use keywords to drive in organic traffic. That’s good, but when you think about it, there’s no point in welcoming visitors to a slow, outdated website. Users will only leave while your SEO efforts go down the drain.

So, before hiring an SEO agency to help you, create an SEO audit group who will optimise your website and fix its technical issues. This team would include a web developer, graphic designer and content writer. Here are some web vitals to include in your SEO goals.

1. Check and test your web pages

An optimised website is functional. Have you ever clicked on a link and got redirected to an error page? It can frustrate visitors and potentially hurt your sales. It also gives the impression that your site is uncared for and untrustworthy. Worse, you’ve unintentionally urged organic users to find the competitor.

So, make sure to check and fix broken contact pages, product links, videos and downloadable files. See if your checkout section and calculator are functioning as they should. You can go through your pages manually.

But for extensive websites, automated tools should simplify the SEO audit process. Use testing tools that identify dead links, accessibility issues, 404 errors, website speed, browser compatibility and mobile readiness.

2. Aim for a responsive web design

An optimised website is user-friendly. If visitors like browsing your site, they tend to stay longer. And when they do, the chances of conversion are higher. Positive online experiences also send search engines all the right signals to give your website better rankings.

When designing your website, choose the humanistic approach. Impress your intended audience first before the search engines. Generally, it should be attractive and readable. Here are ways how to do it:

  • Design for easy navigation. Try to avoid being overly creative and unique for your web design. It can only confuse your users. Choose a simple layout that makes essential details noticeable.
  • Use proper colours and font. Make sure your text is legible without having to zoom in the page. A background colour that makes the font stand out is best.
  • Highlight calls to action. Your main goal for putting up a website is converting organic users to online consumers, after all. So, make it easy for them to sign up to your newsletter, contact customer service or make a purchase. Don’t make visitors scour each page to find the info they need.
  • Create a mobile-friendly site.  Even if your website is well designed, it’s a waste if we can’t view it on mobile devices. Make sure it can adapt to different screen sizes without sacrificing readability. You can use Google’s mobile checker to test.

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3. Present meaningful content

An optimised website is value-rich. Creating content pieces stuffed with keywords alone is not enough. Ranking algorithms have already levelled up. Specifically, search engines are now after relevant content with the EAT factor. EAT stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

So, how will you know if your content makes the cut? Keep the following tips in mind when you optimise your website:

  • Actively update your website content.  Bringing something new to the table displays a company’s high regard for its brand, services and customers. Moreover, keeping your content fresh is one key to winning the SEO rankings game.
  • Base your content on user intent.  Your articles, videos or images increase in value if they are useful to your audience. Applying topic relevancy also helps generate constant visitors and repeat customers.
  • Ensure clear and accurate content creation. Check if the company goals, products and services are well-defined. Make sure that your product descriptions, shipping policies or payment details are complete and correct. Also, see to it that your contact details are up-to-date.

4. Enhance your website images

An optimised website is visually appealing. It’s a fact that visual content attracts users more than written ones. It’s even likely for us to skip reading the text altogether after seeing stunning images. And this is what will exactly happen if you don’t replace low-quality photos from your website.

Presenting excellent images from different angles is a good idea. But these little extras should make your site more SEO friendly:

  • Compress your photos. Image compressing tools can reduce your image size without drastically affecting its quality. This step is essential in speeding up your website’s load time. Remember: slow load times and excellent user experience don’t mix.
  • Use the right image format. Use JPEG for detailed images and PNG for icons or logos. These file types have the best compression quality.
  • Properly label your images. The crawling process cannot read photos, but bots can index your image filenames and alt tags. So, make sure to add quality keywords in them.

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5. Produce well-thought-out blog posts

An optimised website is informative. Blogging and guest posting are great ways to market your products and reach your audience. They serve a dual purpose of informing users and driving in organic traffic. The blog comments section may also give you valuable data for your content strategy.

Like images, you also need to optimise your blog posts and make them SEO ready. And if you’ve been blogging for some time, you might want to check if you’re applying the following:

  • Structure articles for skimming. Breaking up long paragraphs, adding bullet lists and using headers make your blog posts easy on the eyes. In the digital world, readers are often on the go and in a hurry. Reading long text is not their cup of tea.
  • Optimise your blogs. Following the optimal length for your articles, title tags, meta descriptions and so on helps improve both readability and rankings. Also, consider using automated tools for content writing and keyword ideas.
  • Invest and promote. Blogging is neither cheap nor free. You need great writers and graphic artists to make it work. And if you’re sending out emails or newsletters to subscribers, use them to promote your articles. Social media platforms are ideal channels, too.

Conclusion

An SEO campaign is a long-term investment and a continuous process. So, taking the extra steps to make it successful is all the more essential. Yes, it requires technical know-how.

But ultimately, the effort to optimise your website based on user intent and experience is your trump card. And while there are several SEO techniques available, the foolproof test is to put yourself in the users’ shoes.

If you’re happy with your website, your target audience will be, too!