Increasingly, I see businesses and website owners approaching agencies too early in the process in order to find the best links. They should invest that money into their website instead of spending thousands of dollars on authority links.
It’s great to rank highly for keywords and attract a lot of visits, but both are useless if you don’t convert your visitors. To convince the client that they’re worth paying each month, most SEO agencies use ranking reports and Google Analytics data.
Topics Covered
Convert your website visitors into customers with a well-designed website
Having an appealing layout and visually stimulating design is important, but I’m not just talking about the design. My point is specifically to help you reach all of your conversion goals with a website that’s optimized for conversions.
Yet, the website for which they are ranking and sending traffic isn’t designed from a conversion perspective and all that money spent on SEO and links is being wasted. Whether you are a big e-commerce company offering 100s of consumer products, a local landscaping business servicing a small community, or a specialty restaurant – digital marketing works. All websites have one goal in common: to convert traffic.
A lead, a sale, an email address, a follow-on social media, a phone call, a location visit, or a request for directions could be the means of engaging with your customers. To ensure that your website is fully optimized to help you reach your conversion goals, you must first identify all of your conversion goals clearly.
SEO is more effective when a percentage of your traffic converts and is directly responsible for a larger return on investment (ROI).
The components of your website, including the copy and offers, should be broken down. Review your website traffic data to see what paths visitors take.
The best method to identify roadblocks and problems is to identify them early on. If your site isn’t optimized for conversions, building links, and sending traffic there will be like building a house in the swamp without a foundation. There’s no point in investing time, money, and resources in something that won’t work.
Before you invest time and money into search engine optimization, let alone expensive authority links, you need a website that converts well. It is a good idea to test as much as possible on your site, use a heat map tool to see what is happening, and then use paid traffic to help you optimize.
That doesn’t mean you need to hire a web design agency and spend over $20,000. If you use websites templates, you can make minor adjustments. You should make sure the site converts well for YOUR targeted audience. There’s no guarantee that a theme or layout will work the same way for you simply because it did for one business.
You should also set up conversion goals as soon as possible in Google Analytics. You will optimize your conversion rate much more quickly if you start collecting that data sooner rather than later. This is because optimizing your conversion rate between 2-3% is much easier if you learn how to identify behavioral signals and make necessary changes.
Optimized Website Loading Speed
It is also a very common occurrence for websites to completely ignore the speed and load time of each page. The need to optimize your website speed has two major benefits, and we are not just talking about the homepage here, but every page on your website must be optimized.
In Google’s search algorithm, speed is a ranking signal. Since Google’s main goal is to provide its users with the best possible results, it shouldn’t be a surprise that speed affects your ranking. It’s not just about giving the best information, but also about providing the best UX (user experience). It may only contribute 1% of the algorithm, but it can still be easily done. The only reason it’s not done is laziness.
Users Demand a Fast-Loading Website – Google looks at speed because users demand a fast-loading website. People won’t wait around for a site to load. In case of lag or slowness, people will leave. That’s it. It should take less than two seconds for your pages to fully render.
A majority of clients tell us that their website speed is excellent, and after a quick glance, the website does indeed load rapidly, but the blog pages and inner pages are slow as a pig, which negatively impacts rankings.
Generally, homepages do not have much content or resources. It’s common to notice that the inner pages, and specifically blog pages, use a lot of resources, server calls, and scripts due to plugins. Be sure to optimize and speed up every single page of your site before it goes live.
It may take some time to manage your large website, but once you have it under control, it is simple to maintain. Each new post or page should go through the major testing tools before being published.
Here are the three website speed testing tools I recommend:
PageSpeed Insights: Google’s tool for testing website performance, so you should ensure that your website has a score of at least 90+ (in the green) for desktop and mobile. If you want to rank higher in Google and they tell you explicitly what they think about your site’s speed, shouldn’t you listen and respond accordingly? The answer is yes!
GTmetrix: Another fantastic tool, especially when you want to optimize images. This is very helpful in showing what images are causing any lag, especially when dealing with server-scaled images. It will tell you what size to change it to as well as how much you can save.
WebPageTest: My favorite tool because it provides good insight into issues as well as suggestions for fixing them. Try changing a few things and re-running the test to see if it improves your speed. This website speed testing tool provides you with the most information to analyze.
Additionally, some sites may benefit from the use of a CDN (content delivery network). However, these services are not free. Personally, I find the free ones to be more trouble than they are worth. A CDN will help you to improve your website speed if you have a large website generating revenue.
You should also consider using Google’s AMP if you are a blogger. The conversion can be handled automatically by some plugins. As a result, there is an incredible improvement in load time.
Measure, Analyze, and Optimize Results by Using Tracking and Analytics
Investing in SEO without a plan to measure, analyze, and optimize results is like going into a gunfight without a weapon. The first thing that happens is that you make some progress, even stay alive for a while, but eventually you’re squashed.
Here are some things you should implement right from the beginning of your website. You will achieve your desired results more easily if you do this before building links and working on rankings.
Google Analytics: All websites should have this installed, and there are no legitimate reasons why you shouldn’t. Setting up your conversion goals correctly and assigning a dollar value to your goals is the most important part of setting up Google Analytics. The ROI search engine optimization can produce can be seen as a result of doing this.
You probably know how much a sale in your e-commerce business is worth to you. You should also consider the importance of an opt-in for your email newsletter when creating a goal. Are you willing to pay $1? or Have you considered using a quote request form? How valuable lead to you? Think realistically. You can make intelligent decisions that promote growth when you have accurate information and data at your fingertips.
Google Search Console: This is an important one. The amount of data available for free is so overwhelming that many don’t even know that they can connect their website. People think like this from 2005. In the past, SEO experts worried that their link-building and SEO activities would be tracked if they used Google email, analytics, or any other Google product or service. I will go into more detail below about Search Console, which is a massive source of valuable information for SEO.
Heat Map: Having more information about your visitors is always beneficial. You can quickly identify the best traffic sources and scale them as well as identifying the traffic sources that produce tire kickers and time wasters when you break down each CTA click to the traffic source. There are many heat-map tools available online. Hotjar and Crazy Egg are both excellent options.
Tracking Pixels: If you want Facebook and other social media networks to gather data, install their pixels as soon as possible. Whether or not you plan to spend money on paid campaigns for some time, you should start building audiences immediately. As you scale your content marketing effort, you can target audiences who are already familiar with your business. The best way to generate social shares and links is to place it in front of people who are interested in the topic.
Audit of Google Search Console indexing and performance
You should audit every page on your site and then run them through Google Search Console before you start link building and SEO on a broad scale. Here’s why.
If you run a site on WordPress, you can use Yoast plugin. Moz’s on-page SEO grader is also free. The primary keyword you want to rank for should be targeted on each page. Make sure your content is strong. By using Ubersuggest tool, you can find out what pages rank for your target keywords and then make your content more relevant
Then, run each URL through the inspection tool after you have optimized all of your pages and content. When it returns, click the “REQUEST INDEXING” button even if it says that the URL is already online and indexed by Google. Doing so will force Google to index the new content and index the old content once more.
If you optimized, it to perform better in search engines this would improve your ranking. It is recommended that you do this whenever you make major changes to any page on your website. As a proactive measure, it’s a good idea to crawl the page every now and then instead of waiting for Google to choose to crawl the page again at random. If you don’t take matters into your own hands, you might be waiting for a long time.
It’s also important to ensure your website doesn’t have any health issues that might hinder your SEO efforts. You can view all reported errors in the Coverage section, such as 404 errors, etc. Fixing these issues as soon as you can is a good idea since the Google algorithm takes performance into account
There is no cost associated with doing these things. Be sure the foundation of your website is trustworthy so that you can build on it over time. It’s a total waste of time, money, and effort if you don’t.
