What is website optimization? Is the process of using tools, advanced strategies and experiments to improve the performance of your website, improve search engine traffic and overall user experience. When you fail to optimize you’re going to lose a lot of traffic in your website.

Here are some of the key strategies to optimize your website for best results

• Website speed

This is one of the most things you need to consider when optimizing your website for SEO your website loading is a high factor when it comes to ranking on search engines. So one can do a website speed test by using GTmetrix tool for speed optimization that gives valuable insights on how fast your site loads. One can increase website speed by:

• Enable browser caching
• Reduce call to HTTP
• Use minimal plugins and redirects
• Reduce and optimize file sizes

• Conduct keyword research

Keywords have always been and still are the most important optimization element. These are the most common words or phrases a customer uses when searching for information on your products or services. You can start your keywords research by asking yourself what you would type into google to find a website like yours. Using keywords planner, begin with your industry and location. The tool will then give you a wide range of search items, how often they are searched and the competition over those words. You’ll want to find as many relevant keywords for your business as possible that have low competition but high search numbers. Here are some of the things to improve keywords in your website

• Are directly relevant to your products or services
• They indicate high purchase intent

• Mobile -first approach

About 52% of all website traffic is generally from mobile devices. And having a mobile-friendly site Google takes into consideration and your site ranks higher. Beyond affecting your rankings, mobile friendliness is important as we are using our phones more and more to browse, purchase etc. making your website mobile-friendly means adapting your site for devices with lower bandwidth and smaller screens. Google also use mobile first indexing, so failing to optimize your website for phones and tablets will be needlessly detrimental to your search rankings. Here is what you need to do:

• Use shorter meta titles, which are easier to read on small screens
• Utilize a responsive design so your site adapts to any device
• Avoid long-form content

• Enhance user experience

Optimizing user experience while designing your website will increase its eventual conversion rate. User experience focuses on providing the best content, design and functionality to your online visitors in hopes for them returning to your site or converting into clients. To ensure the best UX, make sure your website is:

• Appear credible and trustworthy
• Strive to make your content accessible to everyone
• Easy to navigate and use
• Adds value for the visitors
• Great content that provides value and touches on every stage of the buyer’s journey.

• Fix technical SEO issues

Technical SEO refers to tools that supervise the SEO of a website and resolve issues as they are encountered. Technical SEO makes it easier for search engines to find your content by improving your website’s structure. Here are some few things to improve the technical SEO for website optimization.

• Use title and meta tags, but don’t duplicate
• Remove less performing content from your site
• Ascertain that your site is mobile friendly
• Use google console to check for any issues with your site indexing and fix them
• Remove the less performing content from your site

• Invest in backlinks

A backlink from another domain to your website is one of the most important signals to Google that your content is authoritative. The higher the number of backlinks to your webpages, the higher they will rank on the SERP’s. Here are some strategies to build quality backlinks

• Track broken backlinks and reclaim them
• Create backlinks from websites similar to your business to improve user intent
• Use resource pages

Creating effective landing pages can be overwhelming for marketers, so you need to create a good landing pages for your website. When designing a landing page, be intentional to simplify your designs whenever possible because it is the first thing potential customers see when clicking ads or search results links. The main purpose of landing pages is converting visitors into customers. Avoid horizontal rules, which can break a visitor’s path, create a balance between variable information and white space.

Here are some of the tips to create a perfect landing page

• Killer headline

Most people concentrate more on how your headline looks and will quickly read the headline more often than diving into the content. Keep your landing page headline and body copy aligned this creates consistency and delivers a clearer message to the page visitors. The header should say exactly what the company offers and it should be short and catchy.

• Call to action

A CTA is the desired results of your landing page, encouraging visitors to do something to complete the journey, be it giving their email or newsletter, purchasing a product etc. Whether it’s a button or form, make it stand out and easy to click on. Use bright color in contrast to the landing page’s main color. It should also include an accountable text that is short and straight to the point with a font size that is visible enough. The CTA button requires its very own section because just like every other element mentioned here, it is crucial to get this right on your landing page

• Incorporate social proof into the page

Social proof is an incredibly powerful way to persuade your user’s to take action. When your landing page is social proof consumers have more access to information than ever before, and they put a lot of stock into what their peers are saying about the brand they use. Therefore, most of the consumers are researching products and services before they engage with your business. If your users have visible proof in the form of reviews, testimonials and real-time purchase from other users they’re highly likely to be the next ones to press the CTA button. Use those items to show visitors that they can join a long list of happy clients when they work with your business.

• Use imagery, videos and other forms of media

Adding images to your landing page is an excellent way to make your page more visually appealing. People want to see what they’re opting into, so adding images and videos to your landing page to show your products and services will persuade potential customers to make a crucial purchase decision.

• Make your landing page mobile -friendly

About 55% of internet users are using mobile phones to browse so it means that if you’re not building landing pages that are mobile optimized for a variety of screen sizes and devices you’re losing out on valuable leads. Also one should ensure that the landing page is well optimized for mobile because if not it could blow up when viewed on anything other than a desktop. So if you aren’t providing the best user experience to your users, you are likely to lose valuable opportunities and leads. One should double-check the quality of your page through mobile device in order to be sure that it is easy to navigate, how fast the landing page is and if everything is easily clickable.

Most people are using mobile devices to access the internet than desktops. A fast website on mobile can greatly improves SEO and conversions.

According to google more than half of all internet traffic is generated from mobile devices, that means if your website is unresponsive and slow you are at risk of not only losing your visitors attention but also undermining your potential reach of new visitors. So if you want to keep mobile users’ attention long enough to generate lead or drive conversions, your mobile website loading speed must improve.

Here are some of the best ways to make your mobile website load faster:

• Minimize your code

Your website has a lot of codes and minifying your code takes out everything that redundant and unnecessary character’s without changing the functionalities and operations. This improves the website loading time. When you deleting the extra part of the code, one can reduce the page weight which helps in speeding up the loading time of the website.

• Simplify your web design

If you use a responsive design, your site will get more attention in form of social shares, which also boost your SEO. An advanced website may look quite impressive, however, the code essential to design it can needlessly overload a website, choose a simple yet original solution that will draw user attention.

• Optimize your images

Images can easily become one of the main speed issues of your site. Unoptimized images will remain unnecessarily large and hard to download, that is why you need to optimize them to increase your website speed. You can optimize these images without compromising with the quality.

• Build accelerated mobile pages (AMP)

Accelerated mobile pages is a project by Google to speed up website on mobile. Activating (AMP) project on your website pages will make it look great while also loading quickly, regardless of devices or distribution platform. AMP uses ultra-minimalistic HTML to reduce the times it takes for content on your mobile page to load. AMP enables fast web page rendering even when the network connection is really slow. Implementing it can significantly increase the users’ convenience and speed up the website loading time.

• Turn browser catching on

Catching is reliable way to speed up a website. You should use an effective catching plugin to serve cached contents to your mobile visitors. Mobile browsers can now ‘recall’ your pages and save the information to your tablet or smartphone for future use this means that they will not have to download all the files from the server again as they already have them stored in the browser. Browser caching can significantly improve the page speed of your website and also for returning users and this in turn will positively influence the way users’ perceive your site. If you are using WordPress, W3total cache plugin is one of the must- have plugins for performance optimization.

• Enable lazy loading

Lazy loading speeds up the initial loading of a site by only loading those images that are within the viewport. Lazy loading can be ideal for long scrolling pages. It loads content from top to bottom of the page and works great if your page has lots of images. This way the user doesn’t have to access the page and the image will load as they come into view. Lazy loading images is all about delaying the loading of images until a user scroll to it. This can improve speed. This technique can be effective in optimizing your page speed and improving the user experience(UX)

CONCLUSION

A faster mobile friendly website can increase traffic and bring new clients and conversions. Speeding up your mobile website should be a top priority if you want to stand out from your competitors.

Today having a business website is extremely important. So creating websites one needs to have high quality web design to achieve success especially in the business world. So having a well-planned website design, you can ensure that you can increase traffic to your website and even generate more leads. Therefore, it is essential to make ourselves familiar with things that can turn off a potential customer from staying on your website. Here are some common issues and how you can avoid them.

• Not optimized for mobile

A research was conducted and almost half of the website traffic comes from mobile users. If your website can not give a mobile experience to people, then you are losing many prospective visitors. Many people will simply exit websites which are not mobile friendly as they cannot browse properly on their phones. Therefore, a website must be mobile friendly and optimized to prevent losing a lot of variable customers and traffic to competitors. In this case a responsive design matter and your site display should work perfectly on all devices including laptops, tablets, smartphones and desktop computers.

• Error pages

The most common error pages say” this page does not exist” or” 404 error “. A customer will click and get the error message, generally an empty page which lead them to backing out of the site. This significantly affect the ranking performance of different search engines. If the website is having this type of error pages then consider redirecting them to the home page or recreating the same content, so that the customers will be taken to where they originally needed and hopefully the more relevant page solve their needs.

• Poor call to action option

 When it comes to CTA they are helpful to direct the customer to the page where they can fill out a contact form or find the product or services they are looking for. So give them clear instructions by creating a call to action button or hyperlinked text that is front and center. When your site doesn’t have clear CTA’s it puts them off from browsing experience and can cause them to leave your site. Without it and its proper function it would be hard for you to have sales or even brand awareness. Meaning you won’t get all those important conversions.

• Lack of social media link buttons

One should never neglect to add social media links buttons on your website. Social media buttons enable visitors to access the business page on social media networks including LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc. Once you have your accounts, you need to link them to your website, so more people can find your pages and connect with your company to other people. These can simply make your digital presence grow and reach through engaging consumers with your business more often.

• Slow loading

Customers expect a website to load quickly. If not 40% of consumers abandon a website if it doesn’t load in four seconds. Speed is a factor in your site ranking with search engines. To collect this problem, you need first to find out what exactly is slowing your site down by using website speed testing tools. Here are some fundamentals tips to optimize the speed of your site.

• Page speed report: use the light house tool to check and fix load speed issues
• Optimize your pictures: one should compress your images by using an online image optimizer
• Web hosting
• Using browser catching to reduce how often browser need to reload your pages.

Unstructured information

Your website should contain valuable content that answers the questions of the visitors. Most consumers come to websites for a reason which might be products or services, making a purchase and if they find it hard to locate what they needed they end up leaving your site. To avoid such issues one should make structured content from the perspective of the user’s mindset.

• Inconsistent design

When you have an inconsistent design it confuses the target market which as a result makes them lose interest. When it comes to the website design it should be seamless to allow visitors to move from one page to another with ease. It should offer an intuitive experience without making customers think about what they need to do next. Having a consistent design can strengthen your company’s brand identity, that loyal clients will recognize and really show your customers that you care about the little things.