A website is essential for your marketing, acting as a digital storefront that will make or break a person’s decision to follow through with the purchase. Ultimately, everything you do online—every post, ad or campaign—points back to this central location, so it’s important to make the work worthwhile by maximising the prospects with both off and on-page strategies.
There’s a number of different tactics you can adopt to boost your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) performance directly on the website, and there’s also a list of things people do that actually has the adverse effect. With that said, we’ve created a list of ways that your website might actually be killing your SEO results to help you get back on track!
Slow-Loading Pages
The speed of your website pages can make a massive contribution to your SEO rankings. The research shows that websites with pages that take more than 3 seconds to load are likely to be abandoned by the visitor, with consumer patience decreasing day by day. This will give your website a higher bounce rate, which can have a negative impact on the Domain Authority (DA) score. Additionally, speed if one of the major metrics that Google will take into consideration when ranking your page.
Now, we’re not going to leave you in the dark, we’re going to offer some productive suggestions to help you increase the loading speed of your website to retain consumer engagement. Our tips for you are:
- Post optimised images using the right format, dimension, and size as needed
- Minimise re-directs
- Reduce your server response time to less than 200 ms
- Minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript files
- Use a content delivery network to spread the load of content distribution.
Duplicate Content
Filling your website blocks with duplicated content can put your SEO performance at stake. It confuses search engines when it comes to identifying the specific pages you want to rank, creating issues with driving traffic to the right location on the website. Concentrated traffic to your specific service pages will continue to help them rank better in future, so you don’t want to lead them off to multiple pages on your website. So, how do you overcome this issue? I always suggest running a SEMrush Site Audit to flag up the pages with this issue.
We recommend taking the time to piece together well-structured, clear and service-specific content that cleverly utilises the keyword you’re targeting. With search engines these days focussed on the user experience, content that lacks any value will be disregarded. If you’re short on ideas, some of the things you could talk about include the technology behind the product, the different applications it can be used for, or just some general answers to frequently asked questions you get from customers. This will actually double the benefit, helping you filter out time consuming queries.
Not Having a Mobile-Friendly Design
SEO experts consider the website’s mobile friendliness another important factor in SEO results. With the considerable increase in smartphone users, it is essential for your website to have its pages optimised for mobile search. The consumer should be able to access the desired content easily through their smaller screens. Not only is a person likely to click away from a page that’s difficult to navigate, but Google’s algorithm will actually assess how responsive your design is when ranking your website.
Serve the Consumer
As we mentioned, the whole objective behind SEO is to provide prospective customers with useful, clear and informative content that improves their browsing experience. Factors like navigation, communication, visual aid and the overall user-friendliness of the website will make or break the users experience. There’s also opportunity to do some more on-page SEO work like incorporating backlinks as a reference to more useful information, optimising the alt-tags of photos to marry up with the keywords you’re targeting, and using clear headings in the appropriate formats to clearly segregate your information.
Black Hat SEO Tactics
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the more you utilise a keyword, the better your results will be. Or alternatively, you might be overusing a bunch of poor-quality links throughout the website that once again, will do more harm than good. Search engines are becoming smarter, which means they pick up on people’s efforts to try and trick them into receiving a higher ranking.
Hosting
Maintaining the security of your website is absolutely essential, so we recommend investing in what’s called “managed hosting”. This is where your host provider takes care of things like updating the plugins used on your website, keeping your website free of bots and potential threats, and simply just staying on standby in the event that something breaks or goes wrong to make sure the problem gets remediated ASAP, and your rankings don’t suffer as a result.
We also want to emphasise that SEO doesn’t lead to overnight success, and while sometimes doing things like re-writing your content to improve it might lead to a drop in rankings at first, you can rest-assured that you’re doing the right thing for your business in the long-term.