Fixing three common issues on websites

Number 1: COPY

Your site may have a lot of copy, perhaps even copy that makes a whole bunch of sense and is insightful, however if you’re copy is not hitting keywords nobody will find your website.

Example: Let’s imagine a web page about ‘Mother’s Day Flowers’. Now the page talks about the flowers reasonably well yet at no point does the keyword ‘Gift’ appear, it wasn’t included but it’s presumed that search engines would know that the page is on about gifts as it was targeting ‘Mother’s Day Flowers’.

Not so, and when potential customers searched for Mother’s Day Gifts, the page does not rank. Search engines need to be told that this page is about Gifts.

It’s common sense yes, but all too easy to overlook when writing content.

When you write content, stop and think about what you are saying and how you are saying it. Quality content, word count, keywords, these all matter, yet only focussing on one of these elements will mean that the website is not working for you as hard as it could be.

Number 2: DATA

Don't ignore the DATA.

What we typically see happen is the website is probably using Analytical software such as Google Analytics and comparing last month’s traffic to this months to see if the site has gained any visitors. 

It’s always the same you hit the audience tab go to overview and compare the data to make sure your website hasn’t taken a nosedive in traffic but ask yourself other than your own peace of mind what do you gain from this? Nothing. Google analytics is NOT there just to provide you with fancy traffic charts every month to show you that your New Users are up, or your Bounce Rate is down, It goes much deeper. 

Using the data that you are collecting from your site is invaluable, it provides history books for you to be able to learn from and guides how you could and should be making changes to your website. Ignore the data and you’ll get left behind by your competition. 

Analytical software is there to provide you with waypoints on how to make your website better.

If you know where to look your analytics provides you with a handy list of everything that is wrong with your website. A couple of examples is that it allows you to do is identify what pages may have issues and what pages are ranking but could be improved. 

Just by taking this little snippet of data you will be able to fix pages with issues and enhance the pages that have potential to competitively rank within the search results.

Number 3: SPEED

If your website is not swift you will lose customers. Even a one-second delay in the load time of a page on your website can have a substantial impact on how many visitors convert from visitors to customers.

From a user experience perspective its simple, it’s just annoying when you hit a slow website, the human attention is already short and becomes ultra-short when using the internet.

There are studies that reveal 40% of people quit a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

So you can calculate that for yourself, if your website is taking longer than three seconds to load and you are losing 40% of traffic, what would it mean to your business if this 40% stayed on your website?

Whilst Google has stated that the website owners should not be so concerned with speed that it should not compromise with content or quality, it IS still a factor that Google will consider fast loading content a positive factor.

It’s just not worth the risk, you have a good business, good product or service and all of this is being let down by the speed of the website when it can be fixed.

What now then? One of the first things you can do is run your URL through Google PageSpeed Insights. It’s a quick look but  will give you a good idea how your website currently stacks up and point to any immediate problems you need to look at.