- Great Content– Make sure your site content is high quality in both value and technical terms. Education, notification, information, entertain, and inspire. Make your content as uniquely yours as possible. If you have content that can be easily found in other websites, that will only create “content competitors” for you. Give potential customers a reason to choose your site over all others.
- Mobile Friendly Design– This may seem like it should be a standard part of any website that is online today. However, surprisingly it is often overlooked during the design process. When this happens it is harder to correct the issue at hand. With more than half of all website connections coming from mobile devices, this could be a major situation for any website. Not counting the fact that Google’s algorithm checks for mobile friendly sites. Make sure your site doesn’t get knocked down the ranks due to this oversight.
- Technical Problems– These could include things like-
- 404 pages– Links going to pages that no longer exist.
- Duplicate content– Having a high percentage of your website content that is duplicated is highly frowned upon by Google. Have original content that is uniquely yours. Don’t create competition for yourself by duplicating content.
- Page load time– If your page takes more than 3 seconds to load, you may want to look to see what is slowing your site down. Optimally your site pages should load within 2 seconds. If your site is slow optimize your photos, check your host server speed, optimize your CSS, minimize HTTP requests, lazy load content if possible, and many more things you can do.
- Complicated navigation– Make sure your site visitors are able to get to the content they are looking for easily. A complicated site menu, pop ups, Call To Actions, all can confuse and annoy a visitor which may cause them to hit the back button to look for another site. Be clear and concise with your focus and make it very easy to go from page to page to the relevant content your visitors are looking for.
- Metrics– Keeping track of what visitors do on your site helps by letting us know what needs to be adjusted to help improve the site engagement.
- Number of page views– How many pages a visitor actually navigates to. The more pages a visitor goes to could mean they are receiving the content they are looking for.
- Returning visitor– By adding fresh content on a regular basis you can ensure that visitors will return to your site.
- Bounce rate– It’s bad news if a visitor comes to your site and immediately leaves. This could happen due to many different reasons including long load time, looking for different content than what’s on your site, etc.