You’ve built a great website. It gets some Google love, and even winning some sales.
Nevertheless, traffic and conversion may be suffering because of persistent problems with your website. I will highlight 5 critical issues you may be blind to, and how to quickly correct them.
1. HTML SEO.
Where is the H1 tag? How often is it used and is it enclosing the correct text? Are the lower level tags placed correctly?
Your logo should not be a heading when there is juicy text content that can be used to improve on page SEO.
You see, this tag is one of the most important to search engines. If you can put 5 to 20 words in that tag, you stand to gain a little more search relevance. Which leads to an increase in traffic.
And also, lower headings tags should layout semantically correct. Meaning, H2 tags are sub headings of H1. They are meant to support the higher tag. The same for H3 to H6. Note that H1 tags should be used once.
There is so much more to HTML SEO, but I have other areas to cover, so I will expand on this in a future post.
2. Site Load Speed
Recently added to the Google algorithm, site load speed is not just a ranking factor but a usability factor. Visitors who bump up against a white screen or partially loaded screen will leave.
You have 8 seconds on average to show them a page. And that applies to 56k modems and up.
So to improve the speed problem with your website. Try these fixes.
The HTML and JavaScript code must contain no comments. Keep documented files backed up. But pages served to users don’t need comments taking up precious bytes.
This comment removal also applies to chunks of code disabled for whatever reason. If they are not in use, remove them.
Another speed factor to consider is image sizes. I’m talking about two measurements; the weight of the image and the actual dimensions. Try to use a small amount of pictures. Try to make their actual dimensions small. And finally, get a graphic expert to render it to GIF or an optimized weight.
One final thing to ask your self; Where are you placing your JavaScript files? You want to place JS files below all other content. This improves something called network latency. Simply put, text and other content will always load faster than JS. So if you have a chance to push this to the user faster, then they will not see a slow loading site. They will see the content. Special effects that JS adds to the site can be loaded a few seconds later.
Again there is so much more to discuss here, but I will break this down separately.
3. Email Capture
Thousands visit your site, but most of them leave. You don’t know who they are, or if they will come back. Worst of all you can’t sell to them, or entice them to come back. This is a serious problem with websites.
The solution: Capture their emails. Some creativity will be needed to convince them to give up their emails. But if you do, you can market to them for as long as they stay on your mailing list.
4. Deep Linking
If you are a blogger or there is a lot of content on your site, great. But don’t rely on your menus to drive traffic to older, deeper pages. You should practice deep linking. This means link constantly to your other content in your articles.
This allows you to use whatever anchor text you want and drive traffic to areas that might have been otherwise overlooked by a user.
There may be pages that get a lot of organic hits, or hits from other sources. Take advantage of this. Also, if the site’s content is syndicated, this will generate traffic from many different sources directly to your deeper articles.
5. Call to Action
Finally, my favorite. A call to action. Tell your users to do something. Let them know you need them to take action. Their is no shame in this. This is not blatant self promotion. This is taking control of the sale and directing the user to an outcome that hopefully benefits both of you.
A call to action is one of the biggest conversion problem with a website that affect sales. And your content is their to advertise whatever you are offering. Some examples would be: “call now for more details”, “sign up now for free”, “don’t miss this deal, enter your email now”.
I’m sure you can be a little more creative.
Like I stated above, there is so much more to these areas. I will try to break them down further in future posts. If you think I missed any website issues on this list please make a suggestion in the comments.
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