Improve the performance of your website with these 4 simple SEO tasks
As the world of SEO is often complex and intricate, wanting to make some simple gains to boost the overall performance of your website is both understandable and advisable.
Implementing responsive design
Most online traffic today comes from mobile devices, which is why Google has included responsive design as a core ranking signal for mobile search. Responsive design also contributes towards the creation of a positive user experience (UX) and plays a significant role in successfully converting visitors into genuine leads and paying customers.
To do: Utilise Google’s Mobile Responsive Test tool to evaluate the responsiveness of your website.
Addressing broken links
Things can change quickly in the digital landscape and, over time, you’ll see a variety of websites appear and disappear just as quickly. Some might shut down or be completely rebranded, whereas others might be acquired for black-hat SEO purposes.
Website owners won’t typically take the time to reach out to every website linking to them to inform them of any changes, which means that you might inadvertently be linking to a dead site or to something that is now outdated, irrelevant, or incorrect. Therefore, it is important to review your outbound links regularly to ensure that you aren’t linking to a website that you don’t want to associate yourself with.
In severe situations, outbound links can contribute to a poor UX and negatively impact your site’s organic rankings because search engines expect every outbound link to be to a highly relevant webpage without any errors or redirects. A high quality UX is a critical component to any Ecommerce SEO strategy.
To do: scan every outbound link and confirm they take users directly to a relevant and reputable webpage.
Reviewing meta descriptions
When utilised well, meta descriptions can have a significant effect on organic search click-through rates (CTRs). Despite this however, most website owners never review their meta descriptions after they have been written.
This is an issue primarily because regularly updated websites likely have meta descriptions which fail to accurately summarise the page content content as well as they once might have. However, consistent meta reviews are also important for websites housing content that never changes.
December 2017 saw Google increase the permitted length of meta descriptions to 320 characters from 160. This is a significant increase and websites who haven’t updated their meta descriptions are potentially missing out on the additional engagement to be gained from the opportunity to present more informative and interesting summaries.
To do: regularly review your meta descriptions, ensuring each one is approximately 320 characters and that it contains target keywords naturally at least once.
Improving page speed
Too many websites load far too slowly, especially when accessed via a mobile device. From July 2018, page speed will become a mobile search ranking factor and websites delivering slow user experiences are likely to slip down the rankings.
Addressing your page speed in time for Google’s speed update is important, as page speed already plays a significant role in UX (a current algorithm ranking factor). Making those improvements now will boost your website’s short and long term performance.
To do: conduct a speed audit of your website and identify opportunities to optimise the speed of your largest digital assets. This might include optimising media files, merging JavaScript and CSS files, and utilising caching. If you would like help with this or for us to conduct a site audit please contact us on 01642 927769 or email us.