Make These 5 Website Fixes to Improve SEO
While it’s true that great content, keyword incorporation, and quality inbound links are at the forefront of an SEO campaign, one important contributor to SEO success that sometimes doesn’t get the attention it deserves is website design and development. Website design and SEO complement each other. If your SEO campaign isn’t performing as well as you’d hoped, you might want to take a look at your website and make the following fixes if necessary:
Improve site speed
The search engines want to provide users with the best search results. A site that loads slowly isn’t going to provide visitors with a good user experience and thus, can bump you down in rank which is why the speed of your site is critically important for SEO. There isn’t a magic number for how quickly a page should load, but more than a few seconds is considered slow for today’s web users. GTmetrix is a useful tool for analyzing site speed along with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Reduce image size
Most web designers today know at least a little bit about SEO, but it isn’t their focus. They’re focused on making a page look nice, which sometimes doesn’t play well with SEO best practice. Huge images can really slow down a site, which can hurt your rank (see above). Re-size any images that are unnecessarily big and you’ll see a page speed improvement.
301 re-direct 404 errors
404 error pages negatively impact the visitor experience and can hurt your inbound “link juice” too. You can check for 404 errors in Google Search Console (if you don’t yet have this set up on your site, make it a priority). Make it a habit to regularly re-direct the 404s to an active page on your site in order to preserve the link equity and ensure that visitors have a positive experience. It’s best practice to 301 re-direct to the most relevant, active page but re-directing to the homepage is also acceptable.
Prioritize internal linking
Inbound links from other sites are important for SEO, but you also need to think about the links on your own site. Since the homepage is going to have the most authority, you want to make sure to link from the homepage to the other important pages of your site, such as your main service/product/industries served pages.
Make it mobile-friendly
Today, there’s no excuse for not having a mobile friendly website. The number of people browsing the web on a mobile device continues to increase and if your site isn’t mobile friendly it isn’t going to rank well in mobile search, no matter how great the content might be. Don’t waste your content. Invest in a mobile-friendly website.
Depending on how web-savvy you are it might make sense to hire a web developer to make these fixes for you. While it’s certainly an investment, it’s well worth it since your site will provide a better user experience and in turn, improve your SEO efforts and search engine visibility.
Categorized in: Digital Marketing
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