3 ways you can quickly improve your website

If your website isn’t working for your business, there are a number of things you can try which might have an impact on your sites performance. You might have already tried some of these, and it’s worth mentioning that there could be any number of things affecting your sites performance. If you have serious problems with your site, then it’s best to speak to a professional.

The first thing to note is that you’ll want to have a good way to see some analytics for your website. The most common free tool for this is Google Analytics. We’ll be writing a more in-depth article on the best ways to get the most out of Google Analytics in the near future so stay tuned for that.

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1: Website SEO Performance

‍If you’re not seeing a lot of hits on your website, then it’s likely that you’re not appearing on the first page in online search. It may be that the search terms you would like to appear for are competitive, meaning that the competition has heavily optimised their site for search. If you are a new business with a sub-1-year-old domain then you will also need to work a bit harder too, because Google gives websites with new domains less weight in the rankings. What about a solution though? Well, one of the best ways to get visibility straight away is to set up Google My Business, you can do this here: https://www.google.co.uk/business/

This allows you to appear in the local results (shown below). So this way even if you can’t yet be found in the regular listing, locals nearby will get visibility of your business. This only applies to people searching in your location, but it can be a good start, and Google also gives you lots of insights on how often you have appeared in search etc.

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2: Website Speed

If you can see a reasonable number of hits on your website, but no-one is contacting you through your website, one of the first things to check is the average session duration and the pages per session. If the session duration number is very low, it could be that your site is loading too slowly, and visitors are giving up on waiting.

Three free ways to improve your website speed:

• Compress those images! If you’ve been uploading images to the site taken directly from a camera or a phone, these images are probably really large, and not all website CMS systems compress these automatically. As a rule of thumb, large images should be no more than 450kb, and smaller images should be less than 100kb. You can compress images using a number of online tools, such as this one: https://compressor.io/
• Enable G-Zip with your website host if it’s not already enabled, this should be free, simply open a support ticket with the host and make the request.
• Make sure your site leverages caching, most popular CMS systems will have plugins that handle this for you, but worth checking if you have long load times.

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3: Engaging content with call-to-action elements

Spoiler alert – one of the most important aspects of your website, is the content, who’d have thought? While you might already have great content, have you considered your visitor flow? How do you want visitors to travel through your site, and have you considered what the ultimate goal you want them to accomplish is? We plan to write a more in-depth article on content and site flow, but here are some quick examples. If your goal with the website is to get customers to call up to book an appointment, then make sure the phone number is available without the visitor having to search for it.

If you have a page with sales content selling your product or service, make sure there is a “call-to-action” section at the end. This is a call-to-action:

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If you’ve succeeded in selling the visitor on your product or service, you want to be sure that they will know what to do to take the next step.

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TL:DR

1. Set up Google Business
2. Speed up your site:
   • Compress your images
   • Enable G-Zip compression
   • Enable (or add) caching to your site
3. Craft engaging content
   • Think about your visitors’ journey, what is their goal
   • Make sure important info or contact details are immediately accessible
   • Use call to action elements to guide visitors