Essential Website Optimization Strategies For 2022

One of the more common ways that businesses optimize their websites is by completely redesigning the site. This is an effective way to enact a website optimization strategy when a site had little in the way of one before, or one that is outdated and in need of a full reboot. Web page optimization helps you get more visitors to your site, and helps convert those visitors into customers. A well optimized site will help them to find answers to their questions, find solutions to their problems, and acquire the things they need.

Website optimization services such as ComboApp use their knowledge and experience to improve the performance of your website. By using proven and effective website optimization techniques, they will drive more traffic to your site, convert visitors to customers, and increase your revenue.

In this article we are going to cover strategies for optimizing a website, the importance of SEO website optimization, and how website optimization experts can help your business implement these strategies efficiently.

Best Website Optimization Strategies

Let's take a look at some website optimization strategies that will help you get an idea of what your business needs. ComboApp also has a fantastic new website SEO checklist to refer to for more SEO focused answers while building a new site. As a website optimization company, ComboApp can make this process much less daunting by doing the hard work for you.

1. Focus On User Intent

Well written content is one of the most important elements of any website. Your content needs to be original, high quality, and be focused on what your users will be looking for. Google uses an algorithm that uses machine learning to try and understand the context of a user's search. It serves the user results based on that context, which makes it incredibly important to research and use the right keywords for your content.

Research is vital because you will find that some keywords and queries will be incredibly difficult to rank, so you need contextually relevant keywords that will align with a user’s search terms. While researching, look at what websites are ranking for search phrases. If your website and landing pages are not similar to the sites that are ranking, you might not get the results you want from that key phrase.

2. Website Optimization Tools

Website optimization tools are an important part of any website optimization strategy. These tools give you insight on what changes you need to make to your site, how it performs, or what keywords you should be using. Insights such as these will let you make the most of your efforts.

These are some of the top optimization tools that you can put to use for your site.

• Ubersuggest - Helps users to find keywords and audit their entire site to find any SEO errors.
• Hubspot website grader - Grades websites by measuring key metrics like SEO and security.
• Spyfu - A Keyword research and competitor analysis tool.
• Hotjar - Uses heatmaps and tools to let you see how users experience and interact with your website.
• Pagespeed - Google tool to show webmasters how fast their sites load and if they meet Google standards.
• Moz - Offers tools and solutions for SEO and site optimizations.

3. Mobile-First

In March of 2018, Google switched to mobile first indexing. The goal of this was to deliver the best user experience as people were increasingly using mobile devices to search the web. This ensured that the majority of users were able to find content that would work on their device.

Mobile website optimization should be a vital part of every businesses website optimization strategies. With many users searching using mobile devices or tablets, you should ensure that they have a positive and frustration free interaction with your website.

What are some mobile website optimization strategies?

• Use responsive design to make your site adapt to any device or screen resolution.
• Scale your images when using a responsive design, especially for mobile users.
• Use short meta titles that are easier to read on mobile devices.
• Avoid pop-ups that cover your content. They prevent visitors from getting a glimpse of what the content is about.
• Less is more. Long-form content does not equate to more traffic and better ranking.
• Efficient design. Make sure your site loads fast and is easy to read.

Remember, users and search engines need to see the same content. Don’t use mobile as an excuse to hide content instead of optimizing how it loads and is seen.

If you are building a mobile app, you also need a mobile friendly website for your app. App ASO (App Store Optimization) and Mobile App SEO are two different things that need different strategies. ComboApp offers a great guide on mobile app SEO vs ASO for learning the difference in marketing for each. They can also provide services that take those worries out of your hands so they can do the work for you.

4. Content Marketing

A content marketing strategy is vital to your website optimization efforts. Not only does great content help you grab the attention of the visitors to your website, it also grabs the attention of search engines who will drive traffic to your site. Your content is how both users and search engines know what your site is about and how to interact with it.

One of the first keys is making sure your content is easy to find and interact with on the site. A central hub for all of your content lets you lead visitors to the most appropriate and beneficial content for their needs. The site should have links to all of this content on the central hub, and an easy way to travel back to the homepage. Relate your links and content to your social media platforms and other web marketing channels.

When creating content, topic selection is incredibly important. Make sure that the topics you are writing on are trending in your market to increase traffic to your site. Use your keyword research to ensure that search engines are able to direct search users to the topics most relevant to them. While writing the content, make sure that it is engaging and entertaining. You want your viewers to spend time on your site and encourage them to convert into customers.

Content is more than just written words, of course. Website content optimization should also include the use of videos and images as well. Making sure to use the right tags and content markers in your videos is also important, missing “ALT” tags and other important code can hurt your SEO rankings.

Being on the cutting edge is also important, and with more and more users using voice search it can be important to make your page optimized for voice search SEO as well. Answer commonly asked questions that are relevant to your site and work on your local SEO (if applicable) along with the usual important SEO website optimizations in order to maximize your voice search results.

SEO website optimization services such as the ones offered by ComboApp can use their knowledge of content creation to craft the perfect strategies for your site. They save you time and money by putting their experience in these matters to use for you.

5. Speed of the Website

Website speed is one of the most crucial elements of website performance optimization. The first 5 seconds of load time are the most important to load within, and the longer a site takes to load the more likely a user is to leave. Most users leave if a site takes longer than 3-5 seconds to load, so if you plan on converting visitors to customers then you should be paying attention to your load speeds.

Speed is important when it comes to ranking on Google and other SERPs too. Google Pagespeed insights will give you an idea of if Google thinks your site is loading fast enough.

Here are a few techniques that can help you with your website speed optimization:

• Use website caching with a long TTL (Time To Live)
• Database optimization in CMS
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Move your site to a better host or to a hosting plan with better hardware / bandwidth.
• Implement Gzip compression. It reduces the size of the files before sending them to the browser.
• Use modern web image formats such as WEBP
• Reduce the number of plugins. More plugins need more resources to run them. This makes the website slower and causes security issues.
• Minify Javascript and CSS, use asynchronous loading when needed, and reduce or eliminate the presence of unused scripts in your code.

Avoid using software or extra features that bloat and slow down your site, fancy animations and tools lose any possible benefit if they are slowing down your site and keeping you from acquiring customers.

Test your website speed through the design process and periodically after. This lets you see what might need to be better optimized to increase your site's speed and ranking.

A website speed optimization service such as the ones offered by ComboApp can allow you to focus on your business while they put their expertise to use for you.

6. Track and Analyze Essential Metrics

They always say that one of the most important things in marketing is to “know your audience”, and that is true. It is also important to know how your audience sees and interacts with you. Data from user interactions can help inform you on what website optimization strategies are working and what you might need to adjust on your site to better retain and convert potential customers.

Google provides a few tools for this that are excellent, those tools are Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools is a more basic view from above at your site, giving you a look at what terms your site is showing up for, where it ranks, and how many people click on the site. It is also a great tool for submitting site updates to ensure that Google crawls the site quickly.

Google Analytics is a more refined and focused view that lets you see how users interact with your site. You can see user demographics, the most visited pages on your site, when and what page people are on when they leave your site, and more. You can even track clicks on individual links and calls to action to see exactly which ones are working best.

If people are leaving your site (bouncing) often from a particular page, it could be a potential technical issue with that page or it could be that the content is not relevant or engaging. You can use digital marketing analytics to learn why and take the proper steps to lower the “bounce rate” of the page.

You can also use the data that Google Analytics provides to identify content that is resonating well with visitors. You can learn from that information to apply those effective techniques to the rest of your site.

7. Structure of the Website

The structure of your site is important, both to users and to search engines. Your site needs to be easy to navigate and have everything connected efficiently.

Some basics of structure:

• Establish a link between the site homepage and its significant pages
• Have an internal linking strategy
• Set up a website that follows a tree-like structure through web pages categories. Use breadcrumbs on the site to enable visitors to surf around.

Be sure to do an audit before optimization. It helps to understand and analyze the structure of your site. It also helps to know whether the website makes sense or not. You also get to know the user experience through website structure.

Conclusion

Your business website is your key to success in the digital world. Cutting corners when it comes to building it means cutting yourself off from potential sales and customers. Your site should be designed and optimized with a focus on being as user friendly and search engine friendly as possible. Optimization can mean the difference between success and failure for your online efforts, and using the strategies outlined in this article will get your site on the path it needs to be on.

If you are not an expert in building and optimizing websites, then trusting your site to a website optimization firm such as ComboApp can help avoid stress and limit the risks you have during the learning process. Putting the experience and knowledge of website optimization consultants who have honed their skills to precision will help you avoid potential pitfalls and get your site ready to jump to the head of the pack. Contact us today and see what we can do to craft the perfect website and optimization strategy for your company.