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Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines: 5 Tips and Techniques

Parita Pandya

Gaining organic traffic to a website is a doorway to increasing conversion rates. The end goal for any business is, ultimately, conversions. Yes, the ways to reach this goal are numerous. Build an SEO-optimized website, create a social media presence, fish out marketing strategies to reach and engage your customers, etc. However, the aim is always to convert a user into a consumer. Your website needs organic traffic to leverage more conversions. While Google considers over 200 factors when determining the rank of a website, gaining traffic remains one of the most fundamental. So when Google fails to recognize you, you lose out on new business. We don’t want that. Below are a few tips and techniques for optimizing your website for search engines. Big or small, it’ll benefit businesses regardless of their size. Let’s get to it.

Analyze Your Current Website Data

For optimizing your website, you must first know where it currently stands. Here’s when data helps. A single metric, for instance, website traffic, won’t help you all that much to understand how well or poorly your website is doing; however, when you collect lots of data, you’ll notice patterns. For example, if five users fail to click on your CTA, it won’t immediately increase your website’s bounce rate. However, it requires some adjustments if most visitors choose not to click on your CTA.

Use Personalization Tools like Yieldify

Many data analytics tools and extensions will give you data. From how a user behaves once they visit your website to how much time they spend to the number of clicks, these tools give you a crystal clear picture of a user’s journey throughout your website. Moreover, you get to know the number of unique sessions, bounce rate, number of sessions, etc. While tools such as Yieldify’s tool help businesses personalize their consumers’ buying experiences, you get the data on your onsite audience, engage with tailored content and thus, drive high ROI.

It helps your business in the following ways

Analyzing the data for specific patterns helps you find loopholes in your existing website. Even referral sources tell you quite a lot about your users. Look for websites getting more traffic and conversions and reverse-engineer your way to make that happen for your website. Once you find the gaps, you then work on finding the solutions.

Publish Authoritative, Relevant Content with Appropriate Keywords

Content is not just the king but, indeed, an entire Kingdom. Quality, authoritative content drives the user, offers them the required support during their journey on your website and drives your search engine rankings. Quality content targets your audience and increases the site traffic, eventually improving the overall site’s authority and relevance.  While the quality of content is essential, so are keywords. You must identify and target specific keywords and phrases for particular web pages. However, if you want to target multiple keyword phrases, create a separate webpage for each keyword phrase. Stuffing similar keywords in a single web page won’t optimize your website.

The three most fundamental questions when placing keywords are:

If you answered yes to one or more questions, your search engine ranking will significantly improve. However, don’t overdo it. Keep readability in mind and keep the tone of the content organic and user-friendly. After all, you write for your users, not the search engine. For the keyword placement, put the keyword once or twice in the introductory and closing paragraphs and a few times throughout the body content. Strategically insert the relevant source links throughout the content to build the credibility of your web page.

Also, use bold, italics, headlines, and keywords to highlight the text. When your content flows organically with keywords spread throughout it, the search engine will consider your content, crawl, and index it.

Build a User-friendly Website

Getting into the good books of Google is not all about good content. Yes, quality content and keywords help Google identify your business; however, website design is equally essential to optimizing your website. Google will rank a user-friendly website with seamless navigation and stellar content better than a poorly designed website with exceptional content. So when monitoring the SEO metrics, don’t bypass good website design. After all, users will find the relevant content only when they get to it quickly, without any hassle. So SEO and web design go hand in hand, as one affects the other.

A few reasons to focus on website design are:

Overall, a well-designed website improves user experience, site speed, and content structure—all three positively impacting search engine rankings. Since web design is a core part of SEO strategy, you might as well consider this before building the website. If you already have a website, it’s never too late to update it since web design trends continually evolve. You’ll almost always find a design element that you can incorporate into your website!

Improve Web Pages Speed

Visiting a slow-loading website is a sure-shot way to repel a potential customer. Page speed matters a lot when it comes to both conversions and SEO. If you visit a website that takes forever to load, you’ll quickly press the back button or exit the website altogether. Even a single page speed directly affects the website’s overall bounce rate. Similarly, if a user fills a form that refuses to submit because of slow speed, they eventually give up. The first five seconds of page-load time has the highest impact on conversion rates. For example, if you have a CTA placed on your home page, or a user goes to buy a product, and the page doesn’t load, you just missed out on a conversion.

Improving the page speed benefits your business in the following ways:

These small benefits cumulatively assist in optimizing your website so that the search engine recognizes your business. If you want to gain valuable insight into how fast your website loads across different devices, visit Google’s page speed insights or add a Chrome extension. Such tools and extensions will help you fix the site faster.

Track and Measure Your Growth

SEO is a slow and long-term investment. It can take weeks or even months to see the impact of an SEO strategy. It also takes time for search engines to crawl your business website, index it and show it to the users. After implementing these SEO practices, monitor whether your website attracts new traffic sources or users.

The key benefits of tracking and measuring your website’s SEO growth are:

Keeping track of the SEO metrics at regular intervals will help you identify the weak areas while figuring out ways to improve them. However, ensure you know the SEO KPIs and performance metrics you want to improve. Depending on how the audience reacts to your SEO strategies, the results will vary. You may find a rampant increase in the website traffic one time and may find a significant increase in the bounce rate the other. Get to the nitty gritty of each metric to know the why and then work on the how.

Optimizing Your Website – Let the Search Engine Know Your Website Better

The article sheds light on a few tips and tricks for optimizing your website. However, bettering the equation between your website and the search engine is a continuous process. Knowing,  implementing, and analyzing–these three processes must be done regularly to keep your website updated. While you can implement these tips on your own or with the help of your team, it’s always wise to consult a professional. An individual consultant or an SEO company will pinpoint the exact loopholes and devise strategies to mitigate them. Whether to hire a professional or not depends on your business size, budget, and your existing website performance.

Remember, SEO is a long-term investment. So invest, watch, and revise.