I spend a lot of time thinking about my clients' sites and how to optimize them for happier customers and more revenue. Many of these things fall outside of the realm of SEO, but as I notice them it's still important for me to share. And hopefully it's helpful to you.
Other times my observations relate directly to SEO and will have an impact on the performance of an SEO campaign. For example, it's hard to SEO a site that doesn't have the right content. My number one suggestion to clients is to add more content to their site. Google wants to display the best results possible. Look at other results in your niche, put on your Google hat, and think- if I were Google, would I want to display this website for {insert query here}?
Here are just a few questions that are helpful to ask:
Is the page informative?
Is it trustworthy?
Does it provide a positive user experience (UX)? Does it load quickly? Is it easy for me as a user to find the information I need? Do I spend an extended period of time on the site or leave it quickly because it doesn't answer my question or solve my problem?
Am I targeting a buying query ("buy finches in Compton") or a knowledge query ("what are finches")?
Does my page align with the searcher's intent?
Does my webpage look like the other results returned for that search term? If not, that's a problem. For example, if you are trying to rank a page for "buy blue widgets" and every result for "buy blue widgets" is for an e-commerce site, that is a very clear sign that you are going to need a site with e-commerce functionality to compete.
As a best practice, I like to target the homepage (example.com) for brand-related terms and inner pages (example.com/inner-page) for specific terms. As a law of the Google universe, we can say that, if a site does not have content based around a target term, it won't rank for it.
In other words, if you want to rank for "buy Finches in Compton", your site better have a page about finches in Compton on it! It should help the user by answering questions like:
- Where in Compton can I buy a finch?
- Are finches in Compton expensive?
- What kind of finches are they?
- Do I even need finches?
- And so on.
Lead Capture
Most people visiting your website are not ready to use your services. Just because they aren't ready to buy at this point in time, however, doesn't mean that they are not great potential future customers.
But most people will just visit a website, leave it, and forget. Maybe if you are lucky they'll bookmark your site or throw it into an Evernote, where it sits for a year before being deleted during their annual housecleaning.
This is why lead capture is essential- it allows you to maintain a relationship with a prospect after they have left your website. In most cases the "lead" that is captured is an email address, but it could also be a telephone number or even a physical address.
To give an example of lead capture, it could be that you have a newsletter signup form (like I do in the righthand sidebar of this website) that entices visitors to sign up for your newsletter in exchange for an offer that will benefit them. For example, if I had a B2B service that helped people to sell more blue widgets, I would offer visitors to my website the option to download their "10 Steps to Sell More Blue Widgets" whitepaper by inputting their email address.
They input their email address, they receive something that is genuinely valuable (this is essential), and now you, the owner of Blue Widget Company Limited, have a growing list of prospects who you can start a conversation with.
If you sign up for my newsletter, which you should, you'll notice that I am doing this completely the wrong way. I don't currently have an email autoresponder setup, and I don't currently have an enticing opt-in offer to compel you to sign up. If you want a much better example, visit my site at smartinternchina.com/newsletter.
If you aren't capturing leads, you are always going to be platform dependent. Whether you are doing social media, SEO, paid traffic, or get by on word-of-mouth referrals, it is important to ask yourself this:
"If my primary sales and marketing channel disappeared tomorrow, what would I be left with? How many prospects would I be able to contact with {insert marketing channel here} gone?"
A great example of this is how Facebook reduced the "organic reach" of brands from around 12% to 2-3% in 2013. Just like that- poof- millions of hours of hard work and millions of dollars invested into an organic strategy for social media vanished overnight.
What this move meant is that, if you had a Facebook fan page with 100,000 fans, only 2-3,000 of them would see your most recent post in their newsfeed after the update. As for the rest, even though you as a brand had accomplished the hard part of getting 100,000 people to raise their hands and say, "I am interested in what you have to say", you could no longer reach them.
Well, not all of them. Or most of them. Only 2-3% of them. Having access to only 12% of your "audience" at a time was already sub-optimal. For example, most newsletters have an open rate of 30%. But access to 2-3% of your audience is simply terrible.
Of course, you could now pay for Facebook ads to get those lost impressions back. Funny how that works.
"Yeah yeah" you say. "But I'm not on Facebook. My customers come from {insert "superior" marketing channel here}"
In which case I would say, it's the principle that matters, not the specific channel.
In sum: double down on the marketing channels that work while also understanding that those channels will change as the market changes and as your company grows. And... capture email addresses while you are doing so!
Because then you will always have a direct line of communication to a list of prospects who have opted in to your message and you don't need Facebook or Google or Pinterest or whoever to give you permission to speak with them.
Sitespeed
Sitespeed is an important ranking factor in Google.
You can test it at GT Metrix. Ideally your site should load in less than 2 seconds and have above a score of 85 for both page speed and server speed.
A common reason for slow website speed is if a site has images that haven't been compressed before being uploaded.
Analytics
Google Analytics is the best way to track user behavior on your website. And while installing the tracking code is the biggest first step, the optimization need not end there.
One recommendation I am making to clients now is that they set up goal tracking in Google Analytics. Basically what this allows you to do is track specific actions that users take on your website.
For example, let's say that you are working on building your newsletter subscriber base. When people subscribe to your newsletter they are redirected to a confirmation page with the url website.com/thanks.
If you set up goal tracking, you can see the exact percentage of people who are signing up for your newsletter from your site. You can see the paths they take to get there. You can (and should) assign a monetary value to each new newsletter subscriber so that you can track revenue generated through this particular event.
Say your customers have an average lifetime value of $10,000 and that 1/100 subscribers to your newsletter will eventually become a customer. This means that you have $100 to spend on acquiring a new newsletter subscriber to break even. Setting up goal tracking allows you to monitor your progress and make such calculations more easily.