Websites are the most important marketing tool for a business today, it is the hub of your online marketing and serves as a platform that branches out to your customers in order to inform them and hopefully encourage convert them to make a booking or purchase with you.

When looking at website success, there are four main steps in the process. Firstly, you need potential and current customers to find your website, this means you need to make sure it’s visible and has all the correct elements enabled or added in order for this to happen. Secondly, once your audience arrives on your website, you need to make sure it contains all the right information in order to satisfy their need and convert them into a customer. Once this is completed, it’s time to analyse your visitors and their website journey – learn how their experience was whilst on your website and how it can be improved in the future. Lastly, we want to ensure that we repeat the process, so that we have a healthy stream of continuous customers.

What are the main things that I can do in order to optimise my website?

Website Goals

When building your website, you need to ensure that you set clear goals on what you want your visitors to be able to achieve. Do you want them to sign up for your eNewsletter, book a course or buy equipment? Two main goals should be to gain website traffic and once that traffic is on your website you need visitors to be able to complete the goals. When a visitor completes a goal, it’s called a conversion.

Target Pages and Identifying Keywords

As you’ll see when you search in Google, most of the organic result listings link to inner pages within one’s website, not necessarily the homepage. This is why it is important to consider keywords on a page-by-page basis, not for the entire site as each page should be treated as unique. You can use analytics to show you what your most visited pages are and also isolate results to see more traffic sources than just hits from search engines. Google Search Console is also a good tool to use to identify pages currently being found from people searching.

Identifying which keywords to use within your website is also extremely important, there are multiple ways to do this such as –

• Relevance – how relevant are the keywords you are using throughout your website to what the user is searching for?
• Estimated search volume – how many users are actually searching for those keywords that you are using?
• Difficulty/competition – are those keywords highly competitive or more for a niche market?
• Use Autocompletes – this is Google’s function that completes words or strings without the user needing to type them in full
• Use Google Keyword Planner – used for Google AdWords, this program can give you an idea of what keywords are most popular in certain industries, countries and languages

Placing Keywords

Now that you have an idea of the keywords that you want to use on your website, you need to know where to place them. There are many on-page SEO opportunities for you to take advantage of, the main ones being page titles, page descriptions, optimising your URL’s, page content, hyperlinks, headings, title attributes and ALT tags. All of these website attributes allow you to add your relevant keywords that describe what is seen on your website to your potential audience. For detailed explanations, you can visit here.

 Ranking Factors – Device, Speed & Security

A few factors that will help your website perform and rank better are optimising depending on the type of device, how fast your website loads (not only on a desktop but also on a mobile device) and also if your website is secure.

Search engines can detect mobile devices, therefore, mobile-friendly websites will be ranked higher to people searching on mobile, is your website mobile friendly? Content Management Systems (CMS) these days make it very easy to have a mobile responsive site as the themes they provide are usually built with the mobile responsive feature. Another important factor when it comes to mobile devices is load speed. Google ranking index previously focused on content served to desktops however now it negatively affects mobile ranking for badly performing sites.

How fast does your website load on both a mobile device and desktop? Ensuring your website loads quickly will provide a better consumer experience and also assist your website ranking within Google. Always remember – the visitors to your website will be from all different countries around the world, with differing load speeds. Make sure you’ve done everything possible to ensure your website loads for them fast, test your website with Google’s Page Speed Insights.

Another important factor to consider when optimising your website is security. Consumers are more concerned these days about the privacy of their data, especially when it comes to monetary matters. Website security is all about encrypting data between server and browser and Google publicly announced that HTTPS would form some part of ranking (in a positive way for those with HTTPS compared to those without).

In addition, browsers have been more proactive with warning users if they are on an “unsecure” website.  This has the effect of scaring people who may not then continue to purchase, even if the pages where the purchase takes place is HTTPS.

It used to be the case that SSL certificates were expensive but now they are fairly affordable and some hosting companies even include them as standard in their packages.  Free SSL certificates are also available (https://letsencrypt.org/ or https://www.sslforfree.com/) however the validity period is usually short and they will need to be continuously renewed.

Blogging

Love it or loathe it, blogging is essential if you wish to be competitive in Google’s search engine results page. By hosting a blog on your website and writing informative and interesting blog articles that contain keywords at least once a month, you will increase your chances of being on the first page of Google. Google’s algorithm favours websites that are updated frequently, so blogging is a fantastic way to increase your website presence.

Luckily, in our amazing underwater world there is plenty of cool topics to write about – dive sites, tips on becoming a better diver, PADI courses, equipment reviews, staff interviews etc. Ensure your article contains the keywords that you are hoping to rank more competitively on, couple your article with imagery/video to add some exciting visuals, utilise external/internal hyperlinks to help direct the flow of traffic to your own website and other external resources and you’re ready to post your blog article and ultimately improve the search engine ranking for your website.

Local Search

These days, we see that nearly one third of all mobile searches on Google are related to location – this increased use of mobile web browsing has increased the need for local search. Having optimal local search is an important ranking factor for your website as the search engines know where the searcher is. Items like GPS (on mobile devices), IP address and local search (i.e. google.com.au) all allow the search engines to gather this information. So, what can you do to help your local search?

• Include NAP (Name, Address, Phone) in the footer of your CMS
• Use keywords relating to your nearby location
• Provide information pages relating to these areas
• Obtain links from other relevant businesses in the area
• Make sure you are listed on google.com/business

Measure your Success and Improve Conversions

An important part of maintaining a successful website is analysing your websites performance using a platform like Google Analytics, then reviewing your website goals in order to improve your conversions. Analytics will assist you in analysing the success of your sales and conversions, how visitors arrived at your site, how they use your site but also more importantly how you can keep them coming back. They also provide important consumer demographics such as location, age, languages, browsers being used etc. which gives you a terrific indication of who your customer base is.

This data will allow you to tweak your website’s performance and therefore improve the journey of future customers to your on your website.

Once you have implemented the suggestions above, your website is well on its way to being fully optimised. Websites however are an ongoing process and need to be continually updated so ensure you keep up to date with important updates and remain active on your blog. If you have any questions, please contact PADI Marketing.

The post Is Your Website Optimised for Ultimate Performance? appeared first on PADI Pros.

Marketing & Social Media, marketing, websitePADI Pros