Uncover Hidden Growth Opportunities with our Free Website Audit
Marketing as a service provider can sometimes feel like driving a car blindfolded. Other than surefire networking and referral strategies, you aren’t exactly sure where you should be heading next in order to land more clients. We see many business owners focus on their social media strategy, and while that’s great if it works for you, we’ve realized that the opportunity for growth constantly goes unnoticed when it comes to your website. Many service providers have a website just to have a sort of front for their business, but more often than not it sits collecting dust.
We want to help you grab the reins on your website by knowing exactly what areas to focus on. Keep reading as we break down critical aspects to focus on that are going to turn your website into a lead engine. (Spoiler alert: Stick around till the end for a free website audit!)
Key Elements to Uplevel Your SEO
When it comes to flipping your website around to drive traffic, SEO is your biggest opportunity for growth. A common misconception is that SEO only matters most if you have blog content. As helpful as blog content is to boost your SEO, you can optimize every page of your website to help you rank higher on Google. Although it’s a beast of its own, there are a few key elements that are really going to uplevel your SEO.
HEADERS
Headers communicate to Google what your content is about, so it’s important that you’re mindful of how you word them. This is especially true for your main home page heading. It should clearly state what your business is and how you help, and it’s even better if you can include top keywords that your ideal clients are searching for (in a natural way that still makes sense, of course). With that said, keep in mind this is also true for all headings and subheadings on your website. Not only will Google rely on them when crawling your site to understand what your content is about, but they also increase the readability and accessibility of your pages.
TAGS
This all comes down to helping Google understand even further what your content is about and who they should show it to. (That’s going to be a recurring theme here if you can’t tell.) We’ve already talked about header tags– a couple of others to pay attention to would be title tags and meta descriptions. You know the title that’s on your browser tabs? That’s what your title tag dictates. You want the title tags for your pages to include important keywords, but know that it isn’t the end-all-be-all for how you rank on Google. What we mean by that is Google isn’t going to prioritize pages that have the exact search string people are looking for. They take your headings, meta description, and other factors into consideration when determining what’s going to be the most helpful, so use these elements in conjunction with each other.
Your title tags don’t have to be straightforward about what the page is either. For example, your services page title tag shouldn’t be “Your Business Name - Services.” Instead, take the opportunity to use keywords to your advantage. If you were to take a look at our services page title, you’d see “Services - Customer Relationship Management - Marketing Strategy - Web Design - Boss Project” because these are the top keywords we strive to rank for. Although it isn’t a pretty title, it’s what will have the most leverage for SEO. This doesn’t count for your blog content, however, in which the title tag should match the blog title.
Another important tag to pay attention to is your image alt text. Google can’t “read” what an image is unless you add an alt text description, which looks better on Google’s part. Make sure your alt text blurb is an actual description of the image, however. Even though you can’t see the alt text, page visitors that are blind or have low vision rely on the alt text to describe to them what an image is, so don’t just stuff it with keywords.
META DESCRIPTION
Meta descriptions are the short blurb that summarizes what a page is about. Depending on what people are searching, this is what will display in search results. Meta descriptions are dynamic, so Google could pull snippets from your actual page content to display in its place, but you should still aim to write a clear, click-enticing description with relevant keywords.
How Website Keyword Rankings Work
We’ve been throwing the word “keywords” around like hot potatoes, so it’s time to actually dive into how they work and how best to use them on your website. Your keywords are the main search terms you want to rank for on Google, so think of them as the most relevant aspects of your business. When deciding what your keywords are, consider what search terms you want to be found in and what you think people will search for to find you.
KEYWORD CONSISTENCY
How often you use your keywords or keyphrases in your page content matters. It can be hard to find the sweet spot– if you don’t use them enough or use them too often on a page, both can have negative effects on your SEO. Back in the day, you could stuff your keywords in your content and call it a day. Now, though, readability and helpfulness make all the difference to Google. Get your keywords in where you can in your content, but make sure they’re spread evenly throughout and that, most importantly, they’re used logically. If the copy is hard for your readers to get through, Google isn’t going to like it either.
How to Increase Your Website Speed
Your website speed is another crucial factor of your website’s overall usability and rapport with search engines and visitors. In this day and age, people want to be able to access content immediately. 1 in 4 visitors abandon a website that takes longer than 4 seconds to load (source), but it also has impacts on your SEO, too. The average loading speed of a first-page Google result is 1.65 seconds (source). So how can you make sure your website is loading faster?
COMPRESS IMAGES
Try to make it a habit to compress the file size of all images used on your site. One thing we’re always sure to do is, if we have a new photoshoot, the images we get back from our photographer we compress to be web-friendly and use those copies on our site. TinyPNG is a free, easy to use tool that will compress your PNG or JPG images for you. It’s worth setting aside the time to compress and re-upload most, if not all, of the images you currently have on your website.
OPTIMIZE SITE RESPONSIVENESS
Having a responsive website means that visitors are able to easily view and navigate it on mobile which, in today’s day and age, is more vital than ever. Not every section of your site on desktop needs to be shown on mobile, and there are likely many sections that should be reformatted. In terms of how Google sees it, with more and more people spending most of their time on mobile, they don’t want to send them to mobile websites that are hard to use (source). Top web building platforms will have a mobile view that allows you to make edits to the mobile version of your website, so utilize it!
Get a Free Site Audit
If you want to find out more about your current site performance on all the points above and more, you can head here to get a free website audit report! All you need to do is type in your name and website address and we’ll generate a report that gives your website a “grade.” You’ll see a breakdown of areas of improvement throughout your website that you can either tackle yourself or our team can handle for you!
