A properly optimized website powers a content marketing program. The home for your content assets can build your brand authority with search engines and help you capture new leads. It might even transform into an automated sales machine. But here’s the problem: many factors go into site content optimization, and many get ignored, forgotten, or brushed aside.
Let’s look at six elements that don’t always get the proper attention. Addressing them will help turn your site into a revenue-generating powerhouse.
Consider these two statistics: In 2022, over 92% of global users accessed the internet via mobile phones, and only about 66% accessed the internet using laptops or desktops.
It’s a mobile-first world, so why not optimize for mobile devices rather than desktop? Here are some ideas on how to do that:
- Design your site for mobile, meaning ensure it fits other devices rather than designing it for desktop first.
- Use short meta titles and descriptions as they are easier to digest on mobile devices.
- Avoid pop-ups or at least ensure they don’t cover up important content.
Site visitors have no patience for slow-loading, laggy, or poorly performing websites. So ensure your website team conducts routine speed checks.
You can use a free tool like Google PageSpeed Insights, which provides a score based on site performance, accessibility, best practice usage, and SEO. It also lets you pull your Web Vitals report from Google.
Fix any issues identified by the tool, some of which may require the help of a developer. Whoever helps fix bugs should also be knowledgeable in Google’s Web Vitals initiative and address potential issues relative to the content’s loading experience, interactivity, and visual stability on the page.
Failing to optimize images and headlines creates a serious accessibility issue for people who rely on screen readers and text-only browsers. It also means your content won’t “speak” well so search engines can understand it.
To optimize the text-related elements around your content:
- Ensure each page (and content asset) contains a meta title and meta description that incorporates the target keyword.
- Include an alt tag and alternate description for all image and video media. If relevant, include your target keyword in both, but make sure you describe what’s in the media.
- Create a distinct URL for all content assets (e.g., blog posts, gated assets) and include the target keyword.
From the moment they land on your site, visitors should feel comfortable navigating. While looks matter, the sitemap should have an intuitive layout with category tabs placed where they make the most functional sense.
To create a high-quality user experience:
- Tailor your website’s copy, graphics, and aesthetics to your ideal audience.
- Add trust elements like accolades, statistics, testimonials, and expertise to build credibility.
- Present tailored solutions to your target audience’s primary pain points.
- Test your website from a user experience perspective often to ensure it’s intuitive.
- If you collect relevant user data via cookies to enable a hyper-personalized site, don’t forget to include a cookie consent banner and stay up-to-date on all compliance laws.
- Use Lighthouse, an open-source automated tool, to gain further insights into improving page quality.
- Add a feedback form to your website and encourage users to provide constructive criticism, so you can improve their experience.
Wondering why Google hasn’t indexed your site? The culprit might be your website architecture. As you identify and fix issues, work with a developer who is knowledgeable in SEO and knows how to build an SEO-friendly site architecture. To be found by Google, do an SEO Audit and then:
- Make your website crawlable by search engines as facilitated by Google Caffeine (its indexing tools)
- Submit your XML sitemap via Google Search Console and fix any identified issues.
- Use Google’s robots.txt file to indicate which URLs should be crawled.
- Find and fix broken links.
- Check and fix status code errors.
- Check your content assets and improve or eliminate underperforming ones.
- Fix redirect chains.
- Add relevant internal links with descriptive anchor text to web pages and content assets.
- Update duplicate metadata.
When you publish content, you should have a search intent strategy behind it. To maximize on-site optimization of your content:
- Organize your content into dedicated hubs and include all your assets (blog posts, white papers, case studies, etc.) on that topic. Create a “resources” tab where these hubs are housed.
- Create topic clusters within the hubs with related subject matter. Include relevant links to pillar and cluster pages and maintain site architecture integrity.
- Identify and target keyword phrases for each webpage and content asset on your website.
- Place target and secondary keywords naturally and strategically within your pages and assets.
Conclusion
When you know what to avoid and what to include, your website can attract more visitors, leads, and customers. But it all starts with avoiding common mistakes, including not focusing on mobile or not having the site and content prepared to attract search engines.
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Pubblicato in Digital Marketing, SEO
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