Website optimization is the best way to achieve higher conversion rates, drive more traffic to your website, establish a stable revenue stream, and increase sales. With that in mind, you can do a range of things to ensure your website is fully optimized.
If you’re new to the web optimization game, the best way to understand what it stands for is to know that it makes your website work better by improving its features. The internet is continuously changing and evolving, making the e-commerce industry a highly competitive and fast-paced business environment.
Online businesses and entrepreneurs have to go to great lengths to cope with constant changes to remain relevant and competitive. One of the best ways to stay ahead of the competition curve and harness the power of change to make it work to your advantage is to optimize your website and provide each potential prospect with the most amazing user experience. Here’s how to do it.
Table of Contents
Get Ahead of Your Website Bounce Rate
The website bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that visited your website but didn’t go past the first page. The lower the rate, the better for you. After all, you do not want your potential clients or readers to leave without getting a closer look at your work. To reduce this rate, you can take the following steps:
- Consistently interlink blog posts
- Reduce adverts
- Improve readability
- Keep your content accurate, relevant, and updated
- Optimize website speed
- Make your articles more interesting by adding popular or related posts
- Make website navigation more transparent by adding different anchor texts
- Prioritize and categorize your pages
- Increase the quality of featured images for all posts
- Optimize checkout for online stores
- Avoid giant pop-ups or large promotions
It’s also worth mentioning that reduced bounce rates greatly help with your SEO.
Improve Your SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it’s one of the most effective ways to ensure your website drives the necessary traffic at an increased pace. Millions of internet users use search engines like Google daily, and SEO allows you to put your website on their map. When it comes to optimizing your website for search engines, you should do the following things:
- Invest in keyword research
- Optimize bounce rates
- Remove or fix broken links
- Increase website and page speeds
- Keep the content word count on par with the latest standards
- Include more backlinks
- Add a sitemap
Increase the Speed of Your Website
To top your SEO efforts, increase your website’s speed and achieve higher SEO rankings, conversion, and lead generation rates. Increasing speed improves your website’s overall performance, but, more importantly, it provides the user experiences your prospects expect. On Hosting Foundry you can check out the list of best web hosting service providers with all their pros and cons. After all, web hosting is the starting point for any website. If your web hosting is bad and the website is slow, users will find what they need elsewhere.
You can increase your website’s speed by:
- Enabling compression
- Optimizing your images
- Enabling KeepAlive
- Merging CSS files and moving Javascript files to the footer
- Enabling caching
- Using a content delivery network (CDN)
- Minimizing HTTP requests
- Selecting the matching image format
- Fixing 404 errors
- Scaling your web pages and images
- Leveraging browser caching
Do you struggle to believe the actual impact of page loading speed? According to statistics, 47% of clients wish that websites would not take longer than two seconds to load. Anything exceeding that number means that the consumer is more likely to leave. In fact, 40% of consumers do abandon websites that do not satisfy their speed expectations. To build an even more compelling case, remember that slower websites get 11% fewer page visits than optimized ones. This notion also relates to the 7% decrease in conversions. With such numbers, investing in speed optimization becomes a necessity.
Improve Customer Service
Modern consumers demand customer-centric customer services, and you should make every effort to give it to them. In a way, this can be viewed as making a long-term investment that will pay for itself in a wide range of different ways.
Having excellent customer service is a perfect way to provide each website visitor with the most fantastic customer experience. Moreover, it can significantly increase your conversion rates. Consumers love brands that are all about solving their problems and providing solutions to real-life situations.
If there is a problem with your product or service, promptly handling that request is a sure way to convert that prospect into a loyal customer. Great customer service also allows you to decrease cart abandonment and cancel rates, as well as increase your sales. When a brand takes care of the customers, they tend to buy more.
However, disregarding users’ needs is one of the pitfalls that could drown your business. Every business website usually operates with a tremendous amount of user data. Companies can exchange this information internally to keep track of their customers or improve user experience. In all cases, you need to be extremely vigilant, since data could be modified or stolen in transit. In addition, access to user information should be restricted to hand-picked personnel. A VPN to use online could be true salvation. It encrypts traffic and data exchanges to guarantee a more private experience. So, hackers or other suspicious sources won’t be able to compromise communications between employees.
Conclusion
There are many other ways you can optimize your website to ensure maximum performance across all search engines, online platforms, and devices. Still, this is the very essence of website optimization. Of course, small businesses will likely need more assistance with these things. Consult specialists for the best options for your company. By adding a professional touch to all these features, you are guaranteed to see positive results.
Once your website starts giving the wanted results, it’s imperative to keep tracking and analyzing your traffic. It will help you understand how your website visitors prefer their content and improve their user experiences. It will also show you all the things you’re doing wrong or could be doing better so that you can get ahead of your competitors and ensure a bright future for your business.