Your website is probably one of your most important marketing assets. It sets out how you appear to the outside world, what your brand stands for and can propel customers to your business to buy products or hire services.
Taking a step back and giving your website a spring clean at regular intervals ensures it remains current and continues to engage your audience. Two particular areas that you need to focus on are search engine optimisation or SEO and the user experience or UX.
On a great website, these two approaches combine to give your customers everything they are looking for. Ideally, they should be considered two sides of the same coin. SEO is designed to help customers find your site on search engines such as Google. UX essentially dictates what they do and how they behave once they get there.
1. Get the Balance Right
One area that business struggle with is getting the balance of user experience and SEO right. A UX specialist may want less content on a particular page so that the customer has a clear idea of what to do next such as buy your product. On the other hand, an SEO specialist may want more content so that the site ranks more highly on Google.
This is not as easy as many people think and requires the UX and SEO experts to compromise with each other. The aim should always be that, once someone gets onto your site, it meets their expectations and delivers on their needs.
At the end of the day, it’s always best to lean towards the user experience and build SEO in than the other way around.
2. Keyword Research is Still Important
While it sometimes gets a bad press, especially when overdone on a website, optimising for keywords is still very important.
The visual hierarchy is something that comes into both UX and SEO. Let’s take the H1 title tags as an example. A UX specialist will want to see this placed in a certain area and have a clear message that reinforces what the audience is looking for. An SEO specialist will want to make sure that they include their main title keyword or keyword combination in the title.
Again, this is a balancing act. Keyword research needs to be appropriate for the purpose of the page you are creating. Get it right and UX and SEO should come together seamlessly. That means having a reason why every page on your site exists.
3. Make Navigation Easy
This is more a UX thing than SEO in that you want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to find what they are looking for. That means not bogging your site down with excessive navigation and assets like drop-down menus.
Don’t forget that many people nowadays view sites on their smartphone so this issue is much more of a challenge than it used to be. The bottom line is that if the visitor can’t navigate your site easily, they are likely to go away and never return.
If you are looking to boost SEO for your site and want multiple pages, our top tip is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be linked on your menu. For example, let’s say if you have landing pages that relate to different geographic locations. These don’t need to be listed as they’ll continue to do their SEO job without getting in the way of navigation.
4. Have a Blog
It remains the number one option that marketers will talk about if you have a business website. A blog can be kept separate from your main website content but it can also be used to boost ranking for certain keywords and deliver extra information for your audience. It’s also great for using social media links to reach out to new people.
5. It’s Mobile First
Finally, when it comes to both UX and SEO, your focus should be on mobile-first. More and more people use their smartphone to search sites and having an appropriately designed website that displays properly is absolutely vital.
When it comes to UX, the placement of images, content and even white space is critical. If, for example, items are too close together it can be difficult to activate links and drop-down menus using a device with a small screen.
If you are considering giving your website a spring clean, contact the expert team at Blue Bee Solutions today to see how we can help.