Could your website strategy be improved?
The sheer pace of developments in digital technology can make it hard to keep up; everywhere you look, there are different ways to spend your money, and separating the wheat from the chaff is an ongoing challenge for marketing pros. However, there is always one certainty; a well-optimised website will always outperform a poorly optimised one.
Every business owner’s first priority should be to ensure their website ticks all the boxes for both search engines and users alike, so that when traffic starts flowing in, you’ll see positive results like a number of online casinos like MobileCasinoKings.com have new online mobile casino offers and bonuses to help improve traffic. Of course, we can’t outline every SEO option here, but optimising your website properly for conversions helps to improve the effectiveness of your entire digital marketing website strategy.
Optimise load times – “AMPlify” for success
Google reports that 53% of mobile users will abandon a page if it hasn’t loaded after three seconds, and with more than half of Google searches coming from mobile devices in 2015 it’s become incredibly important to ensure that load times are kept to a minimum. Don’t forget that Google also takes page loading times into account when determining your Quality Score, which has a strong impact on your search result rankings.
Check your site’s load times with a website speed test tool like Pingdom, which also offers useful tips for reducing load times. Of course, the simpler you can make your site’s various design elements, the faster it will load; complicated JavaScript and CSS structures add to your site’s total page load, hampering its speed.
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) project helps developers create lightweight web pages that can be integrated into existing sites, and they have recently released a Codelab tutorial for them as well as recommending a set of plugins for CMS platforms like Drupal and WordPress.
Because AMPs perform well for specific functions like static pages, Google has also released a set of 8 tips for implementing AMPs, which will help you to make a start on reducing your site’s load times.
Structure your data for Google
Google’s algorithms are becoming increasingly intelligent, able to pick out and display relevant data in a meaningful way by crawling web content. You can optimise your content for Google by wrapping it in relevant tags: Google Schema and Data Highlighter let you mark up different types of data, sending Google strong messages about your content and how it ought to be displayed.
The big win for structured data comes with “snippets”, the “quick answer” which appears above the organic search results in a query. Because these are so prominently displayed in the SERPs (search engine results pages) they’re a powerful way to promote your website, and they’re even more valuable on the small screen of a mobile device important to your website strategy. You can determine whether or not you’re being featured in snippets using SEMrush, and experiment with re-structuring your data accordingly.
Don’t forget that Google will cut out the middleman when it can; a question which can be answered quickly and definitively (such as converting dollars into pounds) will be handled through the Google Knowledge Graph, so snippets are only used when the user’s query can’t be answered succinctly.
Capitalising on SEO
With a well-optimised website, you can divert your budget to acquiring customers with maximum efficiency. Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most powerful tools available to digital marketers, and it benefits enormously from well-optimised sites; a high Google Quality Score enables your ads to leapfrog to the top of the SERPs, meaning you’ll have to spend less to get into the all-important top spots and decreasing your cost-per-click.
Once your website is properly optimised, you can use the keywords it ranks organically for to inform your PPC keyword bidding: Google Analytics lets you uncover the precise terms users search for when your site is displayed, and how often they click-through. Well-optimised websites should rank for several semantically relevant terms, which can provide you with useful insight into areas to invest your PPC spend.
SEO is an ongoing process
These design philosophies should go to the very heart of your website, forming the foundations from the very first stages of development. Don’t forget, though, that the rules of SEO keep changing, and you’ll need to keep on top of developing trends to make sure your website strategy is achieving its potential – all the advertising in the world won’t help if your website can’t convert visitors into customers.
Thomas Coppen is the UK director of digital advertising experts Keel Over Marketing, helping international clients maximise their ROI with top-notch SEO and PPC optimisation. You can connect with Thomas on LinkedIn, and follow Keel Over on Facebook and Twitter.
