Website optimization

Suppose you have invested a lot of time, money and effort in having a beautiful website designed and developed, but you later discover that the website yields little. Or you had a website created a while ago that has generated quite a few leads over the years, but you have the feeling that there is more to be gained from it. It may also be that you have a website that works well and is full of interesting content, but that is gathering dust on the second page of Google and therefore receives little traffic. In all these cases there is a lot to be gained from website optimization. Curious about what website optimization is and why it is important for your company? Read it below!

The benefits are clear: it increases your conversion, improves the visibility of your website and company, attracts more visitors, boosts your online reputation, increases your brand awareness and generates more turnover. Are there any disadvantages? Not really. Be careful not to over-optimize and focus too much on small details that have little effect in the big picture. It has to yield something in the end.

Websites can be improved in various areas. We list them here.

SEO and findability

SEO is surely not a term that comes completely out of the blue. The abbreviation stands for Search Engine Optimization.

With search engine optimization/SEO you improve the findability of your website and generate more organic traffic to your website via search engines such as Google (and, alright, a few others such as Bing and DuckDuckGo).

And this is what you want. Why?

Search engines are the most important source of traffic for most websites.

An ever-growing share of consumers (and B2B decision-makers) first go online to look for information before making a purchase decision or getting in touch.

Fewer and fewer people take the trouble to scroll on and click through to the second and further pages of Google.

There is more and more competition.

So if your website is not among the top search results: missed opportunity.

The search engine algorithm decides, based on various ranking factors, how high your website ultimately ends up. Although only Google knows exactly which these are, and the list changes fairly often due to an algorithm update (there appear to be more than 200 different ranking factors), the criteria can be divided into 3 categories.

Technology

Search engines find it important that the technology of your website is in order. If the basics are good, Google knows what your site is about and it can be indexed and included in the search results. Consider:

• Fast loading time
• Accessibility on mobile devices
• Structure of the website
• The presence of sitemaps
• The use of SSL certificates

Content

People use Google to search for something. Information about a product, an answer to a question, contact details, you name it. To help those people as well as possible, Google mainly wants to show sites with relevant content.

By placing relevant content, Google knows what your website is about and you also help your customers with clear content that is useful to them.

That means you should conduct target audience research and keyword research, looking at which content your target audience searches for and which keywords they use. Because it is becoming more and more common for people to search via voice search and use longer keywords, it is important to include those longer keywords in your research too. This also applies to search behaviour on mobile devices, where people often search for information in a specific way and location is especially important.

This research should yield a list of keywords. You then have to work these into relevant articles and informative web texts where you let the keywords recur in a natural and informative way.

Something you should not forget are the meta titles and descriptions of your web pages. Even though these are not direct ranking factors, they are an essential part of optimizing your content. The meta titles and descriptions determine how your site appears in the search results.

When the metas are vague or do not match the content and the page title, users drop off and are less inclined to click on your website. This can in turn lead to a lower spot in the search results. Could you use some help with this? ROXTAR’s specialists know exactly what to do to achieve top results for your website!

Links

You are not there yet. Besides a technically well-functioning website with high-quality content, authority is the third important pillar of SEO.

By that we mean a website that is reliable and has a good reputation. Since those are difficult things for an algorithm to assess, Google does this based on incoming links. Especially the quantity of links and the quality of the referring site are important here.

So you have to make sure other sites link to you, preferably influential sites that have a good reputation. You do this through content marketing, link building, or for example by writing guest articles. Need help? At ROXTAR we have everything in house to help you with this!

The last part of website optimization, conversion optimization, is by far the most important part. Sometimes it is also called CRO, which stands for Conversion Rate Optimization, or increasing the conversion rate: the ratio between visitors and customers. Example. If your conversion rate is around 2% and you have 10,000 visitors per month, that gives you 200 customers per month. By optimizing your website you may be able to increase this to 3% or even 4% and your number of customers will therefore grow to 300 or 400. So it is worth it. And that starts with a goal. If all goes well, you have a specific goal with your website. Selling something through your webshop, having people subscribe to your newsletter or requesting a quote, this could be anything. Converting visitors to your website into paying customers (or customers requesting a quote) (as much as possible) is ultimately the most important goal of any website. But your customers also have their own goals. Depending on where they are in their customer journey, they have different information needs. In most cases, website visitors are looking for information or visiting your website because they have a problem and think you are selling the solution. If your goals and those of your customers are aligned, you will have a direct hit and this often leads to conversion. Conversion optimization actually includes everything you do to get your visitors to that goal as best and quickly as possible. And it sounds strange, but something that we still see (far) too often is websites that are created without logical thought.A design is made based on feeling, without looking at data and customer insights. The result? Web pages without focus, clear purpose and lost visitors. Suppose you visit a website in response to a search query and you watch a video about the product, you get all excited, but there is a call to action or reference to a product page missing. Or you land on a 404 page (can happen to the best!) but you can’t click on anything else and you drift away. Shame. This is where conversion