The performance of your website, in terms of both speed and functionality, is vital for a smooth experience for your users, conversion rates as well as organic rankings. If your website performance is lacking, you are likely going to send your customers over to your competitor's instead.
With the rapid advances in technology, there is little excuse for a poorly performing website. Additionally, users are becoming adopted to having information presented instantly, so a slow-performing website just won’t cut it anymore.
There are many ways you can improve the performance of your website, from speed to user experience and organic traffic.
Here are 3 tips to get you started on maximizing performance and converting more customers.
Fix technical errors
Some errors are obvious to users and will directly impact their experience, while others cannot be seen on the customer interface but still indirectly impact your customer journey. Your business risks taking a hit if these issues that require your attention are not addressed. Some of the most common issues are:
Website speed
You can be penalized if your website is slow, by the search engines who consider speeding a ranking factor, as well as losing customers to your competitors in frustration. Website speed can be impacted by any errors mentioned below, as well as uncompressed images and Javascript.
Broken links
A few broken links aren’t a huge issue. But if your website is riddled with hundreds of broken links, you can be wasting the crawl budget which can leave important pages un-indexed and impact your page authority. You will also lead your customers to numerous dead ends which will impact their trust.
Broken images and alt tags
HTML attributions (alt tags) to images help the search engines and crawlers understand what it is by providing a description. It also looks unattractive and can impact conversions.
Hreflang errors
If your website has a global audience and various translated versions, it is important that the hreflang attributes are correct. It is a common mistake that hreflang code on websites will not reference each other or use the wrong language codes, which can cause duplicate content issues with crawlers as well as hinder the user experience as the translations won’t work correctly.
You can use tools such as Moz or SEMrush to identify technical issues or an SEO technical expert.
Optimize for long-tail keywords
To improve the performance of your website in the search results, your website needs to be properly optimized. There are many strategies that an SEO expert or agency can show you, and one of these key strategies is to optimize your website for long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords enable you to rank for and drive high intent traffic. This is because the keywords are more specific and will better match your ideal customer search. On most occasions, the long tail keyword will include a variation of the broader key term too, which means you can hit both of your goals in one and boost your rankings. Only ranking for the broad key term can mean missing out on key opportunities as well as being harder to rank for. Long-tail keywords should be used with page copy as well as blogs.
Enhance the user experience
You may have fixed all the technical errors and be driving high-quality organic traffic to your website, but without a good customer journey, they are likely to bounce and go to your competitors. A good user experience can decrease bounce rates and help needed by the customer, while increasing loyalty, conversions and maximizing revenue opportunities. To improve user experience, you must regularly review the current journey and conduct tests. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to gain more insights from your customer's behaviors when they are on your website, as well as utilizing click testing tools to ensure your current website design is working efficiently for your customers.
While there are many ways to improve the performance of your website, these are some of the key elements you must consider for instant results.
