Nowadays, almost 80% of users access a page on the Internet via mobile phones. This, among other reasons, has become the spearhead for us to want to have the guarantee of having our website optimized, not only for viewing on the computer or tablet but also on the smartphones of cybernauts.
But how to do it and what exactly for? These questions will be answered in this article, in order to enhance the main objective of brands: to have an excellent online presence, which in turn leads to more sales.
An optimized website not only ensures that our users have a good browsing experience. It also ensures that they will come back again and for much longer. Consequently, the chances of them buying our products or contracting the services we offer will increase.
According to the most recent statistics, the more time a user spends on our website, the more products they will get to know and, for sure, they will find one that suits their needs. For this to happen, usability and correct user experience are key to maintaining an optimized website.
Benefits of having an optimized website
- Improve the User Experience and increase usability, ensuring that users and customers return.
- Increases the average time spent on the site, as it is easy to navigate and view.
- Faster loading speed of the website, offering users the information in less time, preventing them from abandoning the search.
- Improved positioning in the SERPS (SEO), so we will have greater presence in Google search results.
- It generates a competitive advantage and informative value, favoring customer loyalty.
- Increases the conversion rate.
- Generates a clean and debugged code to improve the order, save space and the proper functioning of the site.
What is behind web optimisation?
A web optimization is nothing more than a compendium of marketing strategies and techniques that are used to acquire traffic, interact with users and make them become customers, or at least potential customers of our business or company.
To achieve an optimized website, different professions and skills come into play, necessary to carry out all the actions that allow our page to work perfectly in every way.
It is no secret that building a website is within everyone’s reach, because currently there are different systems for creating models of web pages totally free of charge. However, it is important to put it in the hands of web positioning professionals in order to achieve our objectives: to position ourselves, to be more relevant, to grow in traffic in the medium/long term, and to attract clients.
Basic steps to set up a web site
1. SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)
These are those actions and target keywords, for which our company wants to appear in a search engine. Most companies focus on optimizing their pages, mainly targeting Google, as it is the most used search engine in the world.
Very often, the Mountain View company modifies the algorithms of its search engine. That is why we must be up to date and keep our website optimized for SEO, based on 3 fundamental pillars.
The first of these is the Content, which will determine to a greater extent the position of our page in the search results. Because Google is able to analyze each page to determine whether the texts, images or videos we use are relevant or not, with respect to the originality and quality of the content we use.
Then there is Page Optimisation, which refers to all the technical aspects that are necessary for us to appear in a good position in Google’s results. Some of the basic aspects that we must comply with are:
Our tags must be consistent and contain the keyword we are interested in.
The website, and therefore the page, must load as quickly as possible.
Our website must adapt to any type of computer screen or mobile device, i.e. it must be responsive.
It is also important that the site is encrypted, using the HTTPS protocol.
Finally, the last pillar for our website to be optimized for SEO has to do with Links. Google uses them to determine the quality of our page and its relevance for the keywords we use on it. Therefore, the more quality websites we link to ours, the better it will be for our SEO positioning.
2. OPTIMIZE TECHNICAL PERFORMANCE
The ease with which users can interact with our content will depend on the technical performance of the website we have. For this reason, it is a determining factor if we want to appear in Google search results.
In this sense, optimizing the speed of the website is the first thing we should work on within the technical performance issues. Why? Because the loading speed of our page is one of the most important and obvious performance indicators at a glance. We can lose a user if our website takes between 2.5 and 5 seconds to load. So, to analyze our website, we can use tools such as GTMetrix, PageSpeed, Pingdom Website Speed Test, Webpagetest.
Similarly, we must think about the performance of our site on mobile devices. As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, almost 80% of users access a page on the Internet via a mobile phone.
Given this scenario, it is absolutely necessary that our website has versions compatible with these devices. In other words, it must be able to adapt to any screen regardless of its size or resolution.
It is also of great importance to identify hosting errors. These are those http protocols that start with 4 or 5: 500 (internal server error), 404 (page not found), 403 (access denied), 401 (unauthorized access), 400 (bad request). Every time a user encounters one of these annoying errors, they leave the page, so we must be careful not to fall into them.
How to identify them? Using crawlers such as Screaming Frog or Botify.
It is important to bear in mind that when it is not your website that causes performance problems, these may be due to the host, i.e. the company that is in charge of managing your website and the server on which it is hosted for users to access it.
3. IMPROVING CONVERSION AND USER EXPERIENCE
It’s all about total reciprocity. When we optimize our conversion rate, we include improving everything that offers a better experience for users visiting our site and vice versa. By ensuring a good user experience we automatically improve our conversion rate and their loyalty to our company or website.
How to improve our user experience (UX)? The first thing to do is to identify and analyze all the data we have at our disposal about our website.
Google Analytics is ideal for this, because it provides crucial insights such as user type (age, location, gender, etc.), bounce rate, conversion rate and abandonment rate. Other advanced analytics tools such as AB Tasty can also be used to evaluate user behavior.
Relevant findings
When it comes to optimizing a website, many companies make the mistake of focusing only on perfecting a single aspect, such as SEO or usability. Without even suspecting that it is essential to touch and improve all aspects to achieve the perfect balance and make the website efficient.
There are 3 types of optimisation: SEO, technical aspects and user experience. In digital marketing, we must understand that these work hand in hand and therefore each must be in tune with the other.
Achieving an optimized website takes time and effort, but all that time invested will surely be worth it.
