Thanks for listening!
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to this week's episode, we are going to be going over a topic very worthy of our time. As you saw in the title of the episode, which is website optimization strategies. So this is going to be a, an episode that will improve our websites and hopefully get not only the customer journey to be seamless. But your website to be converting more and to make the price that you paid for that website. Makes sense and, to, give you more return on your investment. So we're going to be looking at an article or two articles, actually from two pretty renowned, websites. And they're the top in the search results. When you go over website optimization strategies. But I'm going to be putting my spin on all of their, individual, things here. I've already seen some things and I'm like, eh, I don't know if I really agree with that. So we're going to go through some of this stuff and I am a. I have about 15 years of web development experience. So we're going to see which one of these. Stick and which one of these kinds of fall through the cracks. And I think don't really make as much sense or matter as much. And the first thing that this article goes over is pinpointing your market with your website. And so I think that obviously all of us would agree with this one. Before you optimize your site, you need to define your target audience. And that really starts with finding your ideal customer. And so this is a. Thing that I say all the time, when it comes even are like digital marketing strategies for Facebook ads or any of those things. We have to know. Who is our perfect customer. And I see all the time, we're, even people that have, I've worked with. When they began on audience targeting, they generally start a little bit too broad. And the reason why is because. People are like, we just want to capture like all of our customers. And so it's men and women. I've seen someone as young as 20 shop with us. Our demo's 20 to 65 or whatever. And while that does work for some campaigns that are more top of funnel that are more just go find, new people to. Mark it too. When we talk about like your ideal customer, I think another, or a better way to say that really is your perfect customer. And so if you listen to, I think two episodes ago, The episode on how to make your social media posts better. One of the tricks about that is thinking of your last customer, who is just like really pleasant to deal with. And like you had a really good experience with, and so that's who I would say your perfect customer is. And the reason you want to target for perfect customer and not just like anyone that's ever shopped at to you is because when you target for perfect customer, the rest of the people like that, spillover audience will still come. But the perfect customer person that it's going to resonate with at a 80, 90, a hundred percent resonation, that person's going to love it, buy into the brand and keep coming back. And that's who you're ultimately looking for. Everyone else will still that spillover still going to happen. And you can always adjust in, open it up after the fact. But I think when you're beginning, Starting for that. Perfect person has a very good way to design a site for plan your marketing campaigns for all that good stuff. And so I'm like this says here, what products or services are they looking for? How much are they willing to spend and what are their priorities when it comes to contacts, contracts, and communications. So if you're just an e-commerce store that doesn't really apply, but if you're someone like me with a social media marketing agency, then contracts and contacts and communications is a hundred percent going to be mattering. Taken to consideration your customer's priorities. How much they're willing to spend. And ultimately just like what they're looking for. And you remember, your website is supposed to be providing a solution to somebody right there. You. If you want, if you're a lawyer and you want them to use your legal services. Your website should be providing them with information that convinces them, that they're finding what they're looking for. That they've found a legal service that they can do. And that even plays back into perceived likelihood of achievement, which that was a few episodes ago as well. So you can go and listen to it. I think it was season or episode one of the season actually. So that's number one. I do agree with that. We do need to pinpoint our perfect customers and then we can open it up after the fact for others. The second topic or a point on here is, think about user intent throughout the buyer journey. And so it says here, once you're clear on who you want, visiting your website, it's time to outline their journey. If your content doesn't match the needs of your audience, you won't get the traffic. You're looking for. But if you understand what your customers. Need as they move forward, from awareness to making the decision or purchasing. You can create a more powerful on-site experience. And so again, I really do agree with this one. We talk all the time about customer journey specifically, even if they're coming from an ad and then they have to go through from the ad to your website, to a contact page to filling it out and then getting the email. And then they, and then you call them and then you have another meeting, it's that's a big journey. So when the website is a piece of that, we want to make sure that we were being very clear, concise, and progressing people. At the highest percentage rate that we can, there's always going to be a little bit of burn. When, not a hundred percent of traffic, not a hundred percent of traffic is going to convert, but it's our job when we're designing the site to make sure that as much can convert as possible. And like it says here outlining what customers are looking for at each stage in the process and find the content or keywords that best fit each step. So I'll use again, my agency, as an example, when someone comes onto the site, they need to be introduced to our content. They need to be convinced that we have the ability to perform. And then the contacting us, I think on almost every page, we've got a contact form at the bottom of the page. So getting. To that end point where it's filling out that contact form and contacting us is a relatively simple. Process for them. So work on your customer journey and make sure that you're mapping it, literally mapping it, when you're creating your site and, even like your landing pages on your site, very important there. So this was one of the ones I didn't agree with a lot. Or it's really just not going to apply to a lot of us a lot. Then it's improve your user experience with AB testing. So it's saying basically, if you're going to have a homepage, make two versions of it. One has a video at the header ones. A straight up form or whatever it is. But it wants you to test, to do AB testing, to see. Which one's going to convert more people and do those things now. I would imagine for a lot of us, we're not going to have enough traffic monthly or, we're not going to have enough traffic in a short amount of time to make this make sense. Anyone could AB test and. It just may take a year for you to have a thousand visitors or 10,000 visitors, however many you want to like, make it make sense. To be like, yes, this one's definitely working more. So again, I don't know if this really applies to everybody. Now, if you do get a lot of web traffic and you think that in a months time, you'd be able to get enough data under your belt to make this make sense for you. Then I would agree here, but I'd say for the most. Most part, most small to medium businesses are not going to really be able to make this make sense for them. Moving forward because of the lack of traffic. Over a short period of time. A fourth one here is create a seamless mobile experience. So I feel like this should have been number one. Almost. Mobile first designing is like how we do everything with our web design. And so when we say mobile first, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's the site literally needs to be designed to look good on mobile before it looks good on desktop. So it's. When you're doing that. Wireframe for the website, you've got all the site pages laid out and what you want them to look like. And all of that should probably be done in mobile before it's done in desktop. And so even when we're designing. And our web development platform. We always are looking at mobile before we publish out, because we want to make sure that it's going to be. Looking good on mobile, because like it says here more than half of the web traffic worldwide happens on a phone of some sort. So it's very important to be looking good on the phone because that's where almost half your stuff is going to be going. Let's say you pay 20,000 for a website. Imagine that more than half of your web traffic, isn't even able to have a pleasant experience and not going to be converting well because of the mobile. Mobile friendly aspect is not there. That means you wasted 10 to 10,000,$12,000 or whatever it is, theoretically on the site, because we weren't optimizing for that. So make sure that we are optimizing for mobile. Here's some things that you can do. To make it a little more friendly. Condense your menus. So if you have giant mega menus, try to condense those and make it easier. So that the viewing experience is not overwhelming. Remove any popups or interstitials. So if you have, after three seconds of viewing, something pops up. And there's a small X in the top corner that might be hard for someone to click on and frustrate them. You can make the search box easy to find. So again, normally on mobile we have condensed menus and all these things. So having a search bar allows someone to navigate the site easier. And then having filters or sorting options. And of course, call to actions. Viewable when you land on places. And so that's, I feel like this is obvious and most people know this, but even just having your call to actions in the viewport where, when someone lands on the screen, can they see the button to convert? That's a very important thing to do. Okay. So skipping down here had to find the next topic to go on. Another really important thing. I think we need to look at is just optimizing your on-page content. So great content relies on relevance. So any blog posts, videos, podcasts, or digital resource that you create should focus on your target market. And so when we are. Looking at, how are we going to build out our site and all those things. That's like design-related information, but then we have the actual copywriting aspect. And this is the fun part that no one likes to do. Is getting all the headlines and all the little descriptors and all the paragraphs and all the texts added into there. This is a major thing. And it's a concept. Shortly named naming. And the way that you want to be naming your headlines, your products, the blog posts, any of that kind of stuff is going to be based on how people are going to be searching for whatever that content is. And so you really need to have keyword based page titles. So instead of, denim blue jeans, it needs to be soft and the blue jeans or whatever it is. So you want to have like describing words or, Prepositions or adjectives basically that are like help words, that kind of, assist the. The content, the nouns and everything else, and the headlines to make sure that they are keyword based things that people would search. It's almost I guess another way to say this would be like, how would you say it in your head? Or just say it casually to somebody else. And so that may be a way to help you better describe, That may be a way to help you better build the headlines. Because the reason that we do this is not just for the viewing experience for the person, but it's what they're going to be typing into Google. And so you want to make sure that your search words. On the site are going to be similar to that. And so if you're using something like a. Dealer websites. So let's say you sell cars. Or RVs or boats, or even if you're just using, an online marketplace store where it auto poles, your products into a platform. And so like you manage everything on a content management system on the backend, but it populates on the front. You normally don't have a lot of optimization options or like customization options for content. And that's why it's critical for you guys, that, where you do the eight spots where you can input text, needs to be. Relevant and keyword based. So just make sure that we're infilling as much text as possible in that manner. Another good thing to pay attention to is just managing the speed of the site. So you can actually do, load speed tests on websites, just in, I can actually show you on this podcast right now. Live. Really quickly, how to do this. If you are on Google Chrome, you can go to any website, you right. Click it. You go down to inspect and then over here on the right-hand side, you can go to lighthouse. And so if you click this, it will analyze the page load. It'll tell you the elements that are slowing down the page, and it will give you an average speed time as well. So you can actually test it over and over to see if you're getting faster on the site. And so the another way to do this is the optimized images. So make sure that every picture you upload, if. So let's say you have a professional camera and you take a photo. It's probably a lot of megapixels in that picture. Probably a good sized image. We need to compress it so that it's a 10th of the size or a 20th of the size. And that way it loads very quickly on the website. There are many free online image compressors. You can take it. I would recommend doing it for all of your products for all of your banner images. For anything, if you have the ability to it, doesn't really make the picture look worse. The picture will basically look identical. What it does is it will take some of the colors out of the photo and compress some of the pixels. To make it to where it loads very quick, because the file size will go from 15 megabytes to 150 kilobytes. Like it'll literally be a hundredth of the size sometimes. And so that will help with your load speed. Big time. And then talking to add into the load speed. This is the last one from this article I'm gonna go over is measuring and monitoring. So this is, of course, if we're going to make all these changes and go through the effort and the. And the. The painstaking time and effort to go and alter all these things. We want to make sure that we're actually measuring and monitoring the progress of this stuff. Obviously some ways to look at this would be how many purchases have we had? How many leads have we gotten from this or whatever. But another way to look at this, it would just be to be monitoring your actual web traffic. And your backend analytics on the site that your website's hosted on, you might be able to find it there. Or you can register your site with Google search console or Google analytics. And I recommend doing both and tying them together actually. Google search console is going to tell you how you're appearing in search results for Google. It'll actually even tell you your average ranking, based on keywords. If you go and type in digital marketing Springfield, Mo for me, it might say I'm 15th on the list or something like that. You know what I mean? You can do that for your site and actually monitor the progress of this. So if you're working with a web team like ours, Or if you just even have an internal person that, Hey, when you get free time and go work on the website. This is something that you can actually track to see if we're wasting time or for making some good progress. So don't forget to actually monitor and measure all this stuff so that you can see if you're wasting your time. Or if you're actually, making money on this thing. On this other article, this is by the search engine journal. So this is another just thing to go over. And this is again, more toward the search words and measuring and stuff, in the algorithm for Google specifically. And so I'll just read through this and then give you my 2 cents and then we will be done with the episode. So this says as machine learning, artificial intelligence and deep learning continue to evolve, each is going to carry more weight with the Google core algorithm. The end goal for Google is to understand the context of a given search query and to give search results consistent with the user intent. So I'll pause real quick. So we say this all the time, right? What's the whole what's Google's job it's to give people what they're looking for. So when you were talking earlier about titling things, That's why it's important is because someone's going in there and they're going, I want digital marketing or whatever it is. So it's you need to have. You're things, obviously, you're not going to go and say that, but you need to have all of your titles and everything matched to hit the user's intent to find it. And that's what Google is trying to do as well. Continuing this makes advanced level keyword research and keyword selection more important than ever before. Spending time and resources, trying to rank for a phrase, you need to look at the websites that are currently at the top of them. So that, you know what they're doing. I keywords contextual relevance must align with the search query. There will be some keywords and queries that will be impossible to rank for. And so if I tell people this all the time, when you jump into. A preexisting saturated market. It's going to be hard for you to compete. Let's say you're a local clothing store and you are selling things like, I don't know, let's say it's polo, Ralph Lauren and that kind of stuff. And you're basically competing with Dillard's at that point. Dillard's is going to win that search thing. They've had a goo. They've had a Google listing and. Millions of site history visits and all of that stuff over the last 20 years or whatever it is. So like competing for that is very difficult or has this as impossible. So also keep that in mind and don't beat yourself up about it either. There's not really anything you can do as far apart from a paid ads. And so it says here, for example, if Google has determined that people searching for personal injury attorney, Insert city want to list of lawyers to choose from then a trusted lawyer directories the list will appear at the top of the search engine results. Each individual or an individual or a single firm will not supplant those directories. In those cases, you will need to refine your strategy. Like I kinda said, I think the easy workaround to that is just ads. To run Google ads. And then as a scroll through this article again, you're going to see here. They re mentioned user experience. Mobile first. Let's go over. And this is something that the other article didn't mention that actually applies to quite a few people, which is schema and markups. So there's, what's called a rich cards on Google and some of these other search engines. I did not make them up, but they're just named after me. I know. It's cool. But they're an enhanced description that appears in the search results. So it basically reads your website data and then tries to like smart format and pull it forward for previews. And I know that all of us have seen this happen when we type in. Any product or book or movie or whatever, it's all those little cards that pop up all the little, little squares with pictures and I'm basically. That pop up at the top of the results. And so you can format your site and your products and your books or whatever it is on your website. To make sure when Google looks at it, it can actually read it and then pull it forward. And that is crucial if you're doing that. Products or any of these kinds of things, because that's where people's eyes go immediately. It's media to look at instead of text. And so they can scroll through those. You can run ads inside of those even. So if you're working with an ad agency, we can pull your products forward into those. So just always pay attention to. Who you're working with and they're setting this stuff up because if they don't know how to do that is like a huge thing that you don't want to miss. And I'm surprised I'm just not mentioning it to be honest. This is just such a dense topic, there's too much to go over. I'm here and I'll make this the last one. I know I said the two, two times, and I'll make this the last one. I know. I said two topics ago. That would be the last one. Last one is linking and specifically like backlinking. So wherever you can make sure that you have links out to your website. From other resources. So let's say you are a local park and you also have, I don't know, let's say you're a dog park or something. The city that you're in probably has a parks and rec. Website or something like that. And you want to be listed in that directory and you want your website listed there and as many places as possible, the reason why is because Google literally crawls the entire website, it's called a crawl. It basically just scans every single page across its entire listings. And makes it recording of it and you can actually even go on, I think it's a. It's something time machine, but you can see every website ever on any date and it screenshots a picture of what the site is. And so when you do that, Google, when you have all these links built into that, and Google does a crawl. It takes. A record of Hey, this business has, or this website, Has its URL and 180 other spots on the internet. And so when you do that, you tell Google that you're more relevant as the search result than your competitor. Because again, what's Google's job. They're trying to just figure out what the person's looking for. And if it thinks that all these other websites are linking back to you, it's probably oh, this is a good resource. Lots of people are using it. And so that's why. Backlinking and link-building is so important because these robots that are crawling the web that tells them that you're important and that you're popular. So I'm going to pause. I'll stop the episode there. I'd. I could go on for probably six more days, just talking about all this stuff. And as you see, the article goes on further. But, Ultimately guys, what you need is an experienced person to help you out to do this stuff. These podcast episodes are great to give you just enough to get over the cusp and make sure that you are performing at some level. But I think ultimately the next step past an episode, like this is taking it to the professional level. So either. Studying it and doing it yourself or hiring out to somebody else. But this hopefully will get you guys really far in terms of just organic performance. And like I said, drive conversions better reduce that customer journeys, friction on the website. So from ad to conversion, making that process as short and painless as possible. So let me know in the comments, if you guys liked this episode, if it was too long or if I'm just too, long-winded when it comes to some of these things, I would love to hear from you either on YouTube, Instagram, anywhere you listen to us, apple, Spotify, whatever, and otherwise, Thank you all for listening and we'll see you in the next one.