19 Website Optimization Tips For 2024 – Forbes Advisor

Web optimization typically focuses on search engine optimization (SEO), user experience (UX) and customer conversion.

Website Optimization for SEO

Plenty of SEO statistics tell us why optimizing your website for search engines is essential. Here’s how to set up your website for success using SEO techniques.

​​1. Get an SEO Audit

Before optimizing your website, get an SEO audit to discover its state. An SEO audit analyzes an entire website, including website codes, indexing, loading speed, broken links, status code errors, content accuracy and backlinks, to verify the crawlability of your website by search engines. An SEO audit analysis also reveals your compliance with Google’s E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) guidelines. Google Search Console and Google Analytics are great tools for conducting SEO audits.

2. Improve Your Website Structure

Search engines crawl your website to include your pages in search results, so improve your website’s structure and fix technical SEO issues to make it easy for the bots to find your content. Do these:

• Use the structured data technique to organize your website in a language search engines understand.
• Ensure your URLs have a consistent structure.
• Build an Extensible Markup Language (XML) sitemap.
• Fix broken links and remove duplicate content on your website.
• Enhance your website’s crawlability by submitting your website to search engines, especially after updating pages.

You can use Schema.org to optimize your website structure.

3. Embrace Content Marketing

Content marketing is the planning, creation and distribution of search-engine-optimized content, which educates visitors about your products, services or industry. Here’s how to use it to optimize your website:

• Integrate your website with social media platforms and share posts or direct your audience to blog posts on your website.
• Create landing pages with direct value propositions and clear and visible calls-to-action (CTAs) to compel people to buy from you.
• Start a blog with regular posts to inform visitors about industry trends, product updates and how to use your product or service. Include relevant keywords to attract more potential customers.
• Reach out to customers and subscribers regularly, providing them with the latest updates on your product, service or industry. There are several email marketing software for this.

4. Optimize On-Page Content

Google runs around 99,000 search queries per second, adding up to 8.5 billion searches each day. You’ll be left behind if your website isn’t optimized for organic Google search. Some ways to optimize the content on your pages:

• Regularly create blog posts with relevant and up-to-date information about your product, service or industry and follow blog SEO practices that bring conversions.
• Integrate relevant keywords in titles, headings, alternative text and the body of landing pages or blog posts.
• Include header tags, meta titles and descriptions for all pages and blog posts.
• Add internal and external links and valuable images to your pages.

Using SEO tools, such as Yoast, will help optimize your web pages.

5. Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is a necessary part of SEO marketing. Locate relevant keywords your target customers actively Google and include them on your website to rank higher on search engine results. Tools like Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends are helpful keyword research tools.

6. Set Up Internal Linking

Link from one page on your website to another to make it easier for visitors and search engines to navigate. You can also place a navigation menu or links in your website footer to guide visitors through your website.

7. Build Backlinks

Backlinks from high-quality sites will increase your website’s organic traffic since Google interprets their reference to you to mean that your website is credible. So, create content worth sharing and get other websites to link their content to yours. Still, one quality backlink is better than several low-quality backlinks, so source backlinks from trustworthy websites. Also, don’t buy backlinks as Google penalizes websites that buy backlinks against its Webmaster Guidelines. Check backlink status and manage link features with SEO software, such as Moz Pro, Ahrefs and Semrush.

8. Check Out Your Competition

Find out how your competition approaches SEO. Tools, such as Semrush, explore competitor keyword rankings and examine how much organic traffic follows specific keywords. Knowing these metrics will guide you in approaching SEO in a manner that keeps you on equal footing with competitors. It also helps you identify opportunities to differentiate your brand and stay above them.

9. Update Old Content

Websites have pages and posts that underperform or become outdated with time. Optimize your website by regularly analyzing and updating such content. Find out where there’s traffic decline and update content to meet current search engine guidelines or usual changes.

Website Optimization for UX

User experience tells how users interact with your website, which often gives them an idea of what it would look like to engage your service or use your product.

10. Implement UX Web Design Practices

Users form an opinion about your website in 0.05 seconds, so you need to design your website to support the smooth transitioning of first-time visitors to returning customers. Here are a few web design practices to follow:

• Include straightforward menus at the website header and footer to help users find your primary pages easily.
• Include CTA buttons, such as “Start a free trial” and “Buy Now,” at visible locations so that visitors can locate them quickly.
• Improve the sales funnel by including conversion steps, such as a how-to guide on becoming a member of your program.

11. Speed up Your Site

According to Google, 53% of those visiting your website on their mobile devices will leave if it takes too long to load. Also, page speed is one of Google’s ranking factors, which can penalize your site if it is slow. For faster page loading:

• Remove unnecessary characters, such as plenty of spaces between lines.
• Set up a content delivery network (CDN) with a hosting provider, such as Hostinger to improve your website performance via static content replication.
• Use software or plugins to fix static pages.
• Use only high-quality visuals and optimize your images to fit your website’s specifications.

Tools, such as PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix, will give you valuable insight into how fast your site loads across devices and what you need to do to make your website pages load faster.

12. Prioritize Mobile Responsiveness

According to Statista, in 2023, mobile devices generated 58% of the global website traffic. Google uses a mobile-first approach, crawling the mobile version of a website’s content for indexing to determine its ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs). That’s why you should follow the mobile SEO tips below to optimize your website for all devices, including tablets and smartphones:

• Select a theme that adjusts your site layout and design to various screens when developing a website.
• Implement straightforward navigation by making the search box easy to find and using drop-down menus that mobile users can navigate easily.
• Use short meta titles that give a glimpse of what the content on a page is about.
• Place CTA buttons at locations that are easy to find and tap on a mobile device.

Any of the best website builders or website design software platforms will help you create mobile responsive websites.

13. Personalize Your Website

While good structure and content can drive potential customers to your site, delivering a personalized experience makes visitors stay. When designing your small business website, use geotargeting to include customized features, such as targeted offers and behavior-based product recommendations. It will help you deliver content that aligns with users’ unique needs.

14. Make Your Website Accessible

Ensure every visitor, including those with specific disabilities, who use assistive technologies, such as screen readers, can read your web pages easily. Web accessibility best practices include:

• Adding headings to pages to explain their content.
• Adding alternative text to images and consider Google’s image SEO pointers.
• Using the 4:5:1 color contrast ratio to make your website readable to colorblind visitors.
• Inserting audio or video captions to explain your content.

Use tools, such as VEED and Happy Scribe to optimize your website for accessibility.

Website Optimization for Conversions

Beyond driving visitors to your site, optimize your website to convert visitors to loyal customers better. You’ll get the most out of your site traffic by following the steps below.

15. Understand Your Target Market

For conversion purposes, start your web optimization process by answering these questions:

• Who are your ideal customers?
• Why do they need your product?
• Are they currently using a competitor’s product?
• How much are they paying your competitors?
• What are the pain points their current purchase is yet to solve?

Answering these questions and using tools, such as Google Analytics, will help you create accurate reader or buyer personas.

16. Analyze User Behavior

The next step is to track how visitors interact with your website. Tools, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and VWO’s heatmap generator will give you a holistic view of visitors’ interaction with each website page. You’ll see how they get into your sales funnel, their interactions with your website, which pages obtain clicks and which have higher bounce rates. Outline what customers require at each stage and embed fitting content and keywords.

17. Tailor Website Copy for Customers

The words on your website matter a lot. One time, a company added a word to its headline and the new headline increased conversion by nearly 90%. To ensure each webpage provides a roadmap leading to conversion, create content that is informative and relevant to customers and crawlable by search engines. A few copywriting best practices to follow:

• Use compelling headlines to address your customer’s pain points.
• Highlight the benefits of your product or service, not just the features you offer
• Use bullet points to summarize your brand’s selling points.
• Address the reader directly, using words like “you” and “your.”
• Edit your copy to be clear and concise.
• Insert clear CTA buttons on landing pages.

18. Use Social Proof To Increase Trust

Review customer feedback to understand their experience with your product and identify new features to add and those requiring an update. Then, use positive customer feedback to earn the trust of first-time visitors. Include their testimonials and case studies on your website so potential customers can see how you can help them.

19. Measure and Monitor Website Performance

Effective website optimization requires regular monitoring. Besides tracking sales, measure CTA button clicks, trial signups and email subscriptions. You can calculate your conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number of website visitors. The result indicates your website performance and helps you know where you are and whether or not you need to review your current actions or move in a different direction.

More Pro Tips on Optimizing Your Website

When we interviewed expert sources, they emphasized three website optimization tips that most business owners neglect when it comes to web optimization.

1. Use A/B testing tools or the WordPress UpdraftPlus plugin to back up your website before implementing changes to prevent losses from plugin errors, hosting glitches, hard drive crashes or accidental deletion.
2. Test and run experiments on your website with A/B testing and multivariate testing tools to determine which user experience strategies, SEO techniques or conversion steps work best for your customer journey.
3. Get familiar with relevant updates. For example, search engines update their algorithm often. In the past five years, Google completed 36 major algorithm updates. An alternative option is engaging the services of SEO, UX and content marketing experts.

Bottom Line

Website Optimization is necessary if you want to stand out from your competition. Pay attention to your website structure and content, which affect both search engine rankings and the overall experience of your website users. Following the tips we’ve shared with you will set you up for effective website optimization, which enhances customer conversion and retention.