As we enter the new year, businesses are busy setting goals for their online revenue, conversion, and awareness efforts for the year. With online sales booming over the past two years (helped by pandemic-related changes in consumer behavior), businesses are naturally looking to sustain this growth and make new improvements to keep the momentum going. increase. Of course, taking the appropriate steps in the first quarter of this year will give us the support we need to reach these goals by the end of the year.
About the author
Craig Dunham CEO deep crawl (opens in new tab).
If building awareness and driving conversions is your team’s priority, it’s time to get serious about your website’s overall health and search performance. A study conducted by Econsultancy and Deepcrawl found that 89% of marketing leaders agree that organic search will generate more revenue in the future. Nearly half of respondents also estimate that organic search influences more than a quarter of their organization’s total revenue.
Q1 is the perfect time to implement to set your business up for success in the coming months A website health check that can pinpoint exactly what changes you need to make to your website this year to get more revenue from organic search.
Why Online Retailers Should Start Website Health Checks
as an e-commerce (opens in new tab) In an increasingly competitive market, marketers can’t afford to rely solely on paid channels to do the heavy lifting when it comes to customer acquisition, conversion, and online sales. This is especially true today when privacy is new. (opens in new tab) A concern that reduces the effectiveness and value of many digital advertising platforms. To be successful in driving awareness and conversions, your website must perform just like you.
A healthy website is one that performs well in organic search and increases conversion opportunities. Improving a website’s health and his SEO can have a significant impact on the return on investment of companies prioritizing these organic channels over time. However, in order to rank higher in search engines, you first need to understand where your site can be improved.
Powerful search engine optimization implementation (opens in new tab) Website strategy is a slow and steady process that requires regular maintenance and analysis. In an increasingly search-first world, it’s not only worth the effort, it’s an important step in staying competitive and increasing your market share. You need a solid foundation. So you should start with a deep understanding of the current health of your website.
Key Areas to Audit in Website Health Check
1. Check your website for crawlability and indexability issues
On-page SEO (opens in new tab) It provides the foundation for ranking well on Google and other search engines. This includes the underlying website code, robots.txt directives, HTTP status codes, Javascript, and many other “invisible” elements of your website. (opens in new tab) Rendering issue. At the core of technical SEO is ensuring that your website is properly crawled and indexed by search engines. This allows search engines to best know how to rank his website according to relevant user queries. Building a good looking site is not enough. If it is not properly crawled and indexed by search engines, most people will never see it. If search engines aren’t showing your website to users, you’re leaving conversion potential on the table.
A website health check should look for crawlability and indexability issues to make your site visible to users in search. This includes reviewing sitemaps, checking the placement of canonical tags for duplicate content, and verifying that noindex, nofollow, and disavow controls are not blocking crawling or indexing of critical web pages. will be
2. Analyze page loading and website speed
Website load time is a determinant of bounce rate and click-through rate. Last year’s Google Search update placed more emphasis on core web vitals, such as page speed, as part of ranking decisions. the overall health of the website; To meet user expectations and increase the amount of time users spend on your site, you need to optimize page load speed while maintaining all the navigational and technical features that make your website really “work”. .
According to a 2021 study, pages that load within 2 seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while pages that load within 5 seconds have a dramatically higher bounce rate of 38%. Therefore, it is imperative that your website adheres to his sub-second benchmark to increase your chances of driving online revenue. Page speed is a top priority for website health and related issues should be fixed as soon as possible. Additional reports show that 46% of users are unlikely to return to sites deemed underperforming.
There are several tools that can help you assess the overall speed of your site and the load times of individual pages. Google PageSpeed Insights and Google Analytics are accessible and reliable examples, but ecommerce businesses with websites with huge numbers of pages to analyze may want to look for a more robust SEO analytics platform. .
3. Optimize with Mobile in Mind
Internet usage has changed dramatically in recent years from desktop to mobile browsing and is well documented. Statista reports that 54.6% of his internet browsing in Q1 2021 was done on mobile, making mobile optimization an aspect that can’t be overlooked if you’re looking to improve your website’s overall health. It is
Optimized for both mobile and desktop (opens in new tab) It’s important for accommodating different user patterns and reaching a wide range of potential customers. The main goal of mobile optimization is to allow site visitors to easily navigate and convert on any kind of device. So, remember how important it is to think of your mobile her users when adding, changing, or removing features from your website.
Site content, navigational elements, and website architecture are major considerations in ensuring a website is mobile friendly. Again, there are tools to help you evaluate your site for mobile performance optimization. Google’s Mobile Usability Report, available through Search Console, helps you evaluate how your site performs on mobile devices and provides guidance for evaluation and improvement.
4. Make sure your content is configured to compete on SERPs
Last year’s Google Search update focused on the Core Web Vitals for user experience and SEO, but don’t forget to review the content-related factors that contribute to search result rankings. The title and h1 tags are keyword targeted, have internal links in place to promote your most important content, and a meta disk to increase click-through rates from search engine results pages (SERPs). Make sure the description and schema are in place.
5. Address current website issues and plan for future optimization
Once you’ve gained actionable insights from website health checks, address any issues found and establish appropriate processes to keep your team on track with a strong SEO plan. You might even consider adding his dedicated SEO tools to your MarTech stack this year for the efficiency of automating your SEO. Having SEO automation in place can save your internal team a lot of time and prevent website updates that could otherwise negatively impact search results in the first place.
For technical SEO issues such as site speed, Javascript rendering issues, broken links, site architecture improvements, etc., you should work with web development. (opens in new tab) team to fix these errors. SEO is an ever-evolving field and your team needs to keep up with the latest developments in search engine technology. Make sure your web development team is informed of the health check results and get them involved in his new SEO process you want to implement. A seamless relationship between your SEO team, your marketing department, and your developers is important if you want to address SEO issues quickly (and help prevent future SEO issues for him) .
Benefits of Website Health Check
Website health and organic search efforts are not just about optimizing specific sales channels. By conducting an in-depth website health and his SEO audit, we gain key insights into customer behavior, competitors, and the larger industry trends and developments.
A solid understanding of the health of your website and its performance within the wider search landscape will give you a better understanding of what your consumers want and the pain points your business can solve for them. and helps track competitive threats. Regularly scheduled website health checks help you react quickly to changes in search engine rankings and website performance. and helps avoid potential loss of awareness and conversions.
Today SEO is more than just keywords. Digital marketers and business leaders can assess the overall health of their website in order to identify and optimize the specific areas that will have the greatest impact in terms of both search visibility and revenue-driving opportunities. must be understood as a whole.
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