When was the the last time you saw a doctor and went for an annual physical? A lot can happen in a year. Not only is a checkup important to your ongoing health, going for a physical creates a health baseline that is important for your overall wellness.
The same logic applies to the health of your website. When was the last time you had a search engine specialist conduct an SEO Audit on your website? At Amplify, we believe that every visit to your website is an opportunity to convert. Converting prospects to consumers should be the goal. It just so happens SEO is one of the best ways to promote your company, build brand awareness, and sell your products or services.
The goal of our Search Engine Optimization Strategy is to increase online traffic, retain visitors and establish your company as a topical authority in your industry. If you are currently investing in advertising, regardless if it is physical ads like billboard ads, or digital advertising on social media, search engines or mobile using programmatic, it’s absolutely critical that your website is performing at its best. Otherwise you are wasting valuable ad spend dollars and losing the opportunity to convert visitors into dollars.
Search engines are constantly evolving, using new ways to enhance their results forcing them to change their algorithms. Overtime, this makes the older methods obsolete—and in some cases they could be hurting your rankings. Replacing outdated strategies that conform to best practices in key to improving your search engine rankings. Having spent the better part of ten years building websites for our clients, we have seen a plethora of bad practices that need to be avoided.
Face it, some web developers are just lazy. The over use of plugins adds overhead to your website’s performance and often negatively impacts the speed of your site. The old saying, “speed kills” is applicable to the user experience. If your website’s images aren’t optimized for speed, combined with needless plugins and unwanted CSS and JavaScript, it can dramatically put a strain on your server, taxing the performance and negatively impacting your website’s ranking. Today’s consumers have the attention span of a fruit fly. If your website takes unwanted seconds for your product page to load, your abandonment rate will go up, and the opportunity to convert will be lost.
Using tags throughout your website is a great practice but there is a right way and a wrong way to tag. Consider image tags for example. Alt Tags for images are an opportunity to further optimize your Google ranking. Applying Alt Tags with a short sentence that contains a keyword is an easy best practice to adapt. Make sure the keywords match the page content and use a dynamic alt tag on all images, if possible.
Page Titles and Meta Descriptions are often some of the easiest things to include when building a website. But without a proper strategy or discipline to adhere it, the opportunity may be lost. Page Titles are used by Google to index your website. It is also what shows up on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). We suggest adding some descriptive keywords to the page titles and make them unique for each page of the website. They should also be limited to 50-60 characters and under 600 pixels. Meta Descriptions are also equally importantly. For desktop browsers, they should be 158 characters in length and under 920 pixels. For mobile browsers stick to 120 characters and be under 680 pixels. It is important that Meta Descriptions have dynamic descriptions for each page of the website.
I am often asked what is the best advice you give someone concerned about the SEO of their website. My answer is always Content, Content, Content. Creating content is a necessary evil. It not only helps with keyword usage but it establishes your brand as a topical authority. But be forewarned, creating a healthy blog requires a lot of thought, time, and energy. Having a content strategy should include a wide range of topics that your audience may be interested in. Most content management systems have the ability to schedule blogs in advance of their publications allowing a fire and forget feature. In addition to publishing articles on your website, don’t discount the need to publish material on other high domain websites that can be leveraged to create robust backlinks driving traffic to your website.
The bottom line is your website is your lifeline. You can have the most beautiful website ever designed, but if no one can find it, what’s the point? Conversely, you can have the most creative and effective programmatic ad campaign ever created, but if that prospective customer is directed to your website and your eCommerce isn’t optimized for mobile, speed and user experience, then what’s the point?
Amplify believes in a more human approach to advertising. Let us demonstrate how you can reduce wasted ad spend and time to conversion by implementing an omni-channel strategy that amplifies your SEO, Paid Search, Content and Programmatic strategies. If you would like to learn more about shifting your marketing strategies to grow your marketshare and bottom line, let’s have a conversation.
