2020 has arrived, and the desire to make positive changes in order to better your site has come with it! With a new digital decade upon us, it’s time to stop and think about how you can elevate your site and your business. Here are a few site “resolutions” to consider for the upcoming year.
1. Reflect on your website and marketing communication strategy
One of the most important steps for a new year’s resolution is reflecting – the internal process of understanding your shortcomings and creating an action plan to overcome them. And it’s no different from your site! Your site is your brand, and your brand is a reflection of you. Dedicating time to reflection helps you to discover where to improve.
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In other words – you need to embrace site awareness. And a good place to start is with a content audit of everything onsite and offsite.
2. Citations
Are your local SEO efforts enough to get you noticed? Citations play a key role in the labyrinth that is getting your site to the top positions in Google search. In fact, the average number of citations for a local business that is in the top 10 spots for Google is 81 (1). It is important to make sure that your citations and listings are up to date. This will also help you see if there are other places/sites that you should be placing these citations and listings. Your local structured citations can be listed via platforms like Google My Business, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. Unstructured citations are less common but still valuable and can be found in blog posts, forum threads, press mentions, etc. (2). These audits will help you see what your SEO was like the previous year and will help you set goals for your SEO moving forward!
3. Content. Content. Content!
When your audience comes to your site they are looking for one thing, relevant content, and they do not want to have to struggle to find it! This means that the content on your site needs to be clear, concise and convey a message that is contextually relevant. Your audience should be able to find the information that they are looking for fast and efficiently (3). This is essential in keeping people engaged and also in building SEO. Search engines, like Google, value high-quality content and will display those sites whose content they believe will be more valuable to searchers. So, when reviewing your content, it’s important to consider how useful, informative, valuable, credible and engaging it would be considered to users (3).
4. Make Your Site ‘Lean’
Does your site load slowly? Are there a bajillion images? Is it filled with other UI or content bloat? If it is, it sounds like your website needs a diet! Having a ‘lean’ site isn’t just good web health. It’s a business requirement. Lean sites simplify the front end framework in order to increase speed, make navigation more efficient, and get the right content in front of your audience (4). Having a faster site not only is important in your SEO rankings, it is also proven to lead to more conversions. Intuit is a good case study for this.
Intuit improved its platform performance, reducing page load time from 15 seconds to 2 seconds in the process. This profoundly increased conversions. And they broke down just how significant it was by identifying page load segments and compared them against buckets of conversion improvements.
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For pageloads of 7-15 seconds, a 3% increase in conversions occurred for each second removed from load time
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For pageloads of 5-7 seconds, a 2% increase in conversions occurred for each second removed from load time
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For pageloads of 2-5 seconds, a 1% increase in conversions occurred for each second removed from load time
Your audience almost requires your site to be fast as a prerequisite to qualifying business. Nearly half of users (47%) expect a site to load within two seconds or less (5). These numbers are a critical reminder of how a ‘lean’ site can build your business’s overall performance muscle. Lean means green!
5. Improve User Experience (UX)
Another crucial resolution for your site in 2020 should be renewed focus on user experience. This follows from making your site lean. A lean site is a performant site, which provides a better user experience. But it’s more than just fast load times. You need to know your audience, and tailor the value proposition of your site accordingly! A site’s behavior is an extension of its value proposition.
You need to understand what your audience is looking for, what they value, and their limitations as well as their capabilities (6). Make sure it is easy for your audience to find what they are looking for. One tip is to put all relevant information in one place rather than splitting the difference. And don’t ignore navigation! You want (nay, NEED) your site to be easily navigable so that your audience can quickly and efficiently find their desired information. User Experience is a constantly refined process. You should often audit your site for its usefulness, usability, desirability, discoverability, accessibility and above all its credibility (6). Enhancing these elements of your site design could show major results in the new year!
With every new year comes a new opportunity to find areas in our personal and professional lives to improve and excel in. Your website is an integral part of your business and as such, it should be continually improved upon as well. Want better business vision in 2020? Take your site to the next level and contact us at 3PRIME to help you achieve your New Year’s Resolutions!
Sources:
- https://www.brightlocal.com/research/seo-citations-study/
- https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/what-is-a-local-citation/
- https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-101/content-important-seo/#close
- https://gomakethings.com/the-lean-web/
- https://moz.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-conversion-rates-with-a-faster-website
- https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/user-experience.html