Each year brings new web trends and new areas to focus on in terms of website optimization. It’s a good idea to review your web presence each year and look for areas to improve to put yourself ahead of your competition.
Here are a few things to consider in 2017 if you’re looking to tighten up your web presence and move your business forward in the online arena.
Optimizing for Large to Small Screens
At this point, many websites are seeing a good split in desktop vs. mobile traffic. Modern websites must support both desktop/laptop users as well as mobile users. The result, in terms of web design, is usually one layout style for desktop/laptop users, one for tablet users and one for mobile phone users.
But what about the big screen users? We should also start to think about designing for big screens as well. We might want to add layout options to our web designs for those people who are using a high-resolution widescreen monitors to view your website. There is sometimes a lot of extra screen space to play around with in these instances.
If you already have a website that is fairly well optimized for typical desktop screens and mobile, you might want to take a step back and say, “What can we do for the big screen users?”
Conversion Optimization Opportunities
Your conversion rate is the percentage of users who visited your website and turned into leads or paying customers.
If you sell a product or get leads through your website, can you say exactly what your conversion rate is? If not, you will want to get to that point first. You can use pretty much any website analytics system to track conversions, but Google Analytics is popular and works well.
Once you are tracking conversions, and you know just how many people you’re converting to leads and customers, you will want to try to improve this conversion rate to get the most return on investment from your website.
To improve your conversion rate, you will likely need to venture into the world of split testing. Split testing allows you to put two different versions of a page head to head and see which performs better. Let’s say you have a contact form on your website that convinces 1% of your website visitors to fill it out. You want to improve that to 2%. With split testing, you can create a new version of your contact form, with a different look. Of the people who visit your website, 50% will see the new contact form, and the other 50% will see the old contact form. You can measure how many people fill out each form to see which performs better. If one form performs better than the other, you have a winner that should be used moving forward.
This process can be repeated over and over again to constantly improve the performance of various conversion points on your website. If you focus on split testing some key conversion points on your website, by the end of the year you will increase the amount of ROI you are getting from your website.
Local Search Engine Optimization
There are some standards that can be followed for local SEO at this point to help put yourself ahead of the pack, especially if your competition doesn’t put much focus in these areas.
1. Online Listings
Claim your online listings! These listings already exist, and if you do not claim them you are missing out on opportunities. Google My Business is the big one. Make sure you claim your Google business listing and optimize it by entering more detailed company info and photos. Bing Places for Business is also a good listing to claim right away. Beyond that, make sure your business name, address and phone number is consistent across all of the major directories online.
By the end of the year, you should have fully optimized Google and Bing business listings as well as consistent NAP (Name/Address/Phone) citations across all major online directories.
2. Meta Titles and Descriptions
It’s always a good idea to review all of your key page Meta titles and descriptions. You want your pages to stand out in the search results, and the titles and descriptions are the sales pitch to get users to click from the search results to your website.
To do this, ask yourself the following questions: When people see your pages listed in the search results, does the title and description help them realize they’ve found what they are looking for? And does it encourage them to click through?
Look for opportunities to optimize the use of your target keywords and make things more friendly to humans. Don’t write everything just for search engine bots.
3. Local Structured Data Markup
This gets a little more technical, so don’t be afraid to ask your web developer about it.
Structured data markup is when you mark up certain data within your website to help search engines more easily learn what your business does. Using structured data is a good thing, and search engines want to you use it because it helps them figure out the specifics of your business. The search engines might even present your information in a more useful way to search users if you use structured data on your website. Schema is a good way to handle this, and the standards can be found at schema.org.
There is evidence that websites that use structured data will have more rich information along with their search listings, which can help with click-through rates. This is worth experimenting with if you’re not doing it. And if your competitors are doing it, you better be doing it too.
4. Online Reviews
If you have a Google My Business page or a Facebook page for your business, you should be encouraging your best customers to leave reviews.
Online reviews hold weight when building trust with potential customers and leads. According to the Local Customer Review Survey for 2016 by BrightLocal, 7 out of 10 customers will leave a review online if you ask them to. The same survey found 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
With those types of stats in play, you better start asking your customers to leave reviews. What would your Google and Facebook business pages look like by the end of the year if you started asking your customers for reviews?
Web Design Trends
This year would be a good year to start adopting the usage of multimedia and animation on your website – if you haven’t already.
Now, when I say multimedia and animation, I don’t mean doing animation just for the sake of animation. Animation and multimedia without purpose will just drag your website experience down. That is bad usage of multimedia. Good usage of multimedia will further reinforce your story. This is what we want to do – tell a better story.
Look at opportunities on your website to reinforce your message with the use of video and animation. If you have any pages that are a lot of text and not much else – consider what you can do to tell the same story with a video. Or consider how you could use some animations along with the text to tell your story in a more visual manner.
The Rest of the The Year
We’re already one-fourth of the way through 2017. What have you been doing to optimize your web presence? If you haven’t been doing anything, we would be more than happy to sit down and review your situation with you. Give us a call at 701-478-1111 and ask to speak with a Marketing Advisor or visit absolutemg.com/contact.