How To Optimize Your Website
As important as it is to get people to land on your website, it’s just as important to keep people on your website. And in order to do that we need to optimize your website!
Here is a list from Hubspot of what you need to do to optimize your website.
- Decrease load time
- Optimize your navigation
- Add internal links
- Improve the readability of your posts
- Add images and videos
- Optimize for all devices
- Use exit intent pop-ups
Each of these strategies are designed to help keep your visitors on your website. The longer they spend on your site it shows Google that your website shares good information.
Google’s goal is to ensure people are being connected with the right content. If you are providing information that your ideal client is searching for, Google wants your client to see it. And if someone lands on your site but leaves quickly it shows Search Engines that your content didn’t connect.
Let’s deep dive into this list to learn how you can optimize your website.
Decrease load time
First of all, what does this mean? Decreasing load time means making your website load faster.
These days we have short attention spans and we do not like to wait! So if your website is taking a long time to load, my guess is, your visitor won’t stick around very long.
This is exactly why we need to decrease your load tim!
You can do this by resizing your images so they aren’t too large and don’t take forever to load. You want your photo file size to be 500kb or less.
Optimize your navigation
The links in your top navigation are going to be some of the first ones your visitors are going to see. You want to make sure you have clear and direct titles.
Not only is this going to optimize your website, it’s going to make it super easy for your visitors to find the information they are looking for.
The easier your website is to navigate the higher chance you have of keeping people on your website longer!
Add internal links
Adding internal links means leading visitors to another page within your website either through linking text or adding a button. As long as your visitor is staying on your website it doesn’t matter which page they are on.
And if you do need to add external links (like I did to the hubspot blog post) make sure you have it open in a separate window – you don’t want to guide anyone off of your website.
Improve the readability of your posts
These days we like to skim what we are reading instead of taking in every. single. word.
You want to break up your text by using different headers, bolding or italicizing different points. You can also break it up by inserting links and buttons so you can guide your visitor to a call to action throughout your page.
This leads us to the next point.
Add images and videos
Break up text throughout your site by adding photos and videos. This will optimize your website by increasing time spent on your site!
Optimize for all devices
People visit websites off of their desktop computers, laptops, phones, ipads – everywhere! You want to make sure that the website looks good on all of these devices.
This is one of the reasons I love Showit! You can literally design your mobile layout completely independently of the desktop version. It’s so important to optimize your website for all devices!
Use exit intent pop-ups
You may be thinking, what is an exit intent pop up?
This is a strategically placed pop up that is activated when someone is about to leave your website. So when they go to click the “x” to leave, a pop up will come onto their screen to entice the visitor to stay. You can try and redirect to different blog posts or this would actually be a great time to promote an opt-in to build your email list.
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