The Step-by-Step Guide to Preparing Your Website for a Winning SEO Campaign

Functionality

If you have a small enough website that you can check manually, go through each tab and feature to check if everything works as it should. As much as possible, go through all the pages and every single clickable buttons of your website. This includes your downloads, forms, and other on-site features like your customer chat services and graphics.

And if your website is way too big to check manually, there are a number of tools that automate the process of checking things like:

1. Functionality on different mobile devices

1. Functionality on different browsers

1. Which pages don’t have content and/or displays 404 errors
2. Site loading speed (you don’t want to bounce traffic off because your site loads too slow)

2. Design

As pointed out by content marketing firm AudienceBloom CEO Jayson DeMers, while it’s possible to effectively optimize an existing website, it’s usually more efficient to build a site from scratch while incorporating the necessary SEO components from the get-go. 

But if you don’t have the time and/or resources to redo your entire site, here are some of the things you need to ensure your site has:

1. User-friendly navigation

Eye-tracking and usability studies have found that website’s’ main navigation menus work best when placed across the top, or vertically on the left side of the page.If you want to be creative with your site, you might want to save it for something else; people are used to certain things, this is one of them.

1. Consistent brand scheme

From the fonts and color schemes, to the presence of your logo – being consistent helps reinforce your brand. From the moment they land on your site, you want to make sure your customers know exactly who they’re interacting with. 

1. Clear, well-structured layout

A good layout leaves no guesswork for what it is you actually do, highlighting your key products/services. It also clearly states the benefits and key selling points of the products, while placing a clear CTA right where your customers can see it.

1. Optimized images

Having good image and graphic quality across all the pages of your website is a big part of how customers perceive your overall design. As pointed out by DeMers, you’ll have to make sure that your images are the minimal size needed to still provide good user experience (between 20-100kb). 

He suggests the standard practice of resizing images to how you want them displayed as opposed to shrinking them in the source code (as this will significantly increase page load times). Not only does slower page loading lead to a worse user experience, it has also been linked to worse organic search rankings.   

3. Engaging content

Apart from having concise content that tells users who you are and what you do; listing contact details; highlighting why you’re better than your competitors; and having detailed descriptions of your products – you’d be better served by having the following:

1. Product demos – blogs or video content explaining exactly how your products/services work
2. Social proof – reviews and testimonials have long been proven to help customers reach a purchasing decision
3. Blogs – blogging has been recognized as a powerful tool that builds a connection between you and your audience while also building thought leadership

It’s important to keep in mind that your website needs to have content that efficiently and intelligently answers questions that customers may have, while also being authentic enough to build trust.

4. Be mobile-friendly

It’s a trend that doesn’t intend to end anytime soon, as more and more people are consuming content, navigating the web, and even shopping with their mobile devices.

As such, all your efforts in terms of functionality, design, and content will be all for naught if your website is not optimized for mobile viewing.

To start this off, visit your website using your mobile device and see how mobile-friendly your website currently is. Again, check the functionality on different mobile browsers as much as possible, especially the important features like your contact form, your buttons for different pages, and other interactive elements of your website.

If you’re lucky enough, you might find your website to be already optimized for mobile devices. But if not, Shopify suggests these two routes you can take: 

1. Redesign your website to make it more responsive

This is the most common route. Technically, a responsive website is a website that can adjust to any device. Fortunately, there are thousands of useful responsive web design tools and resources you can check online.

1. Create a subdomain for your mobile visitors

If redesigning your whole website to make it more responsive is too difficult or virtually impossible, you can try redirecting your mobile visitors to a subdomain made specifically as a mobile website. For example, if your website is called “example.com”, you can create a subdomain “m.example.com”. 

If you have an e-commerce site, it is best to allow users to continue checkout on another device. So say a customer abandoned a cart while mobile browsing, you may want to add the capability of sending them an email asking if they would like to revisit the said cart, from where they left off, and from any other device.

5. Social media integration

As noted by DeMers, while Google doesn’t use social signals from Facebook and Twitter in their ranking algorithm, building a strong social media presence has a slew of benefits for your website, a list that includes:

1. Opportunity to have your content shared around the internet
2. Building awareness, credibility, authority and reach
3. Gaining mentions and links
4. Increasing search engine rankings

Some tips on integrating your website with your social media channels:

1. Have highly visible social media share icons on all of your content
2. Consistently promote content from your website to your social media channels
3. If you have an e-commerce site, enable social sign-in 

6. Keyword research

Researching which words and phrases are being used by your target market to find products and services in your field is an oft overlooked practice that leads to both increased SEO benefits, and better user experience. 

Because you can name your navigation tabs and pages according to how people are searching for things, you are able to help both your site and potential customers. It’s not a complicated practice either, as you can use basic tools such as Google Keyword Planner, which could make a huge difference.  

7. Loading speed

Improving your website loading speed isn’t just one of the landing page tweaks to help your conversion rate optimization (CRO); it is also one of the surefire ways of reducing bounce-rate. Since Google can generate thousands of results in just a second, you can’t expect your visitors to wait for your website to load.

To optimize your pages’ load times, check if you have the following things sorted:

1. Properly sized images

1. Minified CSS and Javascript
2. Leveraged browser caching
3. Enabled compression 

As noted by DeMers, tools like WebPageTest and PageSpeedInsights can help you gauge your site’s loading speed. 

Takeaway

Apart from the above, there are a number of elements within a website to set up that will give you the best opportunities to embark on a successful SEO campaign. But while it may seem like a tedious process, the cost of SEO virtually requires you to take care of the fundamental elements of your website to ensure that it is optimized for conversion. 

SEO campaigns can entail a long process, but with a well-prepped website accompanying an SEO strategy with clearly defined goals and objectives, you’re giving yourself the best shot at winning the algorithm game.