Almost a decade ago, a beautiful site with great functionality was just enough for having a profitable business and meaningful online presence.
The search optimization was not required because this technology was still in its infancy and no one strongly cared about improving the visibility of the site in the search results.
Today, however, everything has changed and search engine optimization (SEO) and User Experience design (UX) are at the forefront of online marketing.
SEO is now needed to improve the visibility of your online business in search engines while UX is required to enhance the user satisfaction through improvement of usability and accessibility of the website. Without them, no business site can survive among the competitors that spend thousands of dollars on making their businesses appear on top.
While paying for SEO and UX knowledge is a good strategy, there are lots of things you can do before turning to online marketing agencies and SEO wizards.
To help you with the essential SEO and UX, we have prepared a list of tips that will help to make your website friendlier to Google and improve your visibility among others.
These tips do not require in-depth knowledge but nevertheless are critical to ensuring that your online marketing strategy is moving in the right direction.
See Also: 9 Proven UX Tips To Skyrocket Website Conversions
1. Large Pop-Up Windows
Let's kick off with the tip that will help you to avoid one of the most terrible mistakes in online marketing, large annoying pop-ups that block the users from a proper view of the website until they click on them or close the tab in their browser.
The experienced marketers say that these windows should leave a decent amount of the screen space and do not cover the content the users are looking for.
Otherwise, the quality of the user experience on your website will be quite poor because they will perceive the site as just another advertising resource.
2. Keywords
This is the essential SEO requirement that helps Google and other search engines to discover your site. They are required to be very specific to target a particular audience, area, and product.
Before coming up with a list of keywords for your site, consider these aspects to ensure that your keywords are effective.
For example, if you own a pizzeria, you can use the product to combine with the city and area, such as "pizza in San Francisco" or "pizza in the Bay Area". When you are done, input the results into a keywords research tool, such as Wordtracker or Google Adwords to see if they are good to go.
3. Right Keywords Placement
Just having the keywords approved by Adwords does not mean that your site will be found and placed at the top of the search results.
According to Mark Thompson, marketing strategist from Australian writing service Aussiessay , it is critical to place them in the proper position on the pages.
He identifies alt text, media descriptions, folder names, title tags, H1, H2, and H3 tags as the perfect positions for keywords because they are indexed by the search engine.
4. Useful Site Search
Have you ever visited the websites that had useless search functions that found nothing? It's annoying and frustrating that the developers did not put an extra effort into providing the users with a decent search system that helps to find what we are looking for.
It is very important for UX to have a useful site search because it improves the satisfaction with the service. In addition, the search might include the auto completion and intelligent suggestion functions to enhance the user experience even more.
5. Loading Time
This is the UX aspect that obtained a lot of attention in the recent years because of the rise of mobile Internet. The tablets and smartphones have changed the way we surf the net because they needed "lighter" version and faster loading times.
The same rule shortly began to apply to desktop versions as well, and it makes a perfect sense because who wants to sit and wait for the site to load? To achieve faster loading times, there are a number of tips that can be used.
For example, the developers may optimize the images to decrease the amount of transferred data to the visitor and minify the code. One of the latest technologies in this area is Accelerated Mobile Pages by Google.
6. Integration With Social Media Platforms
Marketers and promotion specialists like social media for one good reason: it brings them closer to potential customers.
The Google and social media go hand in hand as well because the latter may help to build a relationship with the visitors and interact with them in a way that allows raising the awareness about your business.
That's why your company should have representation on the most popular platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram to have a place to redirect the users from the website.
The redirection should be done through the special social media plug-ins that show that your company is there to engage in online interaction whenever needed.
Need more? Read this Why You Should Integrate Social Media into Web Design article from MassPlanner.
See Also: 6 Effective Content Distribution Ideas to Increase Social Media Traffic
7. Upfront Registration
Imagine the following situation: you are looking for an app and you found it on this site but it requires you to register there before you can download it.
The obvious reaction is frustration because you have to spend additional time to type your name, email address, and other information that will get you the app.
Being forced to a mandatory registration therefore is not a good thing because it reduces the quality of user experience and just annoys the visitors. A better way to go in this situation is to propose the visitor to continue downloading as a guest.
Need help to decide when it's right to require an account? Here is a WooCommerce article on when to demand registration to help you.
8. Google-Friendly Images
This tip falls into UX category because it increases the loading speed by optimizing a specific content type, images. Their size needs to be reduced to a range between 30 and 100 KB in order to provide a decent loading even on slow Internet connections.
Also, it is recommended to use the resolution of 72 dpi because of the same reason. These properties of the images allow them to maintain good viewing qualities and contribute to faster loading speeds.
See Also: 10+ Best WordPress Plugins to Optimize Images - Boost Your Website Speed
Conclusion
Making the site SEO and user-friendly is a critical requirement in modern online marketing. The tips described in this article will greatly enhance your chances to get closer to the top Google results because they optimize essential aspects of the site, such as images, text, and social media.
We are not claiming that they will place your site on the top spot in the search result overnight (because nothing will), but they provide you with a great advantage over others: the image of a really trusted and reliable website that provides decent online presence and satisfying user experience.
What's more important than good feedback from the visitors that praised your service and recommended it to others, right? By following these tips, you will get much closer to this goal.