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When we talk about SEO strategies publishers are limit themselves to keywords, and that’s where they spend all their time. Them, after posting, they see that the article doesn’t rank on google, and their site gets zero new traffic.
Don’t get us wrong, keywords are one of the best SEO strategies, but if you only use keywords most likely you will get no results! So you ask, “how can I improve my site SEO?” First, we need to take a look at your website usability.
Website usability can be divided into 5 components:
Effectiveness: Are users able to order the products they want, find the information they need or get personalized customer service?
Efficiency: is not only finding what they need but is also how fast can they find what they need. If the user can’t find what we need quickly, he will probably navigate away from your website, witch besides ruining your site’s usability will ruin also your SEO.
Learnability: The main point here is keeping your website simple. If users spend too much time learning how your site works, probably the will leave. But even if the user doesn’t leave, the time that he spent learning how your site works, is the time that he won’t spend consuming your content.
Memorability: Can users remember your website? If they can you probably will rank pretty good on google, mainly because google values repeated traffic highly, when it comes to ranking.
Error prevention: Some errors completely ruin your website usability. So watch for invalid links! e.g. “page not found”, a link that says one thing but displays something else, or a broken link that is no longer valid.
If you want your SEO to be effective, errors are something you can not afford to make.
How can a good website usability improve your SEO ranking?
Google favours friendly websites that are not only rich in keywords but also keep the users engaged.
If users stay on your website for longer, view more pages and revisit your website, you are perceived by Google as a friendly website. Being a friendly website not only shows that you have good website usability but also makes you improve your SEO ranking. Now that you understand how important website usability is, it’s time to give you some tips on how to improve your SEO ranking!
1. Use Header Tags
Just text most obviously will scare users away from your website, that’s why breaking up your content is essential. A good breakage of your content with header tags makes the reading process much easier and interesting for your users. Google also values more keywords on header tags, so putting important terms on there will only bring you benefits.
The more engaged your readers are, the higher your SEO ranking will be!
2. Mobile optimization
Did you know that around 55% of all searches come from mobile? With that in mind, if your website isn’t optimized for mobile you’re losing a lot of traffic. Since April of 2015 google started lowering the ranking of websites that are not mobile optimized. Mobile optimization is not only important in the B2C market but also in the B2B, around 77% of executives use a mobile device when researching for products that they need.
In an era where the number of users on mobile as surpassed the laptop, if your site isn’t mobile-optimized you are missing out.
3. Have a contact us page
According to google general guidelines, websites with enough contact information, are perceived as more trustworthy and because of that, they have a higher SEO ranking. A good contact us page, besides helping the users, increases the chances of business opportunities and acquiring new leads!
4. Improve your site load speed
A site’s loading speed is something that is highly valued when it comes to SEO ranking. If your site takes a couple of seconds more to load, is enough for users to go away. With more or less no user visiting your website is likely that your SEO ranking will be from second to none.
There are a couple of ways you can improve your site’s loading speed:
- Using a caching plug-in
- Having a clean code
- Optimizing image sizes
- Reducing the number of plug-ins
- Minimizing redirects
5. Be creative within your articles
You don’t need to stick with images and images all the time. We advise you to do the complete opposite. Your content should be rotated with video, text, audio and slideshow, that way you enhance consumer value and increase the chance of a user returning to your website.
By switching your content type you are automatically perceived as a quality site to search engines, which means that you will improve your SEO ranking.
Is also proven that by switching the content is not only your SEO ranking that improves, is your conversion as well. Studies have found that video content, can increase your conversion rate by 4,8%.
When comparing video with text we can see that video help you be more memorable, keep visitors on your website for longer and increase chances of the user taking any action. In general, videos are the preference of users!
6. Outbound links
To provide extra value to the user, you can use outbound links. Linking out of your site, especially to websites with some authority, makes google perceive you as a trustable website and in the process improve your SEO ranking.
7. Longer texts rank better
Researches show that texts with 2000-2500, tend to rank higher on SERPs.
Even though Google won’t value you only because you have more words, the truth is that longer texts can be more helpful, provide more value, contain more keywords, have more inbound links and increase peoples reading time. Normally articles that ranks number 1 to 10 on google have on average 2500 words.
8. Broken links
As mentioned before broken links completely ruin your website usability. The lower your website usability is the lower your SEO ranking will be.
The prevent broken links you can use apps like:
- Screaming Frog
- Google Search Console
- W3C Link Checker
9. Shares on social media
The number of shares that you get on social media can also improve your SEO ranking, so social buttons are the easiest way to do it. By putting a well placed social media button on your website, you increase not only the chance of higher social media shares but also your conversion rate. About 43% of people that shared, liked or commented a product on Facebook ended up buying the product.
Summing up
We want you to avoid some common mistakes that content creators do when trying to fuse SEO ranking with good website usability. These are mistakes like:
- Too many outbound links, which distracts the user from the main article
- Inserting keywords everywhere at the point that ruins the article readability
- Stuffing too many pages on the footer and ending up confusing your audience
Having a high traffic site with bad consumer experience is a no go. At the end of the day if you have a high traffic website but the majority of your customers are unhappy and you have no conversions, what is the point?
