Picture this: You’ve worked really hard to secure one of Google’s top three search rankings, improved your website’s performance, and have begun to witness increased traffic, conversions, and revenue.
But unfortunately, that didn’t last long! After some time, the bounce rate of your website started increasing, broken links came knocking on your door, and organic traffic and the lead count started dwindling.
While there could be multiple reasons behind this, not maintaining your website’s health is one of them.
In much the same way that your doctor recommends a regular checkup for your health, your website also needs regular maintenance to ensure that everything is working as intended.
Healthy websites go beyond just looking good.
It is therefore essential to optimize your website on an ongoing basis.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss in detail the top technical SEO, PPC, and social tips to help you maintain your website’s health.
Website Health Check-Up: Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to enhancing the technical aspects of your website and ensuring it meets the technical requirements of modern search engines.
This leads to increased organic traffic on your website.
Let’s look at the 4 pillars of Technical SEO.
1. Discoverability
The term “discoverability” means how many people can discover or find out your web page. And the first step to ensuring your target audience can find out your content is to make your webpage technically discoverable. Thus, it’s important to set your website to allow indexing.
This will ensure your website is indexable and can be easily crawled by search engine crawlers.
2. Performance
The speed of your website is one of the many ranking factors that Google takes seriously.
Remember, visitors judge the credibility of your business by their experience on your website. Websites that load quickly not only improve the user experience but also improve your SERP results.
So, reduce the overall load time of your web pages. It should be less than 2 seconds.
3. Accessibility
Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites accessible to all users, including those with disabilities, impairments, and limitations.
So, optimize your website as per the accessibility principles to make the content easily accessible to all users and improve your chances of getting ranked higher on SERPs.
4. Security
Security is extremely crucial to maintaining your customers’ trust and loyalty.
When there’s a major breach in the security of your site’s connection, you can miss out on potential business.
That’s why it is recommended to install a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate on your website. It is an affordable security measure that creates a secure connection between a web server and a browser.
SSL-enabled websites have URLs that start with ‘https://’ instead of ‘http://’.
Google states that SERPs favor https-secured websites over those that are not.
Website Health Check Up: Social Tips
1. Integrate Social Media into Your Website
Integrating social media into your website provides your visitors with more ways to interact and engage with your brand.
It also:
[a.] Enhances your social and website engagement
[b.] Facilitates accurate data collection and analytics
[c.] Increases brand awareness, and
[d.] Simplifies KPI tracking
Social media integration, therefore, is important as it not only adds social proof to your website but also ensures the credibility of your site.
2. Focus on Keywords
For SEO, keywords matter the most.
But how do you know what keywords to use? Well, it starts with accurate data collection.
The goal is to find keywords that revolve around what your target audience is looking for.
You can also target keywords that your competitors are using to narrow down the list.
However, make sure you give preference to the quality of keywords over the number of keywords.
3. Grow your Follower Base
Active follower count has multiple benefits to offer.
Starting with greater visibility and engagement, it further leads to more avenues for revenue growth.
However, remember that retaining old followers is just as important as gaining new ones. This is because the probability of making a sale to your existing customer is 60-70%.
In order to grow your follower base, you need to provide your customers value at every phase of their buyer journey, and don’t overlook customer feedback. And you’ll see the difference in profitability, customer loyalty, and happiness.
4. Encourage External Inbound Links
Even though inbound links provide the greatest SEO benefit, they are hard to obtain.
A good way to build external inbound links is to check whether the page linking to you is a PageRank powerhouse. That’s because links from authoritative pages helps improve authority (also known as PageRank) of your site.
Additionally, make sure you only add links that are relevant to your website content. Irrelevant links don’t add any value to your website.
Remember the more high-quality external links you add to your website, the better chances you have of improving your ranking on SERPs.
5. Optimize Your Posts for Better Reach
When you optimize your posts, you’re making your website more visible to people who are using search engines to find your product and services.
For your post to expand its reach, it needs a strong anchor. Whether an infographic, video, case study link, article or infographic, it should be well-designed and informative, further leading to a high engagement rate.
Here are 3 powerful ways you can do that:
[a.] Find your optimal posting times
[b.] Repurpose evergreen content
[c.] Go live and be authentic
6. Share Quality Content
When high-quality content is distributed over social media, it has the greatest impact.
The relationship between social media marketing and content marketing goes hand in hand, as marketers often say.
Ultimately, content marketing is about establishing a connection between the brand and an audience. And not just any connection, but one where audiences feel sympathy and empathy for the brand.
7. Micro-Blogging
Microblogging makes it easier to communicate with your audiences quickly.
In contrast to long, boring texts, a microblog allows customers to get to know you quickly and engage with your brand.
Not only does microblogging helps you reach a lot of people at once, but it also improves your brand reputation.
8. Create Social Content Worthy of Backlinks
Your social media posts can go viral if they are not confined to only social networks.
Use them in articles, blog posts, eBooks, and even in engaging videos and presentations to garner more engagement. The ultimate goal is to market it so that it can reach as many users as possible and drive traffic to your business.
Website Health Check-Up: PPC Tips:
1. Tight Theming:
Small, tight ad groups that contain few keywords and are closely related to each other are the key to getting double-digit click-through rates.
Having tight ad groups will result in more clicks, a better quality score, and a lower bid position.
The best rule of thumb is to use no more than 20 keywords per ad group. There are times when you can use a few more keywords, but exceeding a 20-keyword limit is a sign that your ad copy doesn’t match the keyword searched as closely as it could.
2. Utilize Search Query Reports to Comprehend Actual Search Behavior
Search queries are an important piece of digital marketing that show the keywords you’re bidding on and the “actual queries” that are driving traffic to your site.
Having this information at hand makes it easy to determine the actual search behavior of your targeted audience.
If you aren’t sure whether to add search queries that don’t have any conversions as negatives, you can check the bounce rate of the landing pages. A high bounce rate indicates that users are not engaging with the landing page.
3. Employ Negative Keywords to Fine Tune Targeting
PPC marketing relies heavily on keywords. In fact, the success of your PPC campaign is determined by the relevancy of your keywords.
As data accumulates and search behavior changes, it’s important to refine your keywords list and add more negative keywords to your campaigns/ad groups. Negative keywords allow you to exclude irrelevant keywords from your campaigns and help you focus on only the keywords that matter to your audience.
You can also use the search terms report to improve your ad group structure even further by introducing new phrases to focus on search terms that are high in volume.
4. Use Ad Extensions
A total of 11 ad extensions are available in AdWords. You can use this feature to not only make your ads more engaging but also give your ad greater visibility on the search results page.
Simply put, it tends to add additional information to your ad and give users more interactive ways of reaching you.
5. Landing Page Optimization
Make your landing pages more effective by improving these elements:
[a.] Make a clear offer
[b.] Keep your CTA buttons specific
[c.] Add contact information to make it easier to reach you
[d.] Add testimonials to help convert undecided users
This facilitates increased conversions, better organic search rankings, higher ROI, and most importantly, enhanced brand awareness and reputation.
Wrapping Up
And that is a wrap on impeccable technical SEO, PPC, and social tips to help you improve your website’s health to increase engagement and conversions.
Need a helping hand to regularly maintain your website that’ll get you on top of Google search ranks?