Do you have a website but cannot generate much traffic for it? Did you start a blog a year ago and wonder why nobody is reading your articles? Are you currently struggling to establish a known online presence for your brand?
If your answer to one or more of the questions above is ‘Yes’, you have come to the right place. If you are facing any of these problems, you need to learn a little about website optimization.
What is Website Optimization?
Website optimization is improving your website’s performance to attract and keep visitors to it by using tools and strategies that enhance its overall appeal.
Web optimization is often a neglected area for businesses that are new in creating an online presence for their brand. They usually think that as long as they have built a website and launched it, it should attract visitors and customers to it automatically, with minimal or zero effort on their part. This is far from the truth. Unless you are a celebrity and already have a fan following of millions of people, you would need to put in the effort, and perhaps a small amount of money, to optimize the website and get people to visit it.
Why is Website Optimization Important?
Web optimization is important because it makes the overall experience of your site’s visitors better, which entices them to spend more time browsing through your web pages, and visit the site again at a later time. This increases your chances of making sales for your business by increasing your website’s conversion rate.
Every person who visits your site has a purpose for it. Website optimization makes it easier for the person to achieve that purpose or accomplish the task. If your site visitors see that you have put in zero effort into its optimization, you’ll turn them off on their first visit and never choose to come back again. This means you will face a high bounce rate, and won’t be able to grow your business through your website. It is normally better and easier to keep your existing visitors than putting in the effort to gain new visitors. Therefore, it is best if you work on website optimization from the very first day of launching your site.
5 Effective Strategies for Website Optimization
Here are 5 different strategies that you can adopt for web optimization and the success of your website. These are easy to apply, especially if you use the tool that we’ll be mentioning ahead.
1. Search Engine Optimization
This is by far the most important form of website optimization that you’ll need to work on. For your website to get any traction, it needs to be discoverable by internet users on search engines. Google is the largest and most popular search engine. Hence, if your website is not optimized for Google bots to detect it and place it high among search results, you won’t get any discoverability or reach for whatever content you put out on your site.
Search engine optimization is of two types: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Let’s talk about these one by one.
・On-Site SEO
These are the optimization actions that you take on your web pages that enhance their search rankings. It’s sometimes referred to as on-page SEO. Examples of this are as follows.
- Writing a descriptive title for your site
- Adding meta descriptions to all web pages
- Including keywords in the headings
- Producing good quality website content
- Integrating your website with your social media pages
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
・Off-Site SEO
These are all those website optimization actions that you take as part of your marketing strategy to promote your website all across the World Wide Web. These include the following.
- Building quality backlinks for your website by making guest posts on other blogs and linking your website to them
- Promoting your website on social media platforms
- Networking and telling about your website to friends, peers, and colleagues
- Developing an online community that promotes your brand and website
- Building up an email list and sending newsletters to all subscribers to keep them reminded about your website.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
2. Content Optimization
Content optimization is actually part of your on-site SEO. It involves creating content for your site in a way that enhances its visibility in search results. This means if someone searches for your brand, they should be able to find your website on the first page of the site search results. This is done by using your keywords the maximum number of times. You should use the core keywords for which you want to optimize your site in all the headings, on all web pages, in captions for images, and repeated in any articles or paragraphs you post.
You can also optimize content by using a combination of content formats, such as text, images, illustrations, graphics and videos. Using explainer videos is good for website optimization. People have a longer attention span for watching videos than for reading text. When you embed videos into your website content, your site visitors will end up spending more time browsing through your site as they watch any videos they come across on your web pages. Videos can explain concepts and services in more effective ways than mere text or photos. With the availability of so many types of video editing software, it is easy to create interesting videos to include in your website content. You can also outsource video-making tasks to either freelancers who are good at this skill or to video-making firms.
3. Conversion Rate Optimization
This refers to the efforts you make to increase the percentage of your site visitors who perform a desired action on the site. It could mean one or more of the following.
- Generating more leads in the form of email subscriptions
- Getting more downloads of a free digital product
- Getting more likes and followers for your social media pages that are integrated with your website
- Making more sales in your online store
If you have a high conversion rate, it means you are quite successful in your website optimization. This is because a high conversion rate reflects that people are not only visiting your website, but are finding it interesting and appealing enough to take actions on it that are favorable for your business.
4. Speed Optimization
Do you think speeding up your site is not important? Imagine a user who is interested in buying a product from your e-commerce site has to wait for 3 seconds for the product photos to load. Do you think the user would wait for the page to load, or bounce off to a competitor’s site and make his purchase from there? Most likely, the user would leave your website and make the purchase from elsewhere.
Decreasing the loading time of your web pages is a crucial part of website optimization. If your web pages take a few extra moments to load, it can have a drastically negative impact on your site’s ability to engage its visitors or generate sales.
5. Mobile Optimization
In the mobile-first age, your website should be mobile-friendly. People browse websites more from their mobile phones than from desktops these days. As part of your web optimization strategies, you need to make sure that you have a responsive web design that opens smoothly in its mobile version. Failing to optimize your mobile website can reduce the traffic you can attract to the site.
How Strikingly Helps in Website Optimization
If you build a website in Strikingly, it will be easy for you to implement all the website optimization strategies discussed above. Here are a few ways in which Strikingly helps you in your web optimization efforts.
1. Key in Your Site Description
You can enter your site description into the box in the Settings section of your Strikingly editor. Click ‘Settings’ and ‘Basic Info’, and you’ll get to the page shown in the screenshot below.
Image taken from Strikingly
You can also add a meta description and tags to each of your web pages by clicking on ‘Manage’ and then on ‘Pages’ from your Strikingly editor. This is helpful if you have a multi-page website. It enhances the discoverability of your site’s pages by Google bots. This is part of your website’s on-site SEO.
2. Embed Videos From Third-Party Websites
In Strikingly, you can easily embed videos into your web pages by first uploading them on third-party websites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, and then inserting their links from the Strikingly editor. As mentioned above, adding videos to your web content contributes to your website optimization.
To add a video to your Strikingly website, follow these simple steps.
- Click on ‘Add New Section’ from your Strikingly editor
- Click on ‘Image & Media’ and select ‘Gallery’.
- Hover on top of the section that appears, and click on ‘Add Videos’.
- Paste the link of your video into the small pop-up that opens and click ‘Save’.
Image taken from Strikingly
Image taken from Strikingly
3. Add Your Strikingly Website to Google Analytics
This is super easy and will enhance your website optimization. Once you have your Google Analytics tracking ID, you can enter it into your Strikingly site. From your Strikingly editor, go to Settings > Show Advanced > Services. Key in the ID into the Google Analytics Tracker field.
Image taken from Strikingly
These are how Strikingly helps in website optimization. Our goal at Strikingly is to help all our users prosper in their businesses by providing straightforward solutions for building and running their websites. We often promote our users’ websites in the Strikingly blog as well, in order to give them a further boost in their search rankings.
If you are interested in developing a website and optimizing it in Strikingly, you can sign up for a free Strikingly account to get started today. It is never late to build a strong and meaningful online presence for your business. We are here to support you in any way we can. After all, it is our business to make sure your website runs smoothly.
