1. Website architecture

Your website architecture needs to be simple and easy-to-use for human visitors as well as search engine crawlers.
The navigation structure of your website plays a key role here. Here are a few tips to improve that:

• The navigation links should be clearly visible and, ideally, on a familiar position, e.g., the top navigation bar.
• The links or buttons should be descriptive. There should no ambiguity for the visitor as to where to link would lead her to.
• Consistency is the key when it comes to the format and presentation of the navigation links.
• Wherever the user is, you should try to create a navigation structure that they can use to reach whichever page in just 3 clicks.

A good website and navigation structure will help you improve bounce rate, engagement rate, the percentage of returning visitors, conversion rate, sales, and search engine rankings. It also helps search engine crawlers to better understand and crawl your website.

2. A mobile-friendly website

It’s no secret now that mobile-friendly website is absolutely essential. Mobile compatibility has only increased in importance after the introduction of the mobile-first index. If your website looks poor on mobile devices and doesn’t offer a fantastic user experience to mobile users, it’s going to directly affect your website’s search engine rankings.
The idea is to create a mobile-friendly website design that is fully responsive and successfully adapts to different mobile devices. In fact, designers now often create a mobile-first design and later creates the desktop version.
When creating a mobile website, make sure that the navigation is clear and the CTAs are visible. A cluttered design works awfully on smaller mobile screens.
In addition, also make sure that the metadata is consistent across mobile and desktop versions.

3. Website speed optimization

How long does your website take to load?
If it takes more than one second or two, you have a problem.
Studies show that a single second delay can reduce the conversion rate by 7%. Moreover, 40% of people will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
These are shocking numbers that are bound to have a negative impact on the website’s search engine rankings.
You can improve the loading speed of the website by identifying major issues. Use a tool like Pingdom or GTmetrix to identify the issues. Other than that, focus on removing unnecessary scripts and plugins, image compression, JS and CSS minification, caching, and using a CDN.
For more tips, read our comprehensive guide to improving the loading speed of your website.

4. Content readability

Eventually, it all boils down to how easy-to-ready your content is.
If the content isn’t readable, users will leave your website very quickly, which will have a negative impact on your site’s rankings.
Make sure that you are using easy-to-read fonts that are of an adequate size. The overall design and background color also play an important role in content readability.
Apart from that, don’t forget to remember the more obvious things: use of visual aid (images and videos), proper formatting, heading tags, shorter paragraphs and blocks of text, grammar, spelling, and content structure.
All these things matter when it comes to providing an engaging content experience.

Conclusion

UX is already playing a crucial role in SEO. Not focusing on it may have a negative impact on your website’s search engine rankings. On the other hand, focusing on UX may give you the much-required edge over your competitors.
If you have any questions or need any help with improving your website’s search engine rankings, feel free to reach out.

The post 4 UX Tips For More Organic Traffic and Higher Search Engine Rankings appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Average websites just don’t work anymore. Approximately 79% of online visitors just scan a website. They don’t read it completely. Therefore, the website has to be really great if you want it to be successful.

There are a few elements that make a good website ‘great’. In this post, I discuss 7 elements of a high-quality website.

Ask yourself: Does your website have these key elements?

1.   High-Quality Website Content

Is there any alternative to high-quality content? No.

In order to be successful, your website must have exceptional content. Don’t write for search engines. Write for your website visitors and you’ll be alright.

If you want to have persuasive content, make sure it is highly targeted to your prospects. More importantly, make sure it doesn’t only talk about yourself. The content should be focused on your audience and how your product or service can help them.

On the other hand, if you have a blog, there are a few things that you will have to take care of:

• From the perspectives of SEO and social media shares, your blog post should have at least 2,000 words.
• It must be free from fluff and filler content. Each line must be valuable to your readers.

2. Readability

Readability is now another very important aspect of a high-quality website.

If your website’s content is easily readable, it is going to do fairly well. Otherwise, no one likes to visit a website that is so bad that they can’t even read or understand.

It can also damage your website in the eyes of search engines.

You see, if your website doesn’t do well on the readability front, more and more people will leave your website the moment they land on it. It will lead to a higher bounce rate, which will then affect your website’s search engine rankings.

To improve readability, make sure you use only a couple of fonts. Also, don’t use too many colours. Furthermore, don’t be afraid of increasing the font-size. 14 is the new 12.

3. Usability

Usability if definitely important. It’s a broad term, however, and there are many things that fall into the category of “usability”.

“Website navigation” can be termed as one of the most important aspects of usability. Thankfully, there are many simple ways to improve the navigation system of your website. Here are a few tips for you:

• Add a search bar on the top-right corner of your website – especially if it has a lot of content.
• Use breadcrumb trails.
• Use the related-posts widget. It not only improves your website’s navigation but it also holds the visitor a bit longer.
• Have a very clear, logical and straight-forward sales funnel.
• If there many things that you’d like to present to a new user, consider using a primary menu as well as a secondary navigation menu.

4. Social Media Shares

Whether you believe it or not, a high number of social media shares reflect credibility, authority and quality.

A high-quality website generally has a lot of social media shares. And there are numerous benefits, too.

• Include a social media plugin to encourage shares.
• Include a call-to-action to encourage more people to share your content.
• More social media shares can mean better search engine rankings.

5. Internal and External Links

Search engines now prefer websites that have more internal and external links. And it is also a reflection of a high-quality website.

Websites with internal and external links are considered a hub of useful resources. Your website visitors will be able to find a lot of useful information by visiting your site. It does not only delight your readers, but useful links are also valued by search engines.

6. High-Quality Comments

As it was social media shares, the number and quality of comments on your website are also an indication of how good it is.

If your website has lots of engaging and useful comments, it is going to be perceived as a very credible and high-quality website.

Here is a simple tip for you.

At the end of each blog post, include a simple call-to-action and ask your readers to comment and share their opinions. A simple CTA can have a dramatic effect.

Professional online marketers like Noah Kagan also give a free product to a random commenter on his blog.

7. Visual Content

Never feel hesitant in using more images and videos in your website. A high quality website always uses lots of visual content.

Always use at least one high-quality image in each of your blog post. You can also use relevant videos to make your point and make your post more interactive and interesting.

Besides that, you can also use “infographics” to stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Well did you like this article? If so feel free to leave a comment and add to the conversation. Speak to you soon.

Josh

Related Posts:

• On-Page SEO Guide
• Content Creation Skills
• Content Writing Tips
• PPC Copywriting

The post The 7 Elements of a High-Quality Website appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

It is one of the primary goals of every online business to decrease its website’s bounce rate. If you are not getting the desired results, it is a clear indication that your content, website layout and marketing funnel has failed.

However, don’t worry. In this post, I share some really effective and practical tips to decrease your website’s bounce rate.

1. Drive the “Right Kind” of Traffic

The first tip is to ensure that you are driving the right kind of traffic to your website. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter what you do, you won’t succeed.

Not many website-owners realize this, but if you are driving visitors that are not really interested in your website, they will instantly bounce off. It’s only logical, isn’t it?

Let’s assume you are driving traffic through paid-advertisements, social media, forum-links and guest-posts, etc. Now, if you use vague – or misleading – anchor-texts, titles and ad-content, you will never drive the right kind of traffic. As a result, those visitors will bounce off your webpage right away, as they wouldn’t be able to find the information they were expecting to.

The tip is to use the right keywords to target your prospects and visitors. Furthermore, knowing about your audience and what they want also helps a lot.

2. Make Your Website Responsive and Mobile-Friendly

According to some recent research, approximately 17.4% of visitors are usually on mobile devices. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly and responsive website, all such visitors will bounce off right away.

And as more and more users are shifting on mobile devices, the importance of responsive websites is only going to increase. Otherwise, eventually, a huge chunk of your website traffic will bounce only because you don’t have a responsive design.

Robert Greiner, after implementing a responsive design, reduced the bounce rate from an awful 86% to just 1.5% within two days.

3. Make It Readable

What if you get the right kind of interested visitors, but they can’t easily read the content of your website?

Yes, you guessed it right. They will bounce off.

With so much information easily available on the web, the attention span of an average internet user is getting shorter by the day. You have to make the content of your website easily readable.

Following are a few tips for that:

Moreover, you can also use an online tool for checking the readability of your website.

4. Loading Speed

Currently, it has to be the biggest factor for increased bounce rate.

People don’t like to wait. It is as simple as this.

If your webpage takes more than 10 seconds to load, nobody is going to wait that much. Moreover, apart from significantly damaging your website bounce rate, it also damages your search-engine rankings and negatively affects user-experience.

It’s important.

5. External Links in New Windows

It is a very basic concept, but a lot of people just don’t pay enough attention to it.

If the content of your webpage has external links, make sure that those external links open in new windows. Otherwise, whenever a user clicks on such links, she will be redirected to a new page. More importantly, she will no longer be on your webpage and it will be counted as a “bounce”.

6. Improve Your Sales Funnel

Most webpages are a part of a larger sales funnel. In other words, there is a set of multiple webpages that directs users towards the end of the sales process.

For example, one of your blog-posts may lead a prospect to a product description page. The description page then may lead the user to a landing page, which then leads her to the final buying page.

If you want to improve your website bounce rate – and if you want to make users don’t quit midway – you have to make this sales process very easy-to-understand, accessible and simple.

Conclusion

Surely, there are many things that you will have to consider here. For instance, make sure that your content has clear calls-to-action and accessible links to next webpages in the sales process.

Moreover, your website must also have a very clear and easy-to-understand navigation system. This includes the main navigational system, a search bar and sidebar-widgets to simplify browsing. However, it is considered a bad practice to have sidebars on your landing page, so keep that in mind.

You should see instant positive results as soon as you apply all these tips. Keep testing different aspects of your webpages to identify loopholes and optimise the copy and design.

Anyway, let’s get back to you.

How do you decrease your bounce rate? We’ll love to know that. Please share your valuable thoughts in the comment section below.

The post How to Decrease Bounce Rate of Website appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.