Improve Your Website In 24hrs

Here’s your mission if you choose to accept it: you have 24 hours to improve your website.

What can you do to drive more traffic to your site? What simple changes can you make to improve your SEO and be seen? Here are a few quick and easy ways you can improve your website in less than 24 hours.

1. Improve your page titles

Make your onsite and meta titles as relevant as possible to the content on your site. This is the first point of reference for users and they need to be able to identify exactly what your site is about and what kind of experience to expect when visiting your site. You want your meta-title to attract potential users not confuse or deter them with irrelevant or unclear page titles, Google’s algorithm doesn’t take kindly to these kinds of page titles and chances are neither will your users.

We recommend keeping your page titles short and concise you have a limited amount of space when constructing your page titles so keep them between 55- 60 characters long to avoid ellipses… Remove all unnecessary words that lengthen your title and don’t aid in getting your point across. Create unique titles for each page, duplicate titles won’t help you.

2. Upgrade old blog posts or start blogging

Blogging is a great way to keep your website updated with fresh new content. It’s awesome for SEO and the content you generate can be shared via your social media channels.

It’s fair to say that static websites don’t rank well with search engines, so a weekly blog post is one of the best ways to continually add new content to your website and keep it relevant. Great news – we now have digital marketing packages that include regular blog posts! If you already blog, revisit your old articles and make sure they’re still relevant and the information isn’t out of date.

3. Test your page loading time

Let’s face it, no one likes waiting for a slow, sluggish website to load. More often than not customers will abandon your page and click on the next business listed on their Google search. Check the loading speed of your page to ensure it’s not turning potential customers away.

Google has a host of tools for performance testing your site. Use Page Speed Insights to analyse your sites speed on mobile and desktop devices.  Page Speed Insights will generate a report with suggested improvements for speeding up a sluggish site.

Generally speaking, fast pages are roughly in the top ~10%, average pages are in the next 40%, and slow pages are in the bottom 50%.

4. Delete replicated content

Another thing search engines don’t take kindly to replicated or duplicated content. Avoid repetition at all costs and just get to the point.

5. Add alt text for SEO

An easy way to improve your website and help it rank higher with search engines is to add alternate text to your images. Alt text is the code behind the image that acts as a description and will help search engines identify and find your content. For example, in WordPress you can edit your alt text as seen below.

6. Use Google’s Lighthouse audit

This is a great open source tool free for anyone to use on their website. Lighthouse will generate a detailed report highlighting areas of your site that need improvement, some you might be able to quickly fix yourself boosting performance, accessibility, SEO and best practises. Other more technical improvements can be handed over to your developer.

7. Keep it simple

At Thrive Web we believe website design should be clean, easy to read and uncomplicated. Your customer’s experience with your website should be straightforward, effortless and leave them with a feeling of ease.

Thrive can provide a free website audit on your site and advise some areas to improve user flow and conversions.