This week Coach Yu was all about assessing what is working and what can be improved by setting up your website for success with SEO and auditing.
As Coach Yu points out, people usually think websites are just something you need to put up, like web pages or brochures, but you should think of websites as applications. An application has input and output, meaning there are things that you tell it, then it stores it down in a database and gives something back: room for improvement. Your websites should always focus on their main transaction (or purpose), which will depend on your business goals.
Recently, Google said that 70% of traffic now comes through phones. When a website is built the right way then it is responsive to mobile. Google says the most important thing in ranking is mobile index which is now considered primary despite it having been secondary a couple of years ago.
What does mobile index mean? It means site speed and easy-to-find content. How do you increase site speed and easy-to-find content for a higher mobile index? By categorizing your content with title tags and links.
It starts by being clear about what you do because you can have a fast-loading website with lots of content, and have some links, but if you don’t convert then there’s no point in having a great website.
Now that your site is set up with speed, title tags, and links so that it can succeed and is closer to ranking well in mobile indexing, the next question is, how do we audit our website?
We first need to look at all the factors that may be affecting its ranking and performance, starting with the strategy. Let’s define strategy plainly: a unique combination of goals, content, and targeting.
It is so important to have a website strategy that aligns with your business goals. What are your business goals? Whether it’s to drive this much in sales, at a certain cost per lead, cost per sale, or ROIs, you still need to be very clear about what you need your website to accomplish.
You must be able to answer these questions:
- Who is my ideal customer?
- Who are my employees?
- Who are my competitors?
- Who are my competitors’ fans?
These goals combined with your target audience will set the rules for your content. Your audience will determine what content you should or should not use, where you should use it, such as in emails, social media, or websites, and when you should use it, depending on the stages of your marketing funnel.
Once you’ve got all of that figured out, then you can properly evaluate your website and start understanding where there might be particular issues in need of improvement.
Another way to audit your website is to check your title tags. Title tags are something that people don’t seem to know much about or how to use to their advantage.
Title tags are the title of a page, which needs to be the most accurate representation of the content contained in order to work. If someone does a search and that page title with the meta-description shows up in their search results, the content of the page must fulfill their request or they will click back to the search results, which will absolutely penalize you in ranking and indexing.
What’s more important than the title of the page? The content itself and whether you get people to that page. Ask yourself, does this page deserve to rank high? Is my content relevant? Are my title tags accurate?
There is such a thing as over-optimization. For example, you may try to overdo your SEO by adding some extra words just for the sake of easy-to-find content and ranking, but one, Google knows better and two, you may come to find that your ends do not justify your means and your ranking did not improve at all but on contrary, the opposite.
It is vital that you get your strategy right before you look at your tactics because it’s not a technical issue, it’s a strategy issue. You need the blueprint of the architecture before you start hammering. No matter how fast you are at hammering and laying roofs, you need to know the structure of what you are building.
If you want to hear more about this topic, listen to the full session above. You will also find great insights from Coach Yu reviewing and auditing a few websites on the spot!