Want to turn your good website into a great website? We hear you loud and clear. As your website is often the first interaction consumers have with your brand, ensuring it aligns with your goals and audience expectations is key for growth. Discover our Top 10 Website Design Questions guide that will overview key website optimisation areas to transform user experience and unlock business success.
Does site speed really matter?
Yes, your website’s load speed impacts multiple critical factors:
- SEO Rankings: Faster sites achieve higher search engine positions, earning more organic traffic. Google factors page speeds into rankings.
- Bounce Rates: 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes over 3 seconds to load. Quicker speeds retain more visitors before they hit back.
- Conversions: Sites with longer load times see dramatically lower conversion rates from shoppers and leads. Even 1-second delays cause 7% drop offs.
- Revenue: Page speed improvements directly correlate to higher revenue as more visitors purchase products or services before abandoning your site.
- Brand Trust: Slow sites frustrate customers, negatively impacting brand perception and loyalty over time through poor first impressions.
Optimising speed should be an ongoing focus by:
- Staying up-to-date with the latest Google Core Updates
- Testing site performance regularly from real user locations
- Setting speed benchmark targets to beat
- Leveraging speed diagnostics to catch bottlenecks
- Implementing technical optimisations constantly
With diminishing attention spans, delivering a rapid website experience is essential for engaging today’s consumers.
What factors affect my website’s speed?
Several technical and structural factors influence site loading speeds:
Page Weight Factors:
- Image file sizes and dimensions
- Number and weight of scripts/plugins
- Amount of fonts and media content
Web Hosting Factors:
- Server location relative to visitors
- Allocated RAM and computing resources
- Shared vs dedicated hosting plans
Network Connectivity Factors:
- Http vs encrypted HTTPS protocols
- CDN usage to distribute resources closer to visitors
- Caching technologies to reduce external calls
Resolve speed issues by:
- Compressing images without quality loss
- Removing unnecessary design elements
- Switching to faster hosting infrastructure
- Implementing caching and content delivery networks
What are some top-level things I need to know about SEO rankings?
High search engine rankings increase visibility for earned, free organic traffic. Users trust and click organic over paid ads. Optimising for SEO should be an integrated, ongoing focus touching many areas like:
Content Development:
- Use keyword research to identify relevant target phrases with search volume
- Publish frequent long-form, high quality articles around these terms
Technical Optimisation:
- Ensure site’s metadata, URLs and headings use keywords
- Structure XML sitemaps for crawler indexing
- Optimise page speed and mobile experience
Link Building:
- Produce quality content that readers naturally link to
- Proactively generate backlinks from industry websites
- Focus on quality over quantity with contextual links
Authority and Trust Signals:
- Build social media followers and engagement
- Focus on user experience and satisfaction
- Develop brand mentions and press coverage
Tracking and iterating based on search ranking positions, traffic sources and keyword data will continuously improve organic rankings.
Why my website isn’t showing up on Google?
It’s important to understand how website design can affect why your site isn’t appearing on Google months after launch, investigate these common indexing issues:
Blocking Factors:
- Accidental “noindex” meta tags prohibiting indexing
- Permissions blocking crawler access
- Password protection or payment gateways on key pages
Technical Factors: -Faulty XML sitemaps not guiding Googlebot
- Duplicate page content diluting rankings
- Slow speeds or mobile issues harming crawlability
Content Factors:
- Low-quality content not meeting rankings thresholds
- Sparse pages and blogs not giving search engines enough to index
Resolve Google visibility challenges by:
- Verifying site is fully crawlable using tools like ScreamingFrog
- Expanding rich content while eliminating duplicate pages
- Checking for penalties or algorithm filtering issues
What is Bounce Rate? Is a high website Bounce Rate bad?
Your site’s Bounce Rate represents the percentage of single page visits where users leave your site without browsing further pages from that initial landing page.
Industry averages include:
- Blogs & Content Sites: 40-60%
- Ecommerce Stores: 35-50% average
- Service Sites: 10-30%
A high Bounce Rate isn’t necessarily problematic. For informative content gathering or transactional sites, users may achieve site goals on one page.
However, spikes may signal issues around:
- Slow loading speeds frustrating visitors
- Confusing navigation costing you exploration
- Irrelevant content missing user intent
- Unappealing design failing to engage
Diagnose bounce rate spikes using analytics to identify problem pages and landing traffic sources. Then iterate page content or messaging to better meet visitor intent.
How can I know what is causing users to leave my website?
Understanding strategies to analyse and improve user interactions on your website are crucial in maintaining user retention. Through optimising Google’s Core Web Vitals, we can understand and deploy targeted interventions. Analyse site analytics around:
Exit Traffic By Page:
- Identify pages with unusually high exit rates
- Notice if exits concentrate around page position
Exit Traffic Source:
- Review source referring the traffic exiting
- Consider messaging mismatches between sites
Funnel Movement:
- Assess which funnel steps leak most users
- Pinpoint form fields causing fallout
Reverse Engineer User Journey:
- Hypothesise intent of exiting visitors
- Identify page experience gaps pushing them away
Armed with exit insights, address traffic leaks through:
- Friction point removals improving conversions
- Enhanced page messaging to meet intent
- More supportive user on-boarding
Do I really need a blog?
Yes – blogging delivers outcome-driving benefits:
Traffic Growth:
- Posts boost site content, pages and keywords
- Valuable advice earns links and social shares
Lead Generation:
- Demonstrate expertise convincing visitors to convert
- Offer opt-in gate access to lock in subscribers
Revenue Increases:
- Higher conversions from expanded audience
- Sell products or services directly from blog
Cost Savings:
- Paid advertising expenses reduced through organic growth
- Staff time savings from better information discovery
Blogging intimidating? Follow three simple rules:
- Write what you know around your expertise
- Aim to educate and empower readers
- Focus on addressing visitor questions and objections
Our team utilise blog content creation to help with our SEO (Google Ranking) efforts, we offer two different packages for ranking:
- Local SEO
- Our Local SEO package allows our team to optimise a website on a monthly basis, provide unique blog posts, and create backlinks, all in an effort to rank your website to the top of Google.
- Digital Growth Partnership
- Our Digital Growth Partnership takes it a step further for businesses wanting not just SEO, but a website, blog articles and more, ensuring from the beginning of the project your digital presence and strategy is aimed at generating you the most leads.
How often should I be publishing blog posts?
To maximise SEO, lead and revenue gains, adhere to this frequency guide:
Optimal Blog Cadence:
- 2-3x a week for most website types
- 1x a week minimum for smaller sites
Consistency Over Quantity:
- High-quality, long-form content over quantity
- Avoid gaps wider than 2 weeks
Evergreen & New Content Balance:
- Mix evergreen, reusable posts with time-sensitive
- Update old content while also promoting new
Manage Burnout:
- Vary authoring across staff roles
- Curate and repurpose existing materials
- Stockpile future post drafts in advance
Analyse and iterate posting volume, topics and formats using traffic and conversion data but aim for 1-3x a week.
What is a call to action? How do I use them?
Calls-to-action (CTAs) prompt website visitors to take intended actions like:
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Scheduling a sales call
- Adding an eBook to their cart
- Downloading a guide
Strategies to implement when designing and deploying CTAs:
Compelling Copy:
- Clear, concise language
- Direct response command verbs
- Sense of urgency
Prominent Positioning:
- Within natural user flow on pages
- Above-the-fold visibility
- Next action in conversion funnel
Strong Visual Presence:
- High contrast colours
- Button appearance signalling click-ability
- Directional visual cues
Test various copy lines, placements, formats, colours and more using tools like HotJar recorders and heatmaps to determine the optimal mix driving conversions.
How can I obtain further details about my statistics?
For comprehensive reporting on key website metrics, integrate the following platforms;
- Tracks traffic volumes and sources
- Behaviour flow visualisation
- Goal and lead tracking
- Location insights
- Backlink tracking
- Organic keyword positions
- Competitor insights
- Site audit diagnostics
- Quantitative metrics
- Traffic source breakdown
- Competitor benchmarking
- Industry dashboard
Integrate these analytics tools, then segment data streams to derive insights on where website improvements are most viable to boost KPIs.
Realising Your Website’s Full Potential
Through this website optimisation guide, you now have the knowledge to transform your online presence into a high-value growth engine. Core learnings include:
- Align goals to business KPIs and measure metrics that matter
- Map user journeys to eliminate friction points
- Audit site speeds and infrastructure then resolve bottlenecks
- Research keywords then optimize SEO-rich content
- Analyze visitor behaviors to plug conversion leaks
- Test and refine page elements using heatmaps and session replays
- Continuously improve content strategies per analytics
- Create compelling CTAs that drive conversions
Equipped with these best practices and the data within your website analytics, identifying and addressing areas for optimisation becomes clear. Invest to enhance information architecture, page messaging, calls-to-action and technical foundations for immense conversion and revenue gains.
Treat your site as any other mission-critical sales and marketing channel warranting constant improvement – because optimised online presence holds immense growth potential. Let’s connect to build a Website Design tailored to your specific business goals. The opportunity awaits.
Speak to our team today about your website and digital presence here.
