A website’s appearance says a lot about the brand. The very first impression that your website creates on a visitor will decide whether or not they want to continue browsing. This first impression takes as little as 5 seconds to form, and with a messy website, there is very little chance that the visitors will stick. 

Although great design and useful contents are necessary for a website, factors like usability, and a functional design that compliments the contents are needed to make a website successful. Your website needs to communicate with your audience. It must have every information about your brand that a visitor or potential client may need to know. 

If you have a website that is not performing as well as it should be, here are a few tips that you can use to upgrade your website and make it rank top in the search engine result page.

Optimizing for Mobile

A mobile-friendly design is currently one of the very first things designers should think about before designing a website. More than 60 percent of web traffic worldwide is taken over by mobile site visits. Search engines like Google have announced the ranking of a website will be considered upon the factor of how well the website’s mobile version performs. 

To make your website mobile-friendly, you can use Responsive design, which needs only one set of HTML code. It is easy to build, maintain, and track, with no redirect involved, and most importantly preferred by Google. 

AMP for content and ads

AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages serves contents to visitors at a lightning speed. It is a page separate from the website’s original page, that Google catches so visitors do not have to wait for their servers to load a full page. It is not a commonly used method. But if you are an e-commerce store owner, you can use this method on your website or create Google Ads.

Site speed

Slow sites are the enemy for e-commerce websites. If you have a slow loading site, you will lose both conversions and organic traffic along with being low in Google ranking. People expect fast results, and when they don’t get it, they bounce. 

You can compress all your images to improve the speed of your website. Larger image files create heavy loads that can slow your website down. Use browser caching tools so that it can remember to catch the previously loaded resources, and does not need to newly reload all the data. Remove the unnecessary data by fixing codes, formatting, deleting unused code, and shortening them whenever possible. 

Understand how Google crawls JavaScript

JavaScript is an important factor in building a website, as it provides multiple features that can turn your website into a powerful application platform. Instead of loading a large quantity of HTML from a server, the JS framework allows pages to be distributed from JavaScript. 

As long as you allow Google to render pages created with JavaScript. Without JavaScript rendering, a page looks like empty HTML tags to Google, with no content linking to the topic and quality that Google can see. 

Setting up international sites properly

Many brands are going international every day and building websites for different international territories. Although brands are going international to expand their business, many are not taking search optimization into consideration. 

Google is working on serving users the right content according to their country and language. So, by correctly implementing the internationalization, brands can reach organic traffic by serving contents that are targeted to their language and their land. Google has provided the meta tag ‘hreflang’ to help organic search marketers to get internationalization right. You can also use multiple languages with a default language targeted so Google can present it to the users of unspecified territory. 

Putting content into silos

Creating a site architecture where the key informational pages are in the same folders as the main service or category pages, helps improve organic rankings for core keywords. This technique is called “putting content into silos”. With the improvement of technology, this method is getting more user friendly and more effective. 

A well-made silo can improve organic performance for related keywords, as Google is always looking for sites that hold a good level of information even if they are not all on the same page. It also improves user experience. 

Reviewing your old content and strategies

Another great way to improve your website is to optimize the content that you already have. If you have a page ranking slightly low, you may add relevant media and update the contents to make it more successful. Keep your informational web pages up to date with the most relevant information.

To keep your top-level contents relevant, you need to employ this strategy, otherwise, it will lose its ranking on the search engine result page. You should always remember to factor the existing contents of your sites into your future site plan. Otherwise, all your effort will be wasted. 

While technical excellence is always important in building a successful website, other factors such as the speed and contents of your site are as important. In this day and age, having a successful website is one that addresses the core concern of your audience.