Archives for June 2020

Building a Website With a Better User Experience

June 24, 2020 by David Henderson

Google takes hundreds of elements into account when it ranks your website. Although keywords are one big factor, elements of user experience, aka UX, is also considered. UX is about the user and concerns how easy your website is to use and navigate.

When visitors come to your site, can they understand your site and find what they want? UX also takes into account your site’s credibility and accessibility. When your site is designed to meet expectations for users, search engines use that information for search rankings. More importantly, users come back to your site.

Here are five tips for improving user experience.

1. How easy is it to read your website?

When users come to your website, the information needs to be organized in a way to let them easily find information. Use bulleted lists. Keep paragraphs short. Put in headings for easy skimming. The sad reality is that most people don’t read blocks of text; they’ll just scan the headers.

Use a conventional flow for your site:

Logo in the left-hand corner
Call-to-action at the top
Search feature at the top of the page
Contact information, social media icons and sign-up forms in the footer

Make sure your text stands out against the background. It’s okay to get creative, but keep UX in mind.

2. Is your content fresh and relevant?

Users who come to your site want updated information. Fresh content helps your site be found by search engines. Content that is up-to-date and interesting adds to your credibility. Create blog posts that offer new information about your industry and business to give customers insight. Meet consumers at any place along the sales journey, whether they’re just gathering information or ready to purchase.

3. Can users connect with you on social media?

Modern shoppers want to know about your business before walking into your store. Give customers a way to connect with you through social media. Your promotions and campaigns online can help you grow your customer base when you provide value. Giving ways for customers to easily find you on social media increases the user experience.

4. Do you interact with your customers?

When customers post reviews, negative or positive, do you answer? You need to post responses to users who interact with your business on social media and through Google Business Profile reviews. Not only does this keep current customers, but potential customers are watching your brand. They’ll get to know you through your engagement on your social media. Demonstrate your commitment to customer service and support.

5. Is your website optimized for performance?

Content is king, but the technical side of your website is just as important to UX as what you post. If you want users to click on something, make it obvious. Optimize your site to make pages load quickly and get rid of features that cause slow load-times. Make sure your website looks great on different screen sizes. Add metadata that helps search engines find your pages. Although your users may not recognize these things, ignoring the technical aspects of SEO decreases UX.

Analyze How People Are Using Your Site

Use analytical data to see how you are doing. Test different versions of your pages to see which performs better. Have a plan for using your website. Set goals and constantly work to achieve those goals.

Building a website isn’t as easy as putting words up and waiting for people to come. You have to be proactive and work hard to grow a customer base that responds to your brand. Talk to an SEO company about making your website SEO friendly and customer-oriented. User experience boosts your online presence by increasing customer engagement, which in turn helps your search engine rankings.

Whats New with Search Engine Optimization for 2020

June 17, 2020 by David Henderson

Search engine optimization is one of the most important aspects of any marketing mix. By improving your website ranking in search results, you can also improve the efficacy of your other channels. In other words, when your business is easier to find, you earn more sales.

However, search engines are constantly changing. They update their algorithms regularly and introduce new features. These updates enhance the way that people search, but they also make optimization a moving target for businesses. Therefore, it is important to stay up to date with the latest trends. Furthermore, businesses must stay active with SEO in order to bring as many relevant visitors to their sites as possible.

Voice Search

It may be hard to believe that voice search first became part of the Google mix back in 2012. At the time, it seemed to many like a fad feature that would be fun to play with but that would never have a major impact on search. Of course, in 2020, we know that voice search is here to stay.

The growing popularity of home speakers and smartphone assistants has helped to make voice search not only a permanent fixture but also an important focal point of SEO. Today, tens of millions of searches are initiated by voice every month. To capture a slice of these, you need highly optimized content that plays well with Google’s voice search results.

Implementing structured data targeted at voice search and leveraging Speakable markup can increase your website’s visibility. Understanding Google Actions is also helpful for making the most of voice search.

Google Actions/Entities

Google is increasingly putting development time into more defined and structured data. Whereas search algorithms were once enough to provide valuable search results, today users expect more. Furthermore, there is so much data on the internet that Google expects businesses and developers to “play nice” with its functionality in order to rank well.

Actions on Google and entities are examples of this. The first is voice search actions that can be integrated into software to allow Google Assistant to control it. Entities are a well-defined thing or concept in Google’s search results. Websites and apps with data that are structured to work with these types of results tend to perform better.

Topics & Semantics Over Keywords

In years past, SEO involved a lot of gaming search engine results pages. People would pack their content with keywords to help it rank better. Today, Google and other search engines have gotten smarter. They are structuring their algorithms to more closely match what people want to see.

Perhaps the most significant example of this is the heightened focus on topics and semantics. Increasingly, Google can understand the meaning of users’ searches. The engine isn’t just matching keywords from search terms to words on web pages. Instead, it figures out what the user actually wants and finds content that is highly relevant to that topic.

For businesses, this means one thing: High-value, relevant content is king. To rank well on searches, there are fewer games to be played. Instead, the content needs to raise and answer questions that users are actually searching for. Webpages still need to be optimized so that Google can understand them. However, there is no replacing high-quality content.

Get Help Harnessing the Latest Trends

If your business needs help with SEO in 2020 and beyond, Unwired Web Solutions is here for you. We are a digital marketing agency that helps brands like yours compete online. Our services include web design, content management, social media, and search engine optimization. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help your business succeed.

What Is SEO and How Does It Work?

June 10, 2020 by David Henderson

Once upon a time, anyone could put up a website, add a few keywords, and wait for customers. Although this worked for many businesses, customers often got sent to sites that weren’t exactly what they wanted. Search engines responded to make the user experience better. Today, search engine optimization includes hundreds of elements that relate to the quality of the website to deliver the best results to the user. Understanding the basics of SEO can help you partner with a great agency to get marketing success in search.

Learn What Your Customers Are Searching For

Optimizing your website for search means figuring out how your customers find you. There are dozens of sites that can help you find the right keywords for your industry and business, but you can also use common sense. A little thought can turn up hundreds of keywords to create content that is relevant and informative for your customers.

Assign keywords to specific pages. While you can certainly use two to three keywords on each page, you want to make sure that the search engines know the focus of every page on your site.

Design Pages With Search in Mind

Keywords may be the basis for SEO, but without a good website structure, even the best keywords won’t accomplish much. Technical SEO is the behind-the-scenes optimization that provides good user experience and assists search engines in ranking your pages. Search engines aren’t interested in promoting your business as much as satisfying users. After all, Google’s stated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

To satisfy this objective, here are some elements of on-page optimization:

Short URLs that are descriptive for the page
Metadata, such as title tags and descriptors that show up in search
Logical structure to each page, using descriptive headers and formatting
Optimization of pictures to help search engines understand what the image is

On-page optimization is complex. Fine-tuning your efforts can help you be more successful. Bottom line, you want to make sure that your site is easy for humans and search engines alike to navigate.

Optimize for Both the Humans and Search Engines Using Your Pages

When developing web pages, remember that humans may be who you want to read your site, but search engine bots are what is ranking your pages. Artificial intelligence has come a long way and now can better mirror human behaviour, but there are still differences you need to account for. The algorithms used by search engines for page rankings are extremely complex. That doesn’t mean you can’t understand the basics:

Make sure your website loads fast: You have about three to four seconds to grab the attention of human visitors on your site. Pages need to load quickly.
Prioritize mobile-friendly pages: More people are using their mobile devices for search. Search engines look for mobile-friendly pages.
Ensure security: Install an SSL certificate, which establishes security. If you’re accepting form submissions or selling items, this protects customer data.
Maintain a sitemap: Consumers may not use sitemaps, but search engines do. A sitemap shows the way your site is linked together. It helps search engines index your site faster.
Create internal links: Point visitors and search engines to important pages through links to other pages on your site.
Create backlinks: Build the authority of your site by getting other pages to link to yours.

Successful SEO Takes Time

SEO is like cooking in a crock-pot. You can’t just put the ingredients together and expect dinner in 30 minutes. With SEO, it’s a long-term plan. There are tools that can help you analyze your SEO strategy to know whether it’s working. Ranking for keywords can be competitive, but it’s one of the most effective methods for bringing relevant customers to your site.