New Year, New Site - 5 Ways to Improve Your Website Performance in 2024
Posted on 9th January 2024
After the challenges of recent times, one of the most important lessons for local businesses was just how essential a quality website is!
Whether you’re looking to tune up your existing site or want to start afresh with a brand new website for the new year – here are our top tips to improve the online performance of your business in 2023.
1. Speed Matters!
Does your current website take ages to load?
Slow websites turn off users and search engines hate them!
40% of users will leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load, and 80% won’t come back. In addition, Google penalises slow loading sites in the rankings, meaning your site won’t show up for the keywords and phrases you want to be found for.
Improving page speed through effective web design, correct file sizing, reducing server response time and investing in quality hosting will deliver real benefits across your site in terms of user experience and performance.
2. Focus on Voice Search
The way people search for information online is changing – smart speakers and smartphone assistants like Siri and Google Assistant mean that an increasing number of searches are now done via voice.
It’s a growing trend, and is only going to get more important in 2024.
There are some real differences between traditional text searches and voice searches. When people search by voice, they tend to ask questions and be more specific – using longer phrases in the process.
Optimising the content on your site to better cater for voice searches is a great way of generating high quality, super targeted organic traffic.
You can do this by:
Targeting the right long-tail keywords
Optimising for mobile (where most voice searches are made)
Provide direct answers to questions (sites like AnswerThePublic are great for finding out what your customers are asking)
Improve page speed (see point 1!)
3. Don't neglect your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile is a powerful tool for local search – but many businesses choose to ignore it completely!
If you’re looking to stand out against the competition in your local area, it’s definitely worth spending some time to develop your account. Business owners looking to create a profile should head over to https://business.google.com/ if they haven’t done so yet.
Keeping it updated, encouraging customers to leave a review and answering queries asked to the page will help you to climb your local rankings and ensure you appear on the map when customers search for businesses like yours. Lots of 5* reviews will also give potential customers the confidence they need to choose your business.
4. Stay up to date
In 2024, content is still the king.
It’s the single most important factor when it comes to where your website ranks in the search engines.
Keeping your website content updated and regularly adding high quality, new content is a great way of increasing search engine rankings and driving quality traffic to your site.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s regular blogging, video content or new landing pages – every bit of high-quality content will help to improve the performance of your site. You can even update old content, whether that’s rewriting your home page copy, updating a blog or extending your FAQ.
5. Keep testing and measuring
How do you know whether your website is performing? How do you know what is working or isn’t?
The answer is that you need to look at the data and use it!
Checking important metrics like traffic and conversions, tracking performance over time, and testing the impact of your changes is essential for anyone interested in improving the performance of their website.
In addition to looking at website analytics (Google Analytics) you may also want to consider more advanced heatmapping tools like Hotjar. These provide you with clear, easy to understand information about how real users are engaging with your site – so you know what you can improve on.
The secret here is to keep testing and measuring – it’s the only way you’ll know what’s working and what isn’t.
Business websites that work from it’seeze Scarborough
Want a website that works for your business?
As your local web design company, we’re here to help drive your business performance online and deliver real competitive advantage with a fantastic, custom-designed website that you can edit yourself. You won’t find industry jargon or tech speak here – just beautiful, competitively-priced websites for businesses throughout North Yorkshire.
Set up your free, no obligation meeting with Rob Davies from it’seeze Web Design Scarborough today and find out how over the past 10 years he's helped over 350 businesses get great websites, by calling 07957 374787, or by emailing rob.davies@itseeze.com
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