Great SEO starts with a great website. So what makes a website great for SEO?
First and foremost, yours and your website must be optimally designed for a great user experience.
In one of our previous posts, we have discussed Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines for their human evaluators. Humans then rate search results which serve as feedback to improve their algorithm.
This is Google’s way of ensuring search results displayed by their algorithms are what they should be – answers to what users are looking for.
Google has been aligning their machine learning and algorithms with the user experience by coming up with website performance metrics. Here are some of the metrics they’re using, and may be using, as ranking signals:
- Site Speed
- Low Bounce Rate
- Mobile-friendliness
Site Speed
Users easily give up on slow websites. A study by Akamai revealed that:
- 52% of smartphone users
- 47% for desktop users
…expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
According to Aberdeen Group, a 1-second delay in page load time yields:
- 11% fewer page views
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
- 7% loss in conversions
Here are some techniques we use for a fast-loading website.
- Caching
- GZIP Compression
- CSS Optimization
- Minification
- WordPress Plug-ins Optimization
- Image Optimization
- …and more
Bounce Rate
If you are performing great SEO your bounce rate should be low. Bounce rate shows a strong correlation with rankings.
So it is important to pay attention to decreasing your bounce rate — low bounce rate is an indication (but not in the strictest sense) that your website visitors are engaged by going to other pages on your site.
A high bounce rate can be caused by factors such as design and usability.
- Design and Layout
Aside from bad content, bad design and layout turns off website visitors.
- Easy Navigation
If your visitors couldn’t figure out where to go next or where they are in the context of your entire website, they’d probably just drop off.
Here is Google’s guide to improve bounce rate.
Mobile-Friendliness
Although non-mobile-friendly websites obviously get high bounce rates from users who are on a mobile device – thereby making mobile-friendliness an element to decreasing bounce rates, it is a ranking factor in its own category.
Google’s Mobile Friendly Update on April 21, 2015 was designed to give a ranking boost to mobile-friendly pages on Google’s search results on mobile devices. Here is a detailed post about the importance of a mobile-friendly website.
Our web designs have great navigation and themes for every niche. We are always up to date with the latest mobile-friendly guidelines and newest call to actions to create conversions!
Great SEO starts with a great website! Our Web Builds are lightweight, optimized for speed, have sound design and layout, and are mobile-friendly.
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