What does it mean to optimize a website?
To help you appreciate the value of optimizing your website, we asked webmasters and marketing professionals this question for their best insights. From making your website more discoverable to striving to turn traffic into money, there are several meanings that would help you realize the importance of optimizing your website for the success of your brand.
Here are nine meanings to optimizing a website:
- Making Your Website More Discoverable
- Bringing in More Traffic
- Ensuring You’re Speaking Your Customers’ Language
- Adopting SEO To Convert More Potential Customers
- Making the Website Easy To Use
- Having a Clean and Speedy Website
- Improving the Site’s Performance
- Enhancing All Components To Work Together Seamlessly
- Striving To Turn Traffic Into Money
Making Your Website More Discoverable
Searching “near me” is becoming the tried-and-tested method people use to find products or services in their geographic area. Nearly 50% of Google users are looking for local information. And many of these searchers are on their mobile devices, looking for something that is “near me now.” This search data alone makes optimizing your website to be mobile-friendly crucial for ranking high in local search results.
Google’s algorithms factor in the user experience of websites when ranking them in search results. And a better UX for mobile users requires a responsive design that will help your pages render properly on smaller screens and make them load faster. Smaller images, larger buttons, and auto-fill form fields are just some of the ways you can reduce friction to improve your website’s SEO and help customers on the go find your business now.
Jason Sherman, TapRm
Bringing in More Traffic
Optimizing your company’s website means that you have made it as easy as possible to bring in new traffic. This can mean that you create an easier-to-use, more mobile-friendly site so mobile users can utilize what you have to offer. Oftentimes optimizing means that you are using SEO tools to optimize your site’s performance and make web search algorithms prefer your site over competitors.
Brandon Brown, GRIN
Ensuring You’re Speaking Your Customers’ Language
Your website content must speak your customers’ language to engage them better, keep them on your site longer, and increase conversions. Every company has its own terminology. And every industry uses jargon. While these words define how we communicate in the workplace, their meanings may become lost in translation with a target customer.
Learning and adapting to how your customers speak enables you to craft consumer-friendly copy that resonates whether you’re talking about something very niche-specific or product technical. An excellent first step is knowing which search terms visitors use on Google to help them find your site, as these indicate which words people associate most with your brand. You can then implement them into your content to further define your products so customers can understand them more readily. You can then expand your terms to include adjacent search terms to attract new niche audiences.
Chris Gadek, AdQuick
Adopting SEO To Convert More Potential Customers
You will be able to attract more traffic and convert more potential customers if you have a solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. Google may rank a website with better metrics such as time on page and bounce rate if it’s optimized for conversions. SEO is extremely complex, but optimizing your site can give you a head start. Look at trends you see in your current user behavior reports, as well as the experience of your users. Eventually, you’ll see traffic and conversions increase based on your hard work.
Additionally, even older content can continue to work for you in the long run. Don’t dismiss your efforts as being dated. Writing good evergreen content can help you attract traffic and convert customers for years to come.
Nick Shackelford, Structured Agency
Making the Website Easy To Use
If you want your website to be successful, you need to make your website as easy to use as possible. This means optimizing for mobile devices and making your website user-friendly. You can use good internal linking to help people find content more easily based on what they are looking at already on your website. For example, if they are on a blog post about marketing, you can easily link to your other posts about various marketing topics to help them learn more.
Rachel Roff, Urban Skin Rx
Having a Clean and Speedy Website
Optimizing a website can mean many things, but to me the simplest explanation means having a clean and speedy website from both a technical and a content standpoint. Sure you can get into the details of how to make that happen… but the less clutter, the less javascript, the fewer third-party plugins, and the less irrelevant content that you have, the better optimized your website will be.
Mike Miller, Wilderness Times
Improving the Site’s Performance
Optimizing a website is ultimately about improving every aspect of its performance in an attempt to create the highest quality user experience possible, and in turn, rank higher in the SERPs. Delivering a level of performance that meets or surpasses your competitors’ is how you do the same in the search engine rankings, and how you achieve the crawlability that makes your pages visible in the first place. There are hundreds of page elements to optimize, but the end goal is always to help a visitor find exactly what they came for, which is unique to every site. Optimization helps your visitor accomplish their goal with ease and success.
Roy Morejon, Enventys Partners
Enhancing All Components To Work Together Seamlessly
In a nutshell, optimizing a website means experimenting with and enhancing every existing website component so that it works seamlessly with others while achieving stable, consistent, and optimal performance. These components include data analysis, keyword research, impactful content, on-page and off-page SEO, device optimization, page speed, and more. The irony is that this process of optimization can never truly end, as there will always be something more to do to improve the functionality of a website!
Eva Taylor, WP Buffs
Striving To Turn Traffic Into Money
Optimization can mean different things. You can optimize a website for organic traffic. You can optimize it to increase your conversion rate. You can optimize for load speed and user experience and a half-dozen other things. But in all these cases, we’re making the website better — usually to make it stickier, to help it convert better, to help it drive more traffic, etc.
I’m focused on conversion rate optimization (CRO) right now. In eCommerce, my niche, CRO determines how well you can turn traffic into money. With a good CRO, you can live on paid traffic alone and be successful. With bad CRO, you can have immense organic traffic and a big budget and still fail.
Richard Clews, Pants and Socks
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