In this day and age, a business without a website can fade into obscurity. Regardless of how much effort is put in with an offline marketing campaign, client response can still fall flat. To have a website built is still not enough, however. With thousands of sites found online, it’s important for a business to stand out, be visible and have a strong online presence. This is where optimisation plays a major role. The question now is how do you make a client site rank high in search engine results?
- Create a fail-proof strategy
To develop a strategy that a client can mikeefit requires extensive and intensive research. It’s important that you know everything necessary that will make a business rank on top. With this in mind, you should schedule an interview with your client. After all, they know their business more than anyone else, and they can provide you with insider information.
It’s important that you ask the right questions, so you can develop the right strategies. Among the various things to ask involve their demographics, nature of business, type of products and/or services, strengths and weaknesses, and their competition. Don’t forget to check on their current ranking, so you’ll know how much work you need to do.
- Evaluate the website
Although there are plenty of reasons that a website has little traffic, poor design and confusing navigation are guaranteed to turn off users and prospective clients. So check for technical issues, missed keyword opportunities, and lacking features that should have been there. Some of the essentials that need to be checked include:
- Links (broken and otherwise)
- Orphaned pages
- Title page
- Duplicate title page
- Keywords
You can use site crawlers, such as Xenu Link Sleuth or Screaming Frog, to gather vital information, including those listed above. Be on the lookout for duplicates and broken links that are low-quality signal. Most importantly, make sure the robots.txt is not blocking sites that need to be crawled.
- Give more attention to the site architecture
As already mentioned, confusing navigation can turn off clients. This is why you should check if the website is well organised and user-friendly. Visitors must have a wonderful browsing experience whenever they visit the website, so they’ll keep coming back for more. If you want to make a fan out of Google, you should check if pages are grouped under similar topics. Identify pages that deserve more exposure and already get more traffic, then move them up the hierarchy ladder. You should also run a backlink analysis and check internal anchor text matches keyword titles.
- See that crawling and redirects are enabled
For a client site to rank high on search engines, it must be crawled deeply and then indexed. If it meets a lot of Google’s requirements, the site will surely take the top spots. Redirects should also be used, especially when a page is moved or a domain is changed.
- 301 is a redirect that indicates that the page has moved location permanently
- 404 indicates an error or that a page no longer exist
When a 404 redirect is used, make sure that a useful navigation is added so that visitor’s don’t need to click back. You can also take advantage of the error page by providing information that users might be looking for, which can help in a company’s marketing efforts.
- Run a backlink analysis
Despite them being abused, backlinks remain an important ranking factor. However, if the links pointing to the site is of low quality, it won’t help a client’s site rank. In some cases, it could pull it down and increase the risk of being penalised. The best approach is to gather a list of existing backlinks, remove anything that is low quality, and then resolve links so they’ll point to appropriate pages.
There are many ways to optimise a client’s site, but the tips listed above makes for a good start.
