Why You Need A Website Audit

Website Audit western mass

Your website should have all the information on your company so that potential customers can make educated decisions before purchasing your product or service. Just like a car, your website should be inspected and tuned up on a regular basis. Whether it’s not showing up in search engines or having a high bounce rate, optimizing your website will help with the success of your business. Search engine optimization can improve your search engine results and create higher sales conversions.

Before you begin optimizing your website, whether new or it has been live for some time, you should run a website audit. An audit outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the website, helps inspect the technical backend of the website, on-page and off-page elements to optimize result positioning, increase conversions, and more. The website audit must be performed on a regular basis to ensure the long-term success of the website’s performance. The audits are really important as it helps keep the SEO strategy updated at all time.

Why Have An Audit

So, why do it? It outlines the technical performance and health of the website, so you can create practical tasks to enhance the online visibility. The results of the audit also helps create an ongoing SEO plan for improving lead generation and sales conversions. The audit helps identify possible errors in the website, such as broken links, duplicate content, or negative backlinks that might be damaging the website’s performance. Once these errors are identified by the audit, your SEO experts can create strategies to recover the traffic that the website lost.

Website audits also help identify the algorithm changes to the search engines. This is because all search engines tend to update the algorithms from time to time and SEO audits help outline what adjustments can be made to cater to these algorithmic changes. While running a full website audit is recommended, there are variations and parts of the website audit you can do separately.

Types of Website Audits

A website audit is a full analysis of factors that impact a websites visibility for search engines and ease of use for users. But a full website audit is not always necessary, below are some of the most common types of audits you can run on your website:

Technical Audit

While good quality content and backlinks will help get your site ranked, if there is a technical issue on your website, all your efforts could be a waste of time. Technical audits focus on best practice for site visibility and ensuring that all website meets all search engine requirements for crawling and indexing.

SEO Audit

An SEO audit measures how well your website is optimized for search engines. It includes analyzing of keywords, website links, traffic behavior, goal conversions, meta descriptions and data, and image and optimization.

Content Audit

Content is often reviewed as part of an SEO audit, a stand alone content audit can also be helpful, delivering strong insights into what messaging and tone of voice is converting and what isn’t.

Signs Your Website Needs An Audit

There are many reasons why your website may need an audit. Here are just a few:

  • Users can’t navigate your website properly
  • Images are not properly tagged
  • Your website is not mobile friendly or mobile optimized
  • Your website takes too long to load
  • Customers have a hard time contacting you
  • Your competitors are outperforming you in search engine results
  • Certain pages on your website are not getting indexed in search results

The overall purpose of a website audit is to give webmasters a complete and detailed analysis into their sites health, performance and speed. So, when are you performing an audit on your website? If you are looking to have an audit done to your website, or have questions about doing an audit, contact us today.

5 Tips For Higher Engagement With Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories Tips

Instagram Stories should be a part of your social media marketing strategy. Stories and Reels have both become very popular elements of the app. The Stories feature of Instagram occupies that key, top of the feed real estate. It can be a great way to connect and engage with your audience.

Many brands and users are just re-posting their regular feed posts to Stories, which Instagram says users don’t particularly like. They state, “We’ve seen from research that people prefer to see original photos and videos in Stories from the people they care about.” So what are you doing to utilize Stories and to increase your engagement on Instagram? Here are five tips you can begin to incorporate.

Show Up in Real Time

A good social media strategy will include a lot pre-determined content. The Stories features gives you the opportunity to connect with your audience in the moment. Be authentic. Share photos and videos of your day. Highlight some of the things that are going on behind the scenes of your company. You can also utilize stories to share your story, how you got started, who you enjoy working with, why you do what you do, etc.

Utilize The Full Screen

Regular Instagram posts in the feed show up on just a fraction of the screen. Even when you share a regular post to your Story, it takes up only a part of the screen. On organic IG Stories, the media takes up the whole screen. Why not use all that real estate to highlight your product or service? Zoom in on the details and let customers know what you’re working on! You can create tutorials and become a leader in your industry.

Use Stories Features

Incorporating Stickers and text over your photo or video in Stories has a higher probability of a user engaging with the piece of content. Add text to encourage users to take action, like a promotion or sale. Stickers, like Poll, Survey and Questions, allow you to instigate engagement from your audience, while other Stickers like Music, allow you to overlay your Story to a track that fits your messaging.

Expand Your Reach

Checking in with the location feature and utilizing hashtags in your Stories will help expand your reach to users who may not be following your account. Did you know that when you add your location to your regular Instagram posts, it improves performance? You might very well experience the same thing when you add a location to your IG Stories. 

Save to Highlights

Instagram Stories stay up for just 24 hours. The only way to avoid this is to save them to your Highlights.  When you do this, the Story will stay there until you decide to take it down, if you ever do. You have the opportunity to highlight your Stories by topic or category. You can create branded covers for those Highlights, whether it’s your company’s colors or titles for each Highlight.

As Stories continues to grow it’s presence on the Instagram platform, creating a strategy will allow your brand to reach and engage with potential customers who go to Stories first before scrolling their feed. With the algorithm always changing, having content at the top of the feed in Stories will help your brand stay in the forefront. Contact us today if you have questions on how you can use Instagram Stories to grow your business.

5 SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2022

SEO Tips 2022

Just like social media, search engine practices tend to change over time. If you’ve been struggling with search engine results, or you are planning on launching a new website, there may be some common mistakes you may be forgetting about. Here are the top 5 SEO mistakes to avoid in the new year:

Not writing enough quality content

The length of content is an important factor when it comes to optimization and has been correlated with SERP rankings. Search Engine Results Pages (or “SERP”) are Google’s response to a user’s search query. SERPs tend to include organic search results, paid Google Ads results, Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graphs and video results. More words equals more results. So if your content is too short (less than 300 words), then you may need to revisit those pages.

You don’t have an optimized image on each page

One of the biggest items people forget to optimize on their website are their images. Image optimization is the process of creating and delivering high-quality images in the ideal format, size, and resolution to increase user engagement. First, they give search engines important contextual information. Second, optimized images speed up page loading, which increases user engagement and search engine rankings. When design elements are common somewhere else, don’t reinvent them by creating new UI patterns. UI (User interface) design is the process designers use to build interfaces in software or computerized devices, focusing on looks or style. Designers aim to create interfaces which users find easy to use and pleasurable. Making users think hard to learn how to navigate through each page is not what you want.

You have duplicate content

Duplicate content is a big red flag when it comes to search engine optimization and can result in a penalty from Google. Duplicate content confuses Google and forces the search engine to choose which of the identical pages it should rank in the top results, regardless of who produced the content. There is a high possibility that the original page will not be the one chosen for the top search results. All of the content on your content should be completely original.

Your content is not optimized for your target keywords

Keywords are are important to show search engines that they content you created is relevant to the search query. Targeted keywords are the phrases that your target audience and visitors use in search engines when they are searching for a solution or information related to your business. Targeted keywords are usually phrases, not individual words. Including your keyword in your title and in the first 100 words of the page are ways you can start utilizing your target keywords.

Your page load speed is too slow

Page speed has been a ranking factor for a couple of years now. What’s more, each year, its importance to your site’s SERP positions is only growing. Whether it’s desktop or mobile, many users leave websites if the it takes too long for the pages to load. The average page load time is 8.66 seconds, although the recommended speed time is 3 seconds. In the summer of 2021, Google rolled out the Page Experience update to enhance its algorithm. Pages that load faster deliver content quicker, and in that, satisfy the user’s needs quicker. If a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, over a quarter of users will click away and choose a different search result. Increasing bounce rate is not what SEOs are looking to do!

Search Engine Optimization should be a focal point in your 2022 marketing strategy. Have questions on the article or interested in learning more about our Website Audits? Contact us today.