By Paul Krellwitz
As we prepare to bid farewell to 2023, it is time to gear up for the new year by laying a solid foundation for your website’s success. Unlock greater opportunities in the coming year by aligning your site’s performance with your marketing and growth strategies.
Six critical elements that can significantly influence your online visibility and conversion rates are: technical site audits, a robust content strategy, SGE, video and mobile and detailed conversion path analysis. This blog post will cover each of these areas, providing you with vital insights and actionable tips to optimize your digital plan for 2024.
Technical Site Audit
A technical site audit evaluates the health of your website, ensuring that it’s being crawled, indexed, and accurately displayed in search engines. Have you done one in the last year? If not, it’s time to dig in and look at the fundamental nuts and bolts of the site. Look for the places where you can ensure your site is being reflected accurately in the search engines. Here are four critical steps:
- Crawlability and Indexability Check- Use tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to identify any crawl errors or indexation issues.
- Broken Links and Redirects- Broken links can negatively impact user experience and your SEO rankings. Use tools like Ahrefs or Dead Link Checker to identify and fix these errors.
- Loading Speed Test- Slow loading times can harm your SEO. Tools like GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights can help you assess and improve your site’s speed.
- Mobile-Friendly Test- With mobile-first indexing, ensuring your site is mobile-friendly is critical. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool can provide valuable insights.
Content Strategy
Your website’s content is crucial for its visibility. The start of the new year is an ideal time to determine what you must communicate to your users in the upcoming year. Here’s how you can enhance your content strategy:
- Keyword Research- Use tools like SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner to find keyword opportunities relevant to your business. If you have access to your own site search history, that can also be a useful tool in understanding what language users are using when they are on your site.
- Content Audit- Evaluate your existing content. Identify pieces that need updating, repurposing, or deleting.
- Quality over Quantity- Focus on creating high-quality, engaging content that provides value to your audience. Google prioritizes Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) for creating high quality content.
- Personalized and User Focused Content- Focus on creating content that addresses users’ queries and intentions, providing precisely what they sought when they visited your page.
- Social Media- Social will continue to have an impact on SEO and impact visibility. Brands should focus on promoting content through social media and utilize these channels to boost and endorse their content.
- Content Calendar- Plan your content in advance. This will help you maintain consistency and meet your audience’s expectations.
Google’s SGE
SGE (Search Generative Experience) is changing SEO and brands must prepare for it to maintain a competitive edge.
Video
Multimedia content is gaining more real estate in the SERPs especially for informational and long-tail queries. Brands must create video content to diversify content strategy and standout from the competition.
Mobile First
Mobile first indexing will continue to have an impact on search engine visibility. Brands must focus on building mobile friendly responsive sites that provide a good user experience that loads quickly across all devices and platforms and optimized for voice search.
Conversion Path Analysis
The last step is to analyze and optimize your conversion paths. Spend time evaluating how the traffic you are getting interacts with your content.
Here’s how:
- User Journey Mapping- Understand your users’ journey on your website. Identify the steps they take from landing on your site to completing a conversion or abandoning your site.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)- Use tools to identify website areas that can be optimized to improve conversions. GA4 provides a very solid visual report to help site owners understand how users/visitors convert after reaching a site through any channel. Look for ways to make the path from first visit to conversion as short as possible. Really take the time to learn how people convert after an organic keyword search.
- A/B Testing- Test different versions of your landing pages, CTAs, or forms to identify what works best for your audience.
- Tracking and Analytics- Constantly monitor your website’s performance. This will help you make data-driven decisions and improve your conversion rate.
As 2023 draws to a close, proactive planning for 2024 is essential. The focus is to leverage your site’s strengths, while simultaneously shoring up shortfalls or deficiencies. To enhance your digital presence and boost conversion rates, consider comprehensive technical audits, prepare for Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) strategic content development, video, mobile, social and insightful analysis of your conversion trajectories. Acronym’s digital marketing experts can help you finalize a well-defined roadmap for success in 2024 and beyond- contact us to learn more.
