Get tips on optimising your website and create an SEO-friendly platform that improves your visibility in search engines and attracts more traffic.
Thomas Haurum
There are many reasons why you should continuously focus on optimising your website. In the ever-changing world that is the online universe, it is important to stay updated on trends and developments. There are many reasons to dive into website optimisation, and SEO plays a major role in this process.
But what exactly is SEO? For many, SEO can seem a bit complex. That is why I recommend reading my colleague Ieva’s blog post on why you should invest in SEO if you want to gain a clearer understanding before exploring this aspect of website optimisation.
Google regularly releases new updates to their guidelines, algorithms and similar, which you should pay attention to if you run an online business where one of your sources of sales or leads comes via Google. Through indexing, all your relevant pages become visible to crawlers. To help your site achieve the best possible ranking on Google, it is important that these pages are as optimised as possible – both for users and for crawlers.
In this blog post, I will share some valuable suggestions on how to achieve an SEO-friendly website, how to create a good user experience (UX), and other important considerations when thinking about website optimisation.
An important aspect to focus on is having a search engine optimised website. In short, an SEO-friendly website will help your site perform better in Google’s search results and rank as highly as possible.
In addition, a search engine optimised website also enhances the quality of your Google Ads campaigns and can reduce your cost-per-click through well-optimised, relevant landing pages.
If you also work with Facebook advertising, the quality of your landing pages and the overall technical quality of your website will help you achieve better results here too.
But what does it take to achieve an SEO-friendly website?
If you have just launched a new website, or are about to, it is important to let Google know. If Google does not index your website, you will be virtually invisible. Your site will not appear in any search results on Google, and you will not receive any organic traffic or similar.
This is critical – so it needs to be addressed from the start. If it is not, the issue should be detected as early as possible, so you ensure that potential customers can find you in relevant searches. There are various ways to check whether Google is indexing your website. I will cover some of them below.
A quick and easy way to check if your site is indexed by Google is by conducting a site search. In Google’s search bar, type site:yourdomain.com (e.g. site:wemarket-digital.com). If your website is indexed, you should see results from your website in the search results. If your pages appear in the site search but not on page 1 of Google, you need to focus on optimising your SEO – keywords, content, etc.
If no results appear from your site search, or only a very limited number, there is likely a technical issue. You can check via Google Search Console whether your pages are being indexed or if any issues have been identified. You can also submit a sitemap here, which prompts Google to take notice of your site.
You cannot always rely on finding a direct cause of indexing issues in Google Search Console. However, there are several things you can check yourself.
If you discover that your website is not being indexed, it is best to start by checking whether your entire website is, by mistake, set to “noindex”. Noindex is a small code that can be added to your entire website (or individual subpages), telling Google not to include these pages in its index. This can be a good idea for pages with sensitive information or internal pages (such as company intranets, dealer pages, and so on), but not for your entire website.
If you have a WordPress website, you can check under ‘Settings → Reading’ whether the box “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is ticked. If it is, you should remove it immediately.
Noindex can also be added directly into the code. You can check this by viewing your website’s source code and searching for “noindex” using the find function. This is straightforward – even if you are not used to working with code.
In addition to noindex, there may be potential crawl blocks in the so-called robots.txt file. To check if you have a robots.txt file and if there is anything blocking crawlers, go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt – for example https://wemarket-digital.com/robots.txt. In this file, you should look for the following:
If you find any of these variants in your robots.txt file, it means, in both cases, that Google is not allowed to crawl (read) any of the pages on your website. You can solve this simply by removing these lines from your file.
If you suspect that a ‘disallow’ has been set on just a single landing page, you can enter the URL in Google Search Console under “URL Inspection” to check this.
Google Search Console is an almost indispensable tool if you work with SEO – and it is free! If you want to prompt Google to crawl and index your website, you can do so by uploading a sitemap under “Index → sitemaps” in Google Search Console.
In some CMS systems, a dynamic XML sitemap is generated automatically, while in other cases you need to create one yourself. It may be beneficial to get help with this part to ensure your sitemap is generated correctly, contains the right information, and is updated automatically when you add or remove products or categories.
In most cases, the majority of website traffic comes from mobile devices. Furthermore, Google operates by the “Mobile First” principle when indexing websites. This means that it is the mobile version of your website that is stored in their index, and it is this version that your rankings and more are based on.
If your site is not mobile-friendly, you risk it not being indexed by Google, as mobile-friendly pages are indexed first. When working on website optimisation, it is therefore essential to always check the mobile version of your website – to ensure users on mobile devices can use it easily and without frustration. This also reduces the risk of users “bouncing”, meaning they leave the site almost immediately after arriving.
Regarding mobile-friendliness, our clear recommendation is to use a responsive website design. This means the design automatically adapts to different screen sizes, so you do not need to maintain several different versions of your website.
Whether your site loads slowly can be difficult to answer definitively, as it depends on factors like internet speed, the device being used, and whether the user has visited the page before. One thing is clear: if you are optimising your website for Google, you must ensure it loads quickly. Ideally, your site should load within 3 seconds – unless you run an online shop, in which case the recommendation is 2 seconds. Of course, if your website loads in less than 1 second, that is even better, as it provides a fast and positive user experience and reduces the likelihood of users leaving quickly. A slow website frustrates users, and user-friendliness is a major factor for Google when ranking websites.
Many elements affect speed optimisation, but even small changes can have a significant impact on your site’s overall load time. Some factors include the amount of data that needs to be loaded – in other words, how “heavy” your site is. The way your website’s code is structured also matters. Usually, you should look at reducing the size of images, videos and similar, and get your developer to optimise the code as much as possible.
If you use WordPress/WooCommerce, the number of plugins and the theme you have installed also play a role. Some plugins can slow down your website, while some themes contain excess code.
You can get an overview of your website’s speed using a tool such as Page Speed Insights. However, do not get too caught up in the score your website receives. Focus instead on the potential optimisation suggestions it highlights, which you or your developer should address.
Another important aspect of creating an SEO-friendly website is user experience, or UX. This concerns the overall experience a user has with your site. A good first impression is just as important online as it is in real life. It is based on this first impression that the user decides whether to continue their buying journey or leave the website quickly.
UX covers everything from the visual aspect of your website to speed, credibility and much more. The overall experience when visiting your website must be positive. It should be easy for users to find what they are looking for, or what you want them to find. The site should load quickly, all elements should work, and there should generally be as few distractions as possible. The less frustrated the user is, the greater the chance they will stay on your site for longer.
What matters most for UX on your website depends greatly on its purpose. For some websites, design is paramount – how the site looks, which visual elements are used (video, images, animations, etc.). For others, simplicity and accessibility are key – finding what is important, quickly and easily. When working with UX, and an SEO-friendly website in general, you should always keep your target audience in mind – after all, they are the ones who need to find your website easy and pleasant to navigate.
Conversion optimisation is about adjusting your website to encourage users to take a desired action. For most B2C online shops, this usually means purchases or newsletter sign-ups. For B2B websites, it is typically phone calls or completion of a contact form that are most important.
It is important to note that it is completely natural for a large proportion of your website’s visitors not to convert – meaning they do not complete the desired action. This makes it all the more important to work on conversion optimisation, to make it even easier and more attractive for users to convert.
Even small changes, such as changing the colour of a key button, adding more calls to action on your pages, or displaying a prominently placed phone number, can significantly increase your conversion rate. It is easy to become blind to your own website and feel that everything makes sense. That is why it is a good idea to have a few users who have never visited your site before to review it “with fresh eyes”. This can be a highly valuable part of conversion optimisation.
Content is a major and important factor that Google values highly when ranking websites. They are constantly striving to deliver the best possible content to their users. There are two main advantages to content optimisation: you provide users with a great experience through relevant content that matches what they are searching for. When users are happy, Google is happy – and when Google is happy, your site ranks better. Content must be of high quality – but how do you ensure this?
The most important thing when it comes to content is that it must be relevant – in other words, it must match the user’s search intent. The quality of your content is also crucial, and in general, both content and the authority of those publishing it are factors Google is increasingly focusing on in their algorithm updates.
To get an overview of your content and the intent behind each piece, it is a good idea to conduct a keyword analysis. This will give you a clear picture of the content you currently have, which keyword(s) it targets, and which landing page it relates to. At the same time, it will also highlight relevant content and search intents you are not currently covering.
Website optimisation covers many different areas and disciplines. Whether your focus is on creating an SEO-friendly website, improving user-friendliness, or addressing more technical aspects such as speed optimisation – all these elements are necessary for achieving the best possible results.
Google continuously updates its algorithm, which is used to rank websites in its search engine. In addition, Google places a high value on user-friendliness, as their main mission is to display the best results in relation to search intent. That is why website optimisation, and especially UX, is more important than ever.
Do you need help optimising your website? Our SEO team is ready to conduct a review of your site and provide actionable optimisation recommendations that will improve the user experience and, ultimately, lead to more conversions.
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