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 an ever-changing world such as the online universe, it is important to stay up to date with the latest developments. The reason for diving into website optimisation can be many, and in this context, SEO plays a major role.
But what is it? SEO can seem a bit complex for many. That’s why I recommend you read my colleague Ieva’s blog post on why you should invest in SEO if you want to get an even clearer understanding of this before you address this part of optimising your website.
Google continuously releases new updates to their guidelines, algorithms and the like, which you should pay attention to if you run an online business where one of your sources for sales or leads is through Google. Through indexing, all your relevant pages become visible to crawlers. To achieve the best possible ranking in Google, it is important that these pages are as optimised as possible – for both users and crawlers.
In this blog post, I will share some good suggestions on how to create an SEO-friendly website, how to ensure good user experience (UX), and what else is involved when thinking about website optimisation.
One important thing 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 high as possible.
Additionally, a search engine optimised website will also improve the quality of your Google Ads campaigns and lower the cost-per-click by providing good, relevant, and optimised landing pages.
If you also work with Facebook advertising, the quality of your landing pages and the general technical quality of your website will help you achieve better results there as well.
But what does it take to create 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 are effectively invisible. You will not appear in any search results on Google, and you will not receive any organic traffic or similar.
This is critical – and therefore it needs to be in place from the start. If it is not, it should be discovered as early as possible so you can ensure that potential customers can find you on relevant searches. There are several ways you can check whether Google is indexing your website, some of which I will cover below.
An easy and quick way to check if your site is indexed by Google is to do a site search. In Google’s search field, type site:yourdomain.co.uk (e.g. site:wemarket-digital.co.uk). 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, it is your SEO work with keywords, content, etc. that needs optimisation.
If, on the other hand, no results or only very few appear in your site search, there is likely something technically wrong. You can use Google Search Console to check if your pages are being indexed or if any problems have been identified. Here, you can also submit a sitemap, nudging Google to notice your site.
You cannot always expect to find a direct cause for indexing problems in Google Search Console. However, there are a number of things you can check yourself.
If you have found that your website is not being indexed, it is a good idea to start by checking whether your entire website has accidentally been set to “noindex”. Noindex is a small code that can be added to the whole website (or individual subpages) which tells Google not to include them in their index. This can be useful for pages with sensitive information or internal pages (e.g. intranets for companies, dealer pages, etc.), but not for the entire website.
If you have a WordPress website, you can check under ‘Settings → Reading’ to see if you have ticked “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. If so, you should remove this immediately.
Noindex can also be inserted directly in the code. You can check this by looking at your website’s source code and searching for “noindex” using the search function. It’s easy – even if you’re not used to working with code.
Besides noindex, there are also potential crawl blocks in the so-called robots.txt file. To check if you have a robots.txt file and whether anything is being blocked, go to yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt – for example https://wemarket-digital.co.uk/robots.txt. In this file, look for the following:
If you find one 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 from your file.
If you suspect that ‘disallow’ is set on just a single landing page, you can enter the URL in Google Search Console under “URL Inspection” and get an answer.
Google Search Console is an almost indispensable tool if you work with SEO – and it’s free! If you want to nudge Google to crawl and index your website, you can do this 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 will need to create one in other ways. It is a good idea to get help with this part to ensure the sitemap is generated correctly, contains the correct information, and updates automatically when you add or remove products or categories.
In most cases, the majority of traffic to a website comes from mobile devices. Additionally, Google operates under the “Mobile First” principle when indexing websites. This means it is the mobile version of your website that is stored in their index, and your rankings are based on this version.
If your site is not mobile-friendly, you risk that it will not be indexed by Google, as mobile sites will be indexed first. When working on website optimisation, it is therefore essential to always check the mobile version of your site, so you can be sure that people using mobile devices can use it smoothly and without frustration. This also reduces the chance that people will “bounce” – i.e. 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 avoid having to maintain several different versions of your website.
Whether your site loads slowly can be difficult to answer definitively, as it depends on internet speed, the device used to access the site, and whether the user has visited the page before. One thing is certain: if you are working on optimising your website for Google, you need to ensure it loads quickly. Ideally, your site should load within 3 seconds – unless you run a webshop, in which case the recommendation is 2 seconds. However, there is absolutely nothing wrong with your website loading in 1 second or less, as this gives the user a good and fast experience, reducing the chance that they will leave quickly. A slow site frustrates users, and user-friendliness is a huge factor for Google when ranking websites.
Many factors affect speed optimisation, but even small adjustments can have a big impact on your site’s total load time. Some influencing factors include the amount of data that needs to be loaded – i.e. how ‘heavy’ your site is. The way the code your site is built on is structured also plays a role. Therefore, in most cases, it is worth looking at reducing the size of images, videos, and similar, as well as having your developer optimise the code as much as possible.
If you use WordPress/WooCommerce, the number of plugins and the theme you have installed can also affect speed. Some plugins will slow down your website, and some themes contain a lot of unnecessary code.
You can get an overview of your website’s speed using a tool such as Page Speed Insights. However, you should not get too hung up on the score your website receives. It is more about the potential optimisation opportunities that appear, which you or your developer should then address.
Another key element in creating an SEO-friendly website is user experience, also known as UX. This focuses on the overall experience users get when visiting your website. A good first impression is just as important online as it is in person. Based on this, the user will either continue their buying journey or quickly decide to leave the site.
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 good. It should be easy for users to find what they are looking for, or what you want them to find. The page should load quickly, all elements should work, and in general, there should be as few distractions as possible. The less frustrated the user is, the greater the chance they will stay longer on your site.
What is most important for UX on your particular website depends largely on its purpose. For some websites, visuals are most important – how the site is designed, which visual elements are used (videos, images, animations, etc.). For others, simplicity and accessibility are absolutely crucial – making it easy and quick to find what matters most. When working with UX and an SEO-friendly website in general, you should always keep your target audience in mind – as they are the ones who need to find your site good and easy to navigate.
Conversion optimisation is about adjusting your website to encourage users to take a desired action. For most B2C webshops, this is purchases or newsletter sign-ups. For B2B websites, phone calls or completion of contact forms are typically important.
It is important to note that it is entirely normal for a large proportion of visitors to your website not to convert – i.e. not take the desired action. This makes it even more important to work with conversion optimisation to make it even easier and more attractive for users to complete the conversion.
Small changes such as altering the colour of an important button, adding more calls to action on pages, a well-placed phone number, and similar can significantly increase your conversion rate. It is easy to become blind to your own website and feel that everything makes sense. Therefore, it can be a good idea to have a few users who have never visited the site before take a look at it “with fresh eyes”. This can be an extremely valuable part of conversion optimisation.
A major and important factor Google values highly when ranking websites is content. They are constantly trying to deliver the best possible content to their users. There are two major benefits to content optimisation: you provide users with a good experience thanks to relevant content that matches what they are looking 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 achieve that?
The absolute most important thing when it comes to content is that it must be relevant – in other words, it must match exactly the search intent of the user. The quality of the content is also very important, and in general, both content and the authority behind those publishing it are areas Google is paying increasing attention to in their algorithm updates.
To get an overview of your content and the intent behind each piece, it is a good idea to carry out a keyword analysis. This will give you a clear picture of the content you currently have, which keywords it covers, and which landing page it relates to. At the same time, it gives you an overview of content and search intents that are relevant but not currently covered.
Website optimisation covers many different areas and initiatives. Whether your focus is on an SEO-friendly website, high user-friendliness, or more technical aspects such as speed optimisation – all of these are necessary to achieve the best possible results.
Google regularly updates its algorithm, which is used to rank websites in their search engine. Furthermore, Google places a high value on user-friendliness, as their main mission is to show users the best results according to search intent. Therefore, website optimisation, especially UX, is even more important.
Do you need help optimising your website? Our SEO team is ready to review your site and provide specific optimisation opportunities that will create a better user experience and, ultimately, more conversions.
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