5 Signs Your Website May be Poorly Optimized

Our businesses have made a huge amount of change and transition, especially over the last 3 years. We have needed to re-think our business plans, prioritise our investments and sometimes create something entirely new. Or even, some of our businesses haven’t needed to convert into the digital world as much as other companies or products. But recent experiences of lockdowns and restrictions, we have needed to re-create, and re-develop.

With the innovation of technology and huge challenges that arose during the pandemic, many of us resorted to online trade, sales and operations. From zoom meetings, to creating our own business pages and websites, there has been a massive transition for our ways of life.

There have also been some mistakes, and failed endeavours. But that doesn’t mean we have failed business or product. It could be a sign that it has not had enough or any kind of an online impact during a time when everyone had to trade on the www.

So here are 5 ways to spot out a poorly optimized website…

1. Page Views Have Decreased

Yes, this is fairly obvious, a low number of online traffic means lower sales and therefore poor optimization. But there are many ways we can increase these numbers, and broaden our potential clientele..

• SEO, SEO, SEO! I can’t stress this enough, Search Engine Optimization is vital to getting your website seen amongst millions of competitors. You need to constantly revise and update your SEO strategy.
• Refresh your webpages, update its look, colours, fonts, do a rebrand or add something new to the existing page. Update the page as often as possible!
• Use keywords and headers that have low competition, words or slogans that are rarely used in the international domain.
• Improve the load times and smoothness of the webpage, make sure it’s easy to open and scroll through. Nothing more frustrating than a page that constantly refreshes or crashes.

Use public software that can spot or fix any issues in the code of the webpages. They can go through thousands of lines of code to help identify the problem for you and fix it.

2. Time Spent on Your Site is Down

There is an average estimated time spent by consumers on websites, between 2-4 minutes, according to google analytics. So if the average time spent on your webpages is less than that, then customers aren’t engaging with your products as much as you’d potentially like them to. This increases the bounce rates and the drop in conversion. So..

• Make sure the website is smooth and easy to use and scroll through. Different devices, P.C, phone etc. come with different layouts and designs due to the size and power of the devices. Make sure all potential designs and devices are smooth and on-brand.
• Make sure the page is visually appealing, it needs to have images, videos or designs that catch the eye of the customer and keep them engaged.
• Improve the readability, make sure its legible and easy on the eye for the readers.

3. Broken Links & Pages

Often the time we come across a “404 error”, which says the link is broken or takes us to an entirely different page.

This could happen when we change, rename or move a webpage, but we forget to change the internal link, when a source has removed an article, pdf or video. It could also be third party changes to the URL that you have linked. A solution to this would depend on what exactly happened, if its third party, a moved webpage etc. But there is hope!

• Firstly, Use tools like WordPress plugins, Google search console or Xenu to audit and identify broken links.
• But, if the links are internal set 301 redirects
• If a third party removed the resource or page, point users to content that is similar or consider deleting the link entirely.

If it’s a 404 error, return them to the homepage or alternatively, if what they are looking for is missing, suggest users look at your latest products, video or article.

4. Ranking the Wrong Keywords

If your website is ranking for the wrong keywords, it will not generate high-qualified leads and clients. It’s an indicator that you’re missing some key points when it comes to web and SEO optimization. Your either going with competitive, commonly used keywords, and your content is thin, or the optimization is poorly done on-page.

• I recommend going for low competition keywords
• Update your posts to be at least 2000 words long
• Build backlinks, they allow for you to “sponge” off of high quality sites and help increase your rankings
• Use long form content, allows for more keywords and opportunities to get in detail on a subject
• Create intriguing, precise and organic title tags.
• Add unique META descriptions
• Add keywords to alt tags

Create an XML sitemap, adding canonical tags you can sidestep similar or duplicate content.

5. A Low Subscriber Rate

A subscriber rate is equal to the total number of conversions/sales divided by the total number of website sessions, multiplied by 100. For example, if your website has 10000 sessions every month that generates 100 subscribers,

We would say the subscriber/conversion rate = (100/10000)*100 = 1%

Across all the industries, it is hard to give exact figures for conversion rates, but we can say a good average is between 2-5%.

But there are some ways we can increase subscriber rates,

• We can create very competitive deals that excite the market
• Create posts and engagement in areas that genuinely stimulate your audience
• Add a news pop-up section to pages that see high traffic
• Create memberships, purchase benefits or sign up accounts that can get people to enter into competitions or get discounts on their purchases.

Don’t allow your investment and the opportunity of international trade go to waste, remember some of these pieces of advice when starting a business, webpage and to see if your website needs any improvements.