The Biggest Mistake Your Web Designer is Making

The Biggest Mistake Your Web Designer is Making that will Affect your SEO

It’s one issue I come across consistently when performing SEO audits. It’s a simple fix that starts with your web designer or developer.

We often leave the designing and development of our websites to outsourced professionals, then hire or perform SEO once a site is live. The issue lies in the fact that website designers are often unaware of SEO best practices. They design with your specifications in mind, and develop your site with all the bells and whistles you request. Unfortunately, they may lack the ability to guide you in the best direction for website ranking.

A site not developed for SEO can contain heavy HTML that increases page load times, Javascript which negatively impacts your SEO, or stock images that can lead to issues with the way your site loads.

The best way to rank your site quickly is to hire an SEO professional when developing or redesigning your site. Your SEO can work with your designers and developer to ensure that code is structured properly and that everything is optimized for better performance before your site goes live.

So what’s the biggest mistake your web designer can make? Designers often use stock images to fill your site. While the use of images on your site is important for user experience, they can also significantly increase the time it takes for your site to load. Too many images with large file sizes can cause your site to load disjointed, which provides a poor user experience. Long loading times can lead to high bounce rates, lower time per page, and inevitably lower rankings.

The Good News

It’s easy to decrease your page load time by compressing your website images before they’re uploaded to your site. Your designer can remove current images and upload compressed images which will decrease load times and improve your site’s performance.

There are many easy ways to compress or reduce your image file sizes. You can do so in editors like Photoshop, but TinyPNG is a free tool that works as well.

Contact us today to receive your free SEO site audit and improve the way people interact and engage with your website.

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admin February 8, 2017 0 Comments

Heatmap Technology Can Save You Thousands in Search Marketing Spend

Why are they leaving?

One of the most important aspects of campaign management is optimization. As a search marketing or pay per click campaign manager part of the job is consistently making tweaks to keywords, ad copy, and yes landing pages in order to improve campaign performance.

You can decrease CPCs, improve quality scores and engage users, but if they bounce before converting all your efforts are wasted.

If you have what you believe is a fully optimized landing page (fast load times, keyword and quality rich ad copy, lead gen form above the fold, etc.) with poor performance you can test visitor interaction with a heatmapping tool.

A heatmap is a graphical overlay of your website which uses different colors to describe what content is “hot” and not on your page. Heatmap technology typically tracks where a visitor clicks, but more advanced versions can track eye and scroll movements.

Heatmaps are relatively inexpensive, and easy to install. There are free trials and free versions which you can use to gain powerful insights about your site visitors.

What Heatmaps Teach Us

Heatmaps give users a glimpse into the minds of site users. Where users click can be especially significant if you have ads or a lead gen form on your page. It’s important to know if users are clicking away to your main site, or missing ads due to placement.

With this knowledge you can gain insight into the performance of everything from the color of your site, content and ad placement, page copy, outbound and inbound links.

Heatmap Options

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a popular heat mapping tool, because it’s easy to use and inexpensive. The company provides a free 60 day trial. After the initial trial period plan pricing starts at just $9 a month for up to 10 pages. To install Crazy Egg heatmap tracking, you simply copy the code provided into your site HTML. Instructions are provided. Once installed you can use the platform to test the code, and get confirmation that tracking is live.

Mouseflow

Mouseflow claims to be the #1 heatmap and session replay tool on the market. What makes Mouseflow unique is you can actually view recordings of your visitors interacting with your site. This can prove valuable when users aren’t clicking on your pages. You can see what they scroll over, what they avoid, and what causes them to bounce without converting. Mouseflow offers a free plan for 100 recorded sessions of 1 domain. They also offer a 30 day money back guarantee for their paid plans. Paid plans start at $19 a month.

Ptengine

Ptengine provides analytics for both heat and scroll maps. Unlike other heatmaps, Ptengine allows the user to differentiate between interactive and non-interactive elements of a site. With this tool you can gain insights into clicks on buttons, images, videos, drop down menus and more. With the Scroll Reach Map you can determine the percentage of visitors scrolling to specific sections of your page, and get insights into why your visitors are leaving once they land. There is a free trial for up to 20,000 page views a month for 1 domain. Plan pricing starts at $39 a month for 50,000 page views and up to 20 domains.

Landing page optimization is not voluntary it’s vital to the success of your organic and paid campaigns. Contact I Dream of SEO today to learn more about our landing page and website services or to inquire about paid campaign management.

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admin February 8, 2017 0 Comments