Website Critiques
What Are The Key Components of a High Quality website?
Is your website working for you? Do you know what makes a quality website?
There are four key elements you must have for a quality website to attract users and rank with Google.
- Compelling and Engaging Content,
- Brand Authority,
- Web Structure & Navigation,
- Mobile Compliance
Below are the minimum components you need to critique your website!
Compelling and Engaging Content
Is your website designed to fulfill it’s purpose?
- Are you marketing using great content on your website?
- Are you attracting new leads and clients?
- Are those new leads and clients taking your desired action eg: are they buying?
Great content marketing is how you attract new people to your website who have no idea who you are but it also needs to take your visitors on a purposeful journey to take actions. Sure lots of visitors to your website is great, not so great if no-one is buying or your phone isn’t ringing
The only way that people will find you on the web using non-paid general search or searching specifically for a brand is through the content you have on your website.
The better your content the greater opportunity you have of getting more traffic, leads and ultimately sales from your website.
Brand Authority
Are your potential customers finding you or are they finding your competitors instead?
In order to rank high with Google your website overall must have content with plenty of value. This means providing quality answers that satisfy searchers questions.
But not only do you need to ‘impress’ Google, you also need to impress visitors when they come to your site.
Does your site have plenty of detailed information answering questions. Or do you have only a few pages with minimum information which is all about You!?
Web Structure and Navigation
Does your website guide your visitors through your website from 1st impression to point of sale?
Is your website a well-planned and well-organized site with linking relevant pages… all helping the searcher and therefore Google easily find their way around your site.
- If it’s unplanned, disorganized and jumbled then users get lost hunting for information and give up.
- Google can’t crawl around your site quickly or know what your site is about so that it can bring up your pages when people are searching
- you can’t track what users are doing on your site so that you can guide them to your ‘check-out’
When people arrive at your site they need to clearly see the information they seek and need to be easily led around the site so that they end up buying from you.
Site structure is often ignored by web designers. How about your site?
Mobile Compliance
Is your website setup to provide the best user experience for your visitors on their mobile?
You may think your website is setup correctly eg: mobile responsive … but
- does Google think so?
- do your visitors think so?
- have you actually tried to use your website on your mobile yourself?
Your mobile pages must be set up differently to your desktop pages although use the same principles
If your website is NOT properly setup for mobile, it will now affect how your website appears in a desktop search.
Your website must now be mobile friendly in addition to being mobile responsive.
Mobile Site speed loading with mobile must be your top priority.
Google’s requirement now is that mobile pages must load in under 1 second. This will now start to be the key factor with mobile rankings which are different to desktop rankings with this being based on the mobile version of your website.