Onsite SEO: Getting the Most Out of Your Website

You’ve spent your time building a fabulous website, integrating your keywords into your content, promoting your site, building links, and here we are a few months/years later. Are you where you wanted to be with your website? Do you receive the most traffic you could, with the highest conversion rates, and super low bounce rates? Probably not.

The web has changed, and is constantly changing, at a rapid pace. There are new studies, theories, and best practices’ guides available to help you understand the rapidly changing industry. But, it’s very rare that one person could possibly consume, understand, and apply all of that knowledge. That’s why it’s likely that you aren’t getting the most out of your site.

What did you do wrong?
Developing a website takes time, money, knowledge, and a bit of power. There are no tried and true methodologies involved in making your site perform, it’s all about practice, measurement, and skill. So the answer is: You did nothing wrong.

What can you do to make it right?
You can start by examining each of your onsite issues and fixing the problems. Sure, this can be timely and costly, but you won’t fix your overall issues if you don’t examine and troubleshoot components of your websites foundation.

Conversions: Site not converting as well as you had hoped? Get your hands on every piece of content on conversion optimization, and start troubleshooting: is your copy compelling, is your conversion funnel easy for the visitor to complete, have you looked at your call to actions lately, etc…. Examine each of these areas and determine what could potentially be to blame. Run A/B tests, monitor, and slowly make changes to see if conditions improve.

Traffic: Less than favorable amount of traffic to your site? Check out your search engine rankings: not number 1? Get there. It’s been shown that with a #1 ranking you’ll receive roughly 1/3rd of the traffic, whereas a #2 ranking will yield a little over 1/8th of the traffic. There are many things one can do to examine the reason or their reduced rankings, and troubleshooting this issue might not be easy. Look at tools like http://www.seomoz.org/trifecta tool, or some of the free website analyzer tools out there on the web. While none of these will be completely accurate, at least it can get you on your way to examining some potentially serious problems.

Bounce Rates: Visitors not staying on your site long? Do a thorough examination of your site and figure out why: how are visitors getting to your site, what keywords are they using, and why aren’t they finding what they need when they get to your site? Pop-ups, font colors, misleading text, misdirected traffic, the wrong keywords, the wrong content, etc…could all be to blame. Check out these 9 reasons yours website can have a high bounce rate.

Architecture: There are so many website architecture issues that could be preventing you from high rankings, higher conversions, and attributing to your bounce rate. Brushing up on what’s ‘hot’ in website architecture by reading some blogs, attending webinars, and in general getting familiar with what the industry standard has been will help you in troubleshooting your onsite website architecture issues.

I’ve only covered a small part of the onsite factors attributed to getting the most out of your site. More information will be covered on the upcoming August 12th webinar by my colleagues at Vertical Measures: “Onsite SEO: Building a Solid Foundation For Your Website”. If you miss the webinar, be sure to check out the recorded version posted on the Vertical Measures webinar page.

What current issues are you having with your website? Share with us in the comments below.