SEO and The Lessons It Teaches Us
There are lessons learned in all aspects of life. When we are children we learn to sense who is a friend and who is a thread or danger. The way we react is also a lesson in itself. We share a smile for a friend, and a flight response to a threat or danger. How does this relate to SEO? Well, I’m glad you asked. In optimizing websites for SEO we have learned a few key lessons, which we will share here today.
SEO Lesson #1 is Doing Nothing Will Yield Nothing!
The fact that the search engine admins are willing to tell us of the best practices we can do for our website to perform well is a key indicator of the need to do something. H Tags, Meta Data, Keywords, Readability, Alt Tags, etc… these are the basic building blocks for good SEO. I remember building my first website on Microsoft FrontPage. As tedious as it was to code the pages in the tool’s backend, it was an exercise to using those basic building blocks. As we advanced to CMS like WordPress, it became less common for people to continue those practices though making it easier to create pages, but at the same time allowing us to overlook the need for carrying on with the best practices inherent in the old page creators.
The SEO Things We Can Always Improve Upon
Adding keyword rich content; making our content rich in the desired keywords is of the most common mistake. Make sure your content highlights and uses your desired keywords richly, and by that I mean don’t skimp on the keywords. If I google Apple Sauce, the top resulting pages [one in particular All Recipes] uses that keyword 52 times. Now noted, some of the keyword usage is dynamically pulled from published posts yes. But this is the strength of the new CMS platforms – hey you can do that!
Adding clear call(s) to action; your page ranks well, the SEO is great, and once the visitor is on your page… he does not know what to do next. This is failure to capitalize on your traffic. Once on your website, visitors should have a clear and present call to action: what is it you want them to do? Join? Read? Submit their contact data? Reach out to you or call you? If so, then tell them that is what you want from them. I personally think that the supermarket or department store syndrome overtakes our logic when it comes to web design and development. Department stores continually move their merchandise around. Today the envelopes are in isle 10 and tomorrow they are on isle 17. Why is that? In a department store the more you walk around, the logic is that the more likely you will be attracted to and purchase more items then you come for. This is NOT true on a website visit. If your visitors are not engaged in fractions of seconds, they will leave your website.
SEO Dictates You Clearly Define What Your Business Does or Offers
What is it you can do for them? All the work of getting visitors to your website and they do not know what you do or can do for them? On our website’s homepage the very first thing you will see is that we are experts in WordPress, Wild Apricot, E-Commerce design and development… to the right of that you will see a contact form for visitors to take action. Below our initial hero image we provide a little more detail about WordPress, Wild Apricot, E-Commerce. Finally, for in-depth detail visitors can navigate to a product specific pages. On every page of our website and on the footer area there is a contact form for visitors to contact us and ask for more information, a quote, or questions in general about us or our services. What you do needs to be clear and in your visitor’s face. Otherwise, they will go elsewhere to find it.
Testimonials Always Help Sell a Potential Client
How they decide; ask yourself the question – when I visit websites today and shop or search for items, are the reviews [aka testimonials] for the website or product important to me? I would answer ‘Heck Yeah’ they are! Think about it. How often do we find an item and start the purchase process only to learn from the reviews that this is NOT what I want or am willing to risk my money on? Very often I personally abandon an online purchaes after reading reviews. I would say about 75% of the time I don’t buy the item or contact the vendor based on reading the reviews. This means that I only purchase 1 of 4 items I consider buying online due to poor reviews.
Now I know you may say to yourself, but we are a member or trade organization and we do not work like that. Well, that’s a mistake. Some of your greatest proponents are your members. How they view your organization is key to others. Unless you are the only association on the planet that caters to a genre, other associations may be more attractive to prospective members simply because they do a better job presenting them with the views of its member base.
As always Nicasio Design and Development is a partner of the Wild Apricot membership service. We are an expert WordPress and E-Comemrce design and development team. Let us know how we can help. Contact us today.