Four pretty easy steps to determining where your website shines and where it could use some SEO and AIO improvement
Here are some practical ways for a regular person to figure out what areas of your website need improvement for search engine optimization or AI search optimization.
The purpose of SEO is to ensure that your website draws in the people you want through search engines and these four easy steps are a good start.
A slow site is annoying to live visitors, doesn’t convert and ranks lower in search engines. If your site is too slow, you need to fix it before everything else.
Every page on your website should load in under two seconds. If it doesn’t, it’s probably not your web host’s fault. Some things to do to remedy it are to use a CDN like cloudflare and/or install a caching plugin. Some other reasons your site could be slow is a poorly designed theme or a plugin that is fetching information from somewhere else that is slowing things down. Live feeds from instagram or similar will often slow things down. If you have the ability to ‘lazy load’ images, videos and feeds, which is to have the items only load when they are needed, definitely turn that on. If your images are too large for the web that will slow things down as well. They should be no bigger than 1900 pixels wide and no larger than 1 MB. To check your speed, search for a ‘website speed test’ and run it on your home page and on the pages where customers make a purchase or purchase decision. There are several good free tools which will do this, and a few which will ask you to pay.
If the basic fixes above don’t help enough, your site will need professional help. Let me know if I can help.
Structured data are important for making sure search engines and AI undertstand your site and know how to contextualized the information on it. They provide a digested summary of the important facts in a format that external tools can use to answer questions and ultimately to refer people to you.
At a minimum your site should have an organization or person object on it. Product pages should have one product object for each product. Check to see if your site already contains the code to make this happen here: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
If you don’t have structured data, there are plugins you can use, or you can get a better fit by creating the json code snippets yourself or having them done by a web professional.
There are lots of tools created to identify the keywords your competitors are using and the ones that correspond to your product or service. The problem with these is that they don’t know your customers as well as you do, and will treat you as if you are the same as all the other companies in your industry. They can be helpful, but using your own business intelligence is important.
A smart strategy is to use empathy to anticipate the words your best clients or customers use to describe the product they want, in plain language. Anticipate what questions they have, list those on your site and then answer them. For a small business the strategy is not to use all the keywords, it is to use the specific keywords that best fit your unique qualities, those most valued by your best customers. If you provide a specialty product or service or fill a specialty need, the better you can articulate that the more specific your language can be.
Use this knowledge to write directly on these topics in your blog, and included these keywords on your product or services page. If you make blue bicycle helmets for dogs, then make sure you refer to them as blue bicycle helmets for dogs rather than aquamarine canine safety protective gear, or at least include both terms.
I usually interview my clients to glean this knowledge, and do some additonal research. Then I can provide the topics and keywords to you to write your own blog posts, or ghost-write them for you.
An alt tag is some wording put in the html of your image that says what the image shows. If you have product images on your site, they should all contain a plain language description of the item such as “Medium size pet rock in colour midnight sand (black)”. This again, makes it easier for search engines and AI to ‘see’ what is on your site and present it appropriately to searchers. If you aren’t a web specialist, you can use tools like this free one from the web accessibility initiative to check whether all your images have alt tags.
Note, not every image needs an alt tag. The images that need a tag are ones that are necessary to understand the page or take action on it (such as an image you click on to get somewhere), or images that you want to represent your brand such as images of products. Images that are purely decorative can be left without alt tags, although it doesn’t hurt to have them. Alt tags are particularly helpful for visually impaired visitors, and are useful for search engines as well.
Need a more in-depth audit or help implementing?
If you want a more in-depth audit, I offer a vidcall based review of your site, so we can review it together, and you can ask all your questions. If you need help with the more technical portions of your search engine and AI optimization, I encourage you to get in touch.
