Small business's guide to website optimization

Website optimization is an essential ingredient if you’re looking to attract traffic and generate sales. Here are some web optimization techniques you might find useful and some of the best website optimization tools to improve your performance.
What is website optimization?
In its most basic form, web optimization is the improvement of your user experience in order to boost the conversation rate on your business website. Every small business wants its customers to do something on the website. This can include getting in touch, submitting a lead form, or signing up for a newsletter. These actions are called conversions.
When your visitors do what you want them to do on your website, it means that your “conversation rate” is increasing. The better your website optimization, the more likely is that your visitors will convert.
Web optimization, in a sense, is a scientific process for improving the performance of your small business website. You come up with a hypothesis that you think will improve your conversion rate and then you test that hypothesis. If the hypothesis is right, you change your website to your new and improved design. If you’re wrong, you go back to the original design.
With the help of website optimization, you learn about your target audience, about their preferences and their dislikes. Through regular testing and optimizing, you’ll end up with a website that it’s ideal for your target audience but a website that you would never have come up with on your own.
How to optimize my webpage?
Let’s say that you’re in the carpets small business. You write a detailed article on a topic that’s relevant to your target audience. You invest hours into putting it together and you include tons of examples, tips and tricks, and anecdotes. You click publish and wait for potential customers to come in bulk. Only they don’t.
What did you do wrong? Is there something you missed? Yes, you forgot to use the right tools to optimize your webpage. Without the proper tools, not a single visitor is going to find your article and convert into a customer.
You haven’t included meta tags, relevant keywords, and H tags to help Google figure out what you’re writing about. There’s no form for people to sign up for your email list. Users can’t figure out how to purchase your services or products. You need the best website optimization tools to generate traffic and conversions.
If you wish to draw as many people as possible and give them every reason to convert, you’ll need the help of some of the best website optimization tools.
What are some of the best website optimization tools?
Website optimization tools are crucial for building traffic and convincing that traffic to convert on your offers. Here are some of the best website optimization tools you can start using today.
Google search console
Google Search Console is one of the best optimization tools you will find quite useful. Anyone who has a website can monitor how Google views their site and optimizes its organic presence, for free. You can view your referring domains, mobile site performance, rich search results, and highest-traffic queries and pages.
If you want to start using the tool, you should add your website to Google Search Console and verify it. You can easily verify it on your website by installing a code. It’s just a brief snippet of HTML.
Once you install the tool, it will begin collecting information and tell you how much traffic you’re getting, where your traffic is coming from, your bounce rate, and more.
GTmetrix
Google announced its Speed Update in 2018. They reported that the load speed of your webpage will impact your rankings. Meaning, search engines will be able to crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your indexation.
There’s another downside to slow-loading web pages. Page speed is important to user experience. Your visitors won’t sit around and wait for a page to load. They’ll leave your website and go to your competitors. Pages that take a longer time to load have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Conversations are also negatively affected by longer load times.
If you wish to improve the load speed of your web pages, you can use a tool like GTmetrix. It’s a tool that can analyze the speed performance of your page, for free. After the analysis, the tool will generate scores for your pages and offer actionable recommendations on how to fix them.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most popular tool you can use to measure the visitors to your small business. It’s a really powerful web optimization service that has a nice, clean user interface, and is free of charge. This tool will help you see what’s working well on your website, what’s not working, and help you make decisions about “what to do next.”
Google Analytics will help you gain important insights into:
- User type (age, location, sex, etc.)
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
- Abandonment rate
Moz
Moz is another important website optimization tool to put in your arsenal. It’s a tool that tells you what people are searching for when they find your website. The rankings tools tell you where you stand among your competitors.
What’s more, Moz shows any issues that might prevent Google or other search engines from crawling your website. You can also use Moz to receive alerts about pressing site issues that could negatively affect your rankings and traffic.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that allows you to crawl websites’ URLs and find key elements to analyze and audit technical and onsite SEO. It’s one of the best website optimization tools that you can download for free, or purchase a license for additional advanced features.
The tool can help you:
- Find broken links and server errors.
- Analyze page titles and meta descriptions.
- Discover duplicate content.
- Review Robots and Directives.
- Speed issues with downloading your pages.
In Conclusion
Website optimization should be part of your business strategy and should never stop. Ongoing analysis and measurement of your website analytics will provide you with ample feedback to make sure you’re making the users and the search engines happy.
Choose the right set of optimization tools to attract and convert traffic. Your competitors are most likely using them already and you must keep pace. If you don’t want to do the time-consuming work yourself, you can always work with a web builder and let it automatically generate a perfectly optimized website for your local business.