- If a site takes longer than 2 seconds to load Google will limit the number of crawlers it sends to your site.
- If a site is slow it’ll take the crawler longer to crawl the site and it will not crawl as deep, because it is only allowed so much time on your site.
- If folks aren’t staying on your site long enough this will cause Google to loose trust in your site.
- If a site takes longer than 3 seconds to load 53% of the folks will bounce before the site loads.
Your site takes 2.2 seconds for the first content paint and you should be shooting for .3 milliseconds because at .5 Google saw a 20% drop in traffic.
And to fully load it takes your site 10.3 seconds to fully load so the site has some penalties.
To address the length of time people are staying on the site and the speed I'm going to tell you what I would do although not sure how long I can make this post.
POP-UPS
You should never use entry pop-ups.
They do more damage to user experience than just about anything other than load times.
When someone enters your site, they enter with a goal and an idea and you break their train of thought and take them out of that zone with your pop-up.
You’re putting up a barrier between your visitors and the information they’re seeking.
And exit pop-ups destroy brand credibility, it's a lot like spamming … it works but in the long run it’ll destroy your reputation.
They make you seem needy and insecure.
Ethan Zuckerman, the creator of the pop-ups apologized for creating one of the most hated tools online.
It makes for a bad user experience. And it's a bad marketing practice.
The fact that pop-up blockers are built into browsers prove this.
After market ad-blockers confirm it.
Get rid of the pop-ups and force yourself to build a stronger, healthier content strategy.
SLIDERS
Sliders cause ...
1.) banner blindness
2.) divides user’s attention
3.) kills conversions and never helps.
Check out a study by Notre Dame University web developer Erik Runyon.
Their slider received a click-through rate of barely 1% and almost all those were on the first image.
Beaconfire conducted a similar study with four different clients’ websites.
The CTR on these four sites were well under 1%, and again, the first image got the clicks.
I would remove the slider and add a Hero image with a call to action that touched on a problem that you solve.
Hero Images
If it was me I would add a hero image.
This is a full-width image that runs across the top of your page and doesn't use any whitespace.
It occupies the best real estate.
And it Demands Attention!
Images communicate 60,000 times faster than text.
And when you have .05 milliseconds to make a first impression ... you don't really have any ?
What you're looking for is an image-focused design.
Bold graphics that immediately engages the user and draws them in.
A hero image is the #1 best tool for communicating a message.
It's an introduction, elevator pitch, it immediately tells the visitor what your purpose is.
What you're wanting is an image that shows not just how a product looks but how it works.
An image that has an emotional impact, inspires, and reinforces the call to action, that is written on top of it.
The best way to sell a product is to let the product sell itself.
Emotion Overrides Logic!
Make sure the call to action has contrast in its colors, to make it jump out of the design and stand out the most on the page.
Show real people the same age as your target market and have them looking in the direction of the call to action.
Design different images for different devices to help with website load times.
Add a call to Action!
Make sure the call to action has contrast in its colors, to make it jump out of the design and stand out the most on the page.
Show real people the same age as your target market and have them looking in the direction of the call to action.
Design different images for different devices to help with website load times.
A good CTA can prevent boredom, fatigue, and breath life, meaning, and understanding into your content.
Users need direction, they need to know what to do next.
Your CTA is what encourages potential customers to stay engaged.
You've got to give short and strong orders that persuade, engage, and get a click.
It starts with a verb
- Buy
- Download
- Subscribe
- Shop
- Order
- Reserve
- Save
- Add
- Act
- View
- Learn
- See
- Find
- Pick
- Continue
and ends with an adverb, subject or both.
- Add to Cart
- Act Now
- Buy and Save
- Do not buy unless
- Add to Cart
- Learn More
- See More
- See How
- Find Out
- Check it Out
- Click here
- Buy my ebook
You can also use numbers ...“Buy now and get 50% off!”
Make a promise ...“Rank #1 in just 30 days!”
Add urgency ... “Limited time"
But its your job to tell me what to do next.
Images
Take all your images, resize them and optimize them for the search engines.
Resize all of them to their correct size and optimize them for speed. Done correctly it’ll pay for itself because images are normally easy to rank, because nobody has the time to optimize them correctly.
And the way you do this is by making a list of keywords that get good traffic and show buyer intent for your product.
You name the name of the folder you're putting your images in the name of your main keyword.
And you name the images the name of the keyword that best describes the image.
You add alt text targeting the keyword you used in the image name. Good descriptive alt text with the keyword you want to rank for included in the text. Keep in mind that this is the text that shows when the image is loading and when a screen reader describes the image.
This will improve web load times and intern improve Google rankings.
And then optimize your descriptions with a call to action and use the 325 character limit because the idea is to rank the images, get free traffic, and have the site pay for itself.
Social Media Links
Links to social media sites just makes no sense.
1.) They bleed pagerank and hurt your Google’s rankings.
2.) They could get you fined in California and more states are following.
3.) And they send your traffic to a site you don’t control.
You want to get traffic from the social media sites and not send traffic to the social media sites.
And tests by major corporations have shown that they actually hurt more than they help with regards to likes and shares. And that's the only reason for having them.
Social media sites are a tool for getting traffic and nothing else.
The idea is to get traffic from those sites to your site and not to send traffic from your site to those sites.
Your bleeding link juice, sending traffic to places you don’t control and could get finned because of it.
Your goal once on the site should be to convert them into a customer and not to get a like or share on social media site.
Likes and shares on social media sites should come from the people that are currently on the social media sites and not from people on your site ready to make a purchase.
Controlling Link Juice
You need to organize everything by category.
You would have widgets and in widgets you would have blue widgets, red widgets, and under blue widgets you would have blue widgets with round holes and so on and so on.
Each of these categories and their subcategories will create pages and these pages will link back and fourth to other categorizes and back up to the main category.
Every page on your site starts with some form of link juice … it has to for a mathematical formula to work.
By linking these pages together you are controlling link juice and done correctly you’ll be able to get any page on your site indexed just by sending link juice to it.
So the more subcategories you come up with the more link juice you have to flow.
The next thing you want to do is get links to these subcategories from …
- Commenting
- Directories
- RSS feed
- Discounts
- Guest Blogging
- Local Listings
- Niche Directories
- Profile Links
- Q&A Sites
- Reclaim 404s
- Slideshare Presentations
- Coupons
- Video Submissions
- Write Testimonials
- Reviews
- Create a Blog
- Forum Posting
- Newspaper Sites
- Podcasts
- Help A Reporter Out (HARO)
- How-to Guides and Tutorials
- Infographics
- Instructographics
- Internal Links
- Niche Communities
- Press Releases
The more external links you can get to these pages the more powerful they will become and the more often they will get crawled and indexed.
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