5 Ways To Easily Improve Website Accessibility
What is Website Accessibility?
Website Accessibility refers to making sure that websites are designed in such a way that enables people with disabilities to successfully use them.
According to the Web Accessibility Initiative, this means ensuring people can not only understand and interact with websites, but also contribute to the Web as a whole, regardless of any auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical or visual impairments.
The most referenced set of accessibility standards, used by the likes of The Bureau of Internet Accessibility (BOIA), are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as POUR.
Let’s take a quick look at these…
P – Perceivable
This means that information and any actual user interface/interactive elements should be perceivable despite a disabled user visiting the site. In the words of the BOIA, “Information cannot be invisible to their senses.”
For example, ensuring that all images have alt-text so visually impaired visitors can still interact with the webpage.
O – Operable
This one is pretty self-explanatory – the website and its functions must actually work, and functionality cannot require the user to interact with the site in a manner prevented by their disability.
For example, designing a clear and easily usable navigation and site structure.
U – Understandable
The information presented on a website, and the navigation/user interface as a whole, must be able to be understood by the user. This is a basic component of building a successful user experience, and should be an absolute priority.
For example, ensuring that on-page text is readable and clear.
R – Robust.
How can a website be described as robust? This refers to ensuring that a website is built to be compatible with assistive technologies, and that investment is made in the website on an ongoing basis to maintain compatibility with emerging assistive technologies.
Why Does Website Accessibility Matter?
Whilst web accessibility might seem like a niche issue, this could not be further from the truth. Research suggests that over 70% of users with access needs will leave a website if they find it difficult to use, and 92% of us are more likely to support a business that is accessible.
There are three main reasons why web accessibility matters…
1 – The Social Impact of Web Accessibility
Over 15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability. That’s 1 in 6 of us!
Think of how many times you use the internet or a web-based service in your daily life. The average person uses the internet for a whopping 415 minutes (over 6 hours) a day!
Whether it’s for shopping, booking appointments, consuming entertainment, speaking to family and friends, or keeping up with the news, we’re reliant on frictionless access to the internet.
The ability to access the web and successfully interact with services allows those living with a disability to participate in a society that is becoming increasingly digital.
By ensuring your website is as accessible as possible, you are removing barriers and enabling disabled visitors to go about their day without unnecessary resistance.
2 – Legally Protecting Your Business For Accessibility
To further emphasise the importance of access to the internet, did you know that many countries have protected web accessibility under the law, such as the EU’s ‘European Accessiblity Act’ and the US’ ADA laws?
Brands ignoring accessibility run the risk of being accused of discriminating against disabled individuals, and can find themselves in legal trouble. Even Beyonce has fallen short of this, and was sued for breaking ADA laws in 2019.
3 – Financial Incentives for Accessibility
Finally, there’s the financial incentive for accessibility. In the UK alone, online retailers lose over £11 Billion due to poor accessibility on their websites.
By ensuring your website is accessible, you are allowing your site to be functional to millions of potential customers who otherwise would not be able to shop with you.
So, not only is there a moral imperative to make your website accessible, you are giving your business an opportunity to engage with a huge portion of the market.
That’s a win-win!
So, How Do I Check My Site’s Accessibility?
Thankfully, it’s easy to check how accessible your website is.
There are a couple of options here, but we think the easiest way to get insight into your website is to use a tool like WAVE.
This is a free evaluation tool that produces an actionable report for your webpage. You can use their website, or download the chrome extension to make it even easier to assess accessibility.
For more information on WAVE, watch this video for a real-world tutorial on how you can use it to review your website:
How Can I Easily Improve Website Accessibility?
Now we’ve established just how important web accessibility is, it’s a good job that plenty of accessibility improvements are incredibly easy to implement.
Covering site structure, development, and design – here are some easy fixes you can make to ensure your website works for those with disabilities…
1 – Alt Tags for Images
One of the easiest ways to make a positive impact on your site accessibility is to ensure you are inputting alt-tags to your images.
Alt-tags are sometimes also called alt-descriptions, and they perform a very important role in helping visually impaired visitors successfully navigate your site.
Without alt-tags in place, a screen reader may read out an ugly and confusing file name or, worse still, skip the image entirely. This risks hiding incredibly important information from site users.
So, when you’re adding images to your site remember to add alt-text – here is a step-by-step guide to help you on your way.
2 – Font Selection & Sizes
Font size is of great importance to those visiting your site with visual impairments.
Fonts that are too small risk being illegible to those with disabilities, so make sure your default font size is of reasonable scale.
In addition, make sure you select a font that is clearly legible and avoid stylistically complicated fonts. Whilst they may look like cool designs, they often come at the expense of clarity.
3 – Colour Contrast
Poor colour contrasts are repeat offenders in the world of accessibility.
If your site features/sections/content have poorly considered colour palettes and weak contrasts, you risk providing a terrible experience for disabled visitors.
There are plenty of free colour contrast checkers available, like this one from WebAIM or this one which is also a useful plugin. Sites with good contrast scores help visually impaired visitors navigate through your content and distinguish between various site elements.
4 – Make Videos Accessible
Sites that are heavily reliant on video-based media are often very problematic for disabled visitors to engage with.
Luckily, there are plenty of ways to make videos accessible. You can use sites like Rev to easily create accurate transcripts and captions.
Putting in the effort to provide captions can boost marketing efforts across the board, with nearly 70% of marketers finding that captioned videos outperformed their uncaptioned counterparts.
It’s also worth asking if you need videos at all. Can text be used just as effectively? Understanding that a video-heavy site may leave 1/6th of your potential audience in the dark could mean reconsidering how much site media you want to rely on instead of text.
5 – Maintain Title Hierarchy
When writing your blog and page content, make sure you’re sticking to the heading hierarchy using <h> tags from <h1> (biggest) to <h6> (smallest).
This helps users visit your site with the assistance of screen readers, and is actually the best practice for SEO too!
So, you should use <h1> for your main blog or page title, <h2> for any headings that follow on from this on the same page, <h3> for subheadings, and follow suit up to <h6> for mini headlines!
Can Wilkes Wood Help Make My Site Accessible?
Yes, we can!
We can work with you to turn your site into a more accessible, inclusive version. After running an evaluative audit, we can then help you work through visual and technical changes to improve the accessibility of your online presence.
For more information on this, and to book a free discovery call, please get in touch today!
Website Maintenance - Why It Matters And What You Can Do
What Is Website Maintenance?
Contrary to popular belief, a website is never “done”.
Sure, there are very set stages in a website build process, resulting in the delivery of a “final” product, but that’s only the start of the journey.
Once a website has been launched, it requires frequent maintenance in order to get the most out of your investment – without this, you’re likely leaving some significant results on the table and potentially allowing your website to become something that damages your brand instead of benefiting it.
A common metaphor for website maintenance is that of a vehicle’s MOT.
Pretend you’ve gone and purchased the fanciest, most expensive, top-of-the-range car off the forecourt. It looks, drives, and sounds amazing.
Then, for the next few years, ignore any warning lights, services, oil changes, or tyre changes and never get it cleaned.
Chances are you’re going to have some faulty features and, at worst, something that’s potentially now dangerous.
It’s the same for your website.
Why Does Website Maintenance Matter?
There are a number of reasons why website maintenance matters, but none of them are more important than this: if you invest in a website, you want a return on this investment in some way, shape, or form.
If that’s an e-commerce website, then you want sales. If you’re chasing lead generation, it might be phone calls or form submissions.
To put it simply: your website is there to serve a purpose.
Regular maintenance ensures that you’re getting the most out of your investment, avoiding potential downtime (which costs you money) and making sure your content is fresh, up-to-date and doing its job.
Let’s take a look at what this means for a few key areas…
SEO & UX
I’ve grouped SEO and UX as there are many similarities between the two disciplines, and what matters to search engines is increasingly what matters to people too.
Regular maintenance ensures that your site is responding to changes in algorithms, which can be pretty vital to the organic reach of your website.
By keeping up to date with industry developments, you can ensure that you are not only maintaining previous progress but retrospectively bringing your entire site and content up to speed at regular intervals.
Your website is there to provide value to site visitors. It can’t do this if they’re not visiting, and they won’t visit if you’re not being shown to them on search engine results pages.
When they’re actually on your site, you want to leave a positive impression – that’s why keeping on top of your page speed, fixing broken links and page elements, ensuring your site is fully responsive and making sure content is up to date are all vital to long term success.
Consistency/Authority
You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you probably do. People are picky – so picky, in fact, that the average person takes just 0.05 seconds to form an initial impression of your website.
If your content is riddled with spelling mistakes, images that won’t load, slow pages and out-of-date blogs, people will judge your website negatively and by extension consider your business to be amateur.
Regular maintenance ensures that you are giving yourself the best chance of generating a favorable response and engaging your audience to consider your brand authoritative and trustworthy!
Site Security
Finally, we have site security. Keeping your website secure is of paramount importance, and it’s often something that business owners overlook, sometimes to their peril!
Keeping admin permissions up-to-date, changing passwords, updating plugins, SSL certificates, hosting and regularly backing up your website can all contribute to securing your site and protecting your content.
How Do I Maintain A Website?
Good site maintenance is performed regularly, with different tasks requiring attention at different intervals. Whilst this list is not exhaustive, here’s some tasks split into weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly maintenance to get you started!
Weekly Maintenance Checklist
- Check your web pages for obvious errors in loading or content.
- Ensure your site is backed up and that previous versions of your site have backed up successfully.
- Check for broken external and internal links.
- Check for errors or redirects.
- Check that your contact/submission forms are functioning properly.
- Post keyword driven content to your blog.
- Reply to blog comments and clear spammy entries.
- Check Social Media feeds work & sharing functions are operating correctly.
Monthly Maintenance Checklist
- Conduct a site speed test and ensure you follow any recommended actions.
- Review your website analytics and identify any opportunities for optimisation.
- Review SEO audits and follow recommended actions.
- Review security scans & update plugins.
- Test site across different browsers.
Quarterly Maintenance Checklist
- Conduct a full SEO review and analyse organic traffic compared to last quarter.
- Conduct a full site performance audit, analysing performance compared to last quarter and tracking your progress towards key objectives.
- Check all graphics and images are loading, optimised and accurate.
- Test your site across all devices to ensure responsiveness.
- Optimise your forms, buttons and calls to action.
- Review admin accounts, alter/remove permissions and update passwords if necessary.
- Check for any algorithm updates/industry news that could affect your performance.
Yearly Maintenance Checklist
- Renew your domain and SSL certificates.
- Compare hosting packages and renew, update or change hosting provider.
- Conduct a full website audit and consider major updates or redesign.
- Update statistics, links, copyright symbols, and anything related to the current year (such as your footer copyright claim).
- Conduct a full and comprehensive audit of your copy to ensure it is still reflective of your business practice, prices, and update your portfolio, testimonials, etc.
- Review your blog – identify your top performing content and see if it can be further optimised.
- Remove outdated content or features that no longer serve your site.
Can We Help You Maintain Your Website?
Yes!
To continue my metaphor of maintaining a vehicle…
Sometimes you might want to invest time and effort into fixing your car yourself.
Other times, you might think it’s more appropriate to leave it to the experts and book it into the garage.
We can help maintain your website, regardless of whether we built it or not.
We have a variety of support packages available, as well as SEO packages for content production too.
Get in touch with us today for an obligation-free chat and we’ll see where we can add value and help you get the most out of your website!
Is E-commerce Still Worth It In 2023? 5 Facts You Need To Know
The e-commerce industry has been growing at an unprecedented rate in recent years. But with the rise of online shopping giants and a waning pandemic, is selling online still worth it in 2023?
The answer is yes.
Whether you’re an aspiring dropshipper or experienced e-commerce entrepreneur, there are 5 important facts we think you should know about the state of the e-commerce industry.
E-commerce is still growing - in fact, it never slowed down
At this point, it’s fairly well known that the pandemic played a significant role in the surge of online retail sales in 2020.
From 2019 to 2020 alone, online leaped from 13.8% to 17.8% (Statista) as a global percentage of sales. Now, compare that to a previous jump of 1.6% YoY growth the year prior.
So, this was clearly an anomaly, right? Yes and no. As a matter of fact, e-commerce continues to show no signs of slowing, and the momentum from 2020 has continued to gather.
Despite a slowing global market, conflict in Europe, and a struggling supply infrastructure, online retail sales are expected to account for 21% of all global retail sales in 2022. Better yet, future projections are even brighter with online shoppers expected to make up 24.5% of all global retail by 2025.
Did you know e-commerce only accounted for 7.4% of retail commerce in 2015 compared to 21% in 2022?
Whether we like it or not, people just prefer to shop at home
A leading cause of failure for businesses is the inability to react and adapt to the wants and needs of their customers.
For a large, and growing, portion of the population (particularly younger generations), purchasing goods and services from the comfort of our homes is simply preferred over bustling, busy markets.
That isn’t to say the high street is dead – not yet, at least; and although the Covid Pandemic triggered a surge in online commerce and accelerated online sales growth, the trajectory was already set in stone.
Mobile is completely taking over e-commerce
Does it surprise you that 72.9% of all online sales in 2021 were made on mobile phones? Compare that to roughly half (52.4%) in 2016.
These figures are astonishing and really do highlight the behavioural changes of consumers globally. If you’re looking to start your own online business and want one thing to take away from this article, let it be this: optimise for mobile, optimise for mobile, optimise for mobile.
How often have you visited a website looking to buy something you know you need – credit card at hand – only to be completely dissuaded by slow loading times and an exhausting user interface?
You should be an easy conversion – a guaranteed customer, only you weren’t, due to a few simple mobile optimisations lacking on the store.Just to put things into perspective, e-commerce sites can gain a 35% increase in conversation rates with an optimised checkout page. Now, imagine the edge you could have over your competitors if you simply ensure your website experience is smooth on mobile phones!
Dropshipping is definitely not dead
The dropshipping business model is fantastic for entrepreneurs who are looking to start their own business with low up-front investment and fewer risks. You don’t have to worry about manual fulfilment and you don’t need to rent a warehouse or purchase bulk stock.
In fact, dropshipping is how we first started in e-commerce!
Yet, many online have preached ‘dropshipping is dead!’ as e-commerce explodes and advertising is becoming more efficient than ever.
Alibaba, an international Chinese supplier and one of the largest players in dropshipping reported an increase of 29% year-over-year revenue from 2020 to 2021.
If you’re looking to test the waters of e-commerce, there’s no better business model than dropshipping. Later down the line, if you’ve managed to find a successful product and profitable business model, you can always order stock directly and even brand your own packaging. This will not only improve your shipping times, but you could improve your profitability significantly.
With market growth comes further competition
The importance of having a high quality brand and visually appealing website in 2022 can’t be overstated. Consumers on social media are increasingly bombarded with retail advertising, and each year more and more people start their own online businesses.
What does this mean? Advertising costs are increasing. This year alone, Facebook’s average CPC (Cost Per Click) has increased to $0.44 compared to $0.38 in 2021, according to AdEspresso. Acquiring customers is becoming more expensive.
This is why it is essential that your product offering and e-commerce store is conversion optimised, easy to navigate and beautifully designed. If you’re looking for a high quality e-commerce store, there are many qualified and highly professional designers and specialists out there. Wilkes Wood have specialised in web design for over 4+ years – feel free to email or give us a call at any time and we’ll be happy to chat about your project!
Need help designing your e-commerce store? Get in touch with us today!
Exploring Our Web Design Process
Great websites don’t happen by accident, they require thorough planning and research, as well as a carefully considered structural foundation.
When you partner with a web design agency like Wilkes Wood, your experience depends as much on the journey as a whole as it does on the final delivered product.
It’s all very well getting a good website at the end of it, but if you’ve hated your experience along the way, you’re not going to leave satisfied (and neither are we!)
The good news is that a tried and tested web design process not only provides the best experience possible for you throughout the build, but it also enables us to create the very best website for your business or project.
In this blog post, we’ll be breaking down the different stages of our website development process to help you understand what your journey will look like when working with us to develop your new website.
Web Design Process Overview.
Here are the 6 stages in our overall process:
- Discovery Phase
- Planning Phase
- Design Phase
- Development Phase
- Launch & Handover
- Post-Launch
These phases take you from the beginning of a project right through to launch and handover, as well as ongoing support and maintenance.
Regardless of whether we’re building you a single-page brochure site or a complex multi-page website, this process will guide the entire process and ensure you’re able to be as hands-on as you’d like to be throughout the build.
Phase 1 – Discovery
Discovery is all about fact-finding. We want to understand exactly where you are now, where you’d like to be, and how we can best fit into that picture to help you get there.
Discovery starts as soon as you reach out to us, and usually takes the form of an introductory meeting, either on Zoom or in person.
This is a chance to discuss the budget and deadlines, and to get a preliminary idea of the scale, complexity, and purpose of the project.
Some clients come to us with these things very much clear in their heads, but that’s not an expectation at this stage. We can help take your ideas and objectives and figure out exactly what we could make with you to achieve them.
Although these discussions may vary from project to project, this phase of the web design process is about discovering the real purpose of your website, who you are targeting, and what the competitive landscape looks like.
That means we can start from a place of unity and understanding, and ensure that we’re best placed to deliver value.
Phase 2 – Planning & Project Agreements
The planning phase is where we take all of the information we’ve acquired during discovery and make something more tangible.
By the end of this stage, you will know exactly what we are going to build, what we’d need from you to build it, and how the process will work throughout.
Typically, this phase starts with us working on a low-fidelity wireframe together. This is a great way to bring clarity to the process and start to turn ideas into reality.
By working on a wireframe, we can establish the foundation of your website and see how site pages, functionality, and the content will link between and interact with one another.
After this is complete, we’ll know exactly what information will be presented, giving us an efficient way to establish what content will need to be curated or produced for the build to begin.
Once the meeting has ended, we will go away and make sure the wireframe is refined and accurate. We will then send over a meeting follow-up email to go over anything we’ve discussed during the meeting.
Phase 3 – Design & Content
Once your project is live, we can turn our attention toward the look and feel of your website. If you have a pre-existing visual identity, we will ensure we operate within established guidelines to create consistency across your brand.
If you do not have a brand identity, we will work with you to create the assets you need, such as logos or graphic elements, as well as colour palettes, font selection, icons and more.
Depending on the complexity of the project at hand, we will create full website mock-ups to clarify our design before developing the site itself.
For simpler projects, the design and development process can be combined, saving time and enabling you to get a hands-on look at your site as it’s being built.
By looking at the wireframe from the previous phase and creating folders that correspond to page titles, we make the content curation stage an intuitive and easy process.
We help gather existing content you might have and also support you in the creation of anything new that may be required.
It’s also an opportunity for us to bring content in line with the best SEO practices, guided by our SEO guru Tom.
By the end of this stage we will have access to all content and copy required to start the build your site with, helping to greatly expedite later phases and ensuring we are building with a clear understanding of site content.
You will also have a complete understanding of the design of your website and have a clear idea of what the final delivered product will look like.
Phase 4 – Development
Prior to this stage, everything we work on is related to planning, research or content preparation. This phase is where all of this hard work comes together into something tangible and we can execute on our plan.
You may be under the impression that we go away on our own, disappear, then re-emerge with a website and say “Done!”.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re here to help you and your business, and you’re the person who understands those things the most. That’s why we have developed our process to be as collaborative as you want.
We work on a feedback basis, so there are consistent touchpoints where you have opportunity to guide our work – our job is not only to build the site itself, but ensure you’re kept in the loop and feel that your feedback is listened to, acted upon, and valued.
This is, after all, your website!
From a technical perspective, this is where we will pay close attention to the “invisible” parts of your website, ensuring your site is fully optimised for search engines and users alike.
This is often where corners are cut, so we pride ourselves on making sure things are done correctly and our quality control throughout the process is obsessively maintained.
Once we have worked through the feedback process and you feel that the website is done, we will then go through and do our final checks. These cover everything from internal links to spelling mistakes, and once they’re done we’re ready for the next phase…
Phase 5 – Launch
Congratulations, you’ve got a new website! Your website is now ready to launch, which we can do immediately or hold for a specific launch date, event or campaign.
The work doesn’t stop there – we’re on hand to ensure the launch goes smoothly, double-checking the site is working correctly and setting up monitoring systems to ensure we’re notified should it go down for any reason.
This is also the time for us to show you how to use your website. We do this through a video call, which is recorded so you can refer back to it should you need to in the future.
During this call, we will introduce you to the back end of the site, ensure you and your team can log in and access what you need to access, and demonstrate how to operate your site – text tweaks, image swapping, blog posting, page creation, and admin controls are all covered!
We will also take the opportunity to schedule in a future call, between 1 and 3 months ahead, for us to go over site performance and see if there are any improvements we can make based on real life data.
Phase 6 – Post-Launch & Aftercare
During the build process, we will have spoken to you about aftercare and discussed what options would be most suitable for your needs.
We offer a selection of ongoing support packages designed for a range of businesses – each of these provides different levels of retained support for maintenance, performance review, and content creation so you can be sure that we’re helping you as you continue to grow.
This ensures that we are keeping track of your site’s performance and providing you with real-world feedback on how visitors are using your site, finding your site, and what potential improvements could be introduced to add value to your site.
You also have access to a range of SEO specific packages should you want to invest in bringing highly qualified organic traffic to your site.
Our ambition with every client, no matter their size or ambition, is to be long-term partners of growth. We want you to see us as an extension of your team, and nothing makes us happier than supporting businesses like yours in achieving their goals.
If you want an obligation-free chat to see if we can help you and your business grow, get in touch today.
Our ambition with every client, no matter their size or ambition, is to be long-term partners of growth. We want you to see us as an extension of your team, and nothing makes us happier than supporting businesses like yours in achieving their goals.
If you want an obligation-free chat to see if we can help you and your business grow, get in touch today.
Why Is Site Speed So Important & How Can I Measure Site Speed?
What Is Site Speed?
Page speed refers to the amount of time between a browser requesting a page and actually completing processing/rendering the page content.
An often overlooked metric, site speed has become an increasingly important factor in ensuring you’re providing the most optimal experience for users and search engines.
It’s no secret that when it comes to the digital world, attention spans are low and competition is high. That means every second counts when you’re trying to keep site visitors engaged and converting.
Every millisecond counts too, as a recent study showed that a decrease in page speed by just 500 milliseconds had an adverse affect on user experience!
Who Does Site Speed Matter To?
The simple answer is: Site Visitors & Google.
Google measures your site and content across over 200 factors when determining your page ranking, and it’s safe to say that it cares about speed, and pays careful attention to mobile performance too.
Google tests your site by simulating its performance on 4G, with poor results potentially kicking your website from any significant rankings – that means if you’re not optimising your site speed at all, you can say goodbye to the first page of results with potentially disastrous consequences for your website, objectives, and conversions.
But, Google wouldn’t care about site speed if people didn’t.
When it comes to user experience, speed/efficiency matters. This isn’t just a rule for websites – if you went to meet your friend at a cafe and ordered a couple of sandwiches, you wouldn’t want to wait for a couple of hours for your food to arrive.
In fact, if that happened, there’s a good chance you’d leave, tell people about your poor experience, and refrain from ever going back. That’s what a site visitor is likely to do if your page keeps them waiting…
Why Does Site Speed Matter?
So, now we’ve established that users and search engines care about your site performance just as much as one another, we can dig a little deeper into what this means…
1 – Site Speed Affects Conversion Rates
Whether you sell your products/services online or not, your website will be trying to encourage some form of conversion – be that a purchase, newsletter sign up, or a lead gen form, and site speed has a direct impact on this.
There have been countless studies that demonstrate this – with one survey finding that close to 70% of site visitors believe page speed directly affects their willingness to purchase online.
Studies have shown that anything below 4 seconds is optimal for conversions, with 0-2 seconds being the sweet spot – every additional second of load time drops your conversions rates by nearly 5%!
Users stay on sites that load faster and convert at a higher rate, and even small improvements can have dramatic effects. For example, Walmart are reported to have increased their conversion rate by 2% by decreasing load time by only 1 second.
If you needed any more proof, Portent studied the difference in conversion rates between websites fully optimised for page speed and “slow” sites, finding conversions for sites loading in 1 second are 5x higher than one that loads in 10 seconds.
They also showed that the website loading in 1 second achieved 3x the conversion rate of one loading in 5 seconds.
Evidently there’s a lot of money being left on the table if your site is lagging behind your competition!
2 – Site Speed Dramatically Affects Bounce Rate
Your website’s bounce rate reveals the percentage of site visitors who abandon your site after viewing only one single page. A high bounce rate is usually indicative of poor user experience (although there are definitely exceptions to this rule) and it can be a good metric to keep an eye on as you try and measure the impact any improvements you’re making.
Site speed has dramatic impact on the bounce rate of your website – slow to load sites have a much higher bounce rate than their swifter counterparts. A great example of this can be seen in how the BBC, arguably the most popular website in the world, reported they were losing 10% of their users for every second it took their pages to load.
They are by no means alone in this – as Google have reported similar results, showing that the probability of bounce increases 32% if your page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds.
3 – Slow Sites Make Unhappy Visitors
User Experience (or UX) is an important focus of any website looking to promote any sort of conversion and works in tandem with Search Engine Optimisation. We’ve explored this relationship further in a dedicated blog post if you want to dive into the detail.
It’s all very well having a website that’s designed with UX in mind, but if your site isn’t loading quick enough to encourage visitors to stick around, all that work has gone to waste.
On average, you will see a 16% drop in customer satisfaction for just a single second delay in page load times.
4 – Speed Is Important for SEO
Google’s algorithm has evolved massively over the past decade to better perform its primary function: provide the best user experience possible.
This means that all Google cares about is delivering the best possible result to a search engine user’s query – what makes a website the best possible result? A combination of hundreds of factors, with page speed/site performance being among them. To read more about SEO, head over to our introduction to SEO article.
A faster loading site means a better experience for the site visitor, and that’s what Google wants to provide – users visit 8.9 pages on average when your site loads in two seconds as opposed to only 3 pages if your website takes 8 seconds to load!
That means optimising your site speed can positively impact your search rankings, giving you the opportunity to drive more organic traffic to your site or store.
How Can I Measure & Improve Website Speed?
Luckily, there are plenty of free tools and resources out there to help you measure your site speed and performance and identify actionable steps you can take to improve your score.
Google offers plenty of resources to help with this process. Tools such as PageSpeed Insight provide you with insight on an individual webpage, providing a score for both desktop and mobile performance (it simulates a mid range mobile device using a standard mobile network to load your site), as well as some handy suggestions for improving your score.
PageSpeed Insight utilises a mixture of lab and real world data to produce its reporting, measuring your site against Google’s “core web vitals” – this gives you the ability to understand how each of the page loading process is performing.
They also have Lighthouse, which is a more holistic tool that measures your entire site, rather than one single page, using lab data under consistent conditions to create a report. This report also audits other important site elements such as SEO and accessibility.
For more information on the difference between Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights, click here.
If you’re concerned with mobile performance, check out Google’s dedicated resources which can help you create a seamless user experience across all devices.
Google isn’t the only provider of site speed testing tools by any stretch of the imagination, and there are plenty to choose from.
Pingdom is thought of as a more friendly starting point for those of you who are new to performance analysis, and provides a speed score between 0-100 for you to measure against – another popular alternative is GTMetrix.
Both of these tools can deliver key insight and help you record benchmarks as you continue to try and optimise your site performance.
What Factors Affect Site Speed?
Site speed can be influenced by a variety of factors, but there are some common culprits: Page Weight, Network Conditions, and Hosting.
What Is Page Weight & How Does It Affect Site Speed?
Page weight refers to the overall size of your web page. The heavier the page, the more resources it takes to load.
This means that you’re likely going to have to balance providing a rich user experience with ensuring your website isn’t becoming too unwieldy to load in a reasonable amount of time.
You might think that this problem is getting better as the years go by, but that’s not the case. As websites become more interactive, rich and complex, the average weight of web pages is actually increasing due to JavaScript files, video and image content, heavy CSS, bloated plugins, pop-ups and other banners, animations, backgrounds and more.
It’s tempting to try and make your website as visually interesting as possible with animations, videos and interactive sections, but did you know that 50% of site visitors say they’d be willing to give up animation and video if it led to faster loading times?
Content is arguably the place you can make the largest impact on load time – there’s often some low hanging fruit that can be addressed very swiftly to great results. Here are three easy fixes that you could look into:
- Image Optimisation & Compression – Cutting down unnecessarily large image files can be a swift and effective way to improve page load times – with Google finding 25% of pages could easily save more than 250KB, and 10% of pages can save more than 1MB!
- Clean Up Your Code – Unused code can bog down page speed; rid yourself of any useless code and you may see improvements to your performance.
- Be Lazy – Lazy loading refers to a technique that defers “non-critical resources” at the initial load of your page – this allows the browser to initially load just what’s needed for the page to be visible and then subsequently load additional content in the background.
How Hosting & Network Conditions Affect Your Site Speed
Network conditions may mean that your website, regardless of whether it is lightweight or not, loads slower than you’d like it to. This is dictated by the equipment used and the quality of the ISP (internet service provider).
It’s also worth noting that mobile devices are likely to be slower than those using WiFi or ethernet – with 5G not yet rolled out nationwide, mobile access is most likely going to be on 4G (82% coverage in the UK) and 3G (98.7% coverage in the UK).
Obviously, you can’t dictate what device or network someone is using to reach your site, but there are some things you can do to try and minimise the impact this will have on your performance such as compression and using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to host content.
Hosting can also have a massive impact on your site speed, with variables such as location and type of hosting you’ve used affecting the end result.
Ranging from shared web hosting, where you’re competing for bandwidth and server resources with other websites on the same server, to dedicated hosting options that give you complete control, hosting packages vary extensively on price, ease of use and performance.
So, when you’re picking a web hosting provider – be sure you take into consideration much more than just price – look at the size of the hard drive, the power of their RAM, what bandwidth is available to you and also consider how much traffic you’re likely to receive.
Selecting a suitable package early on will save you lots of hassle further down the line and enable you to get the most out of your website right from the start.
Can You Help Make My Site Faster?
Yes! We’d be more than happy to take a look at your website and identify areas for improvement – whether that’s discussing a site rebuild or optimising your existing site or content.
For a free audit of your site, drop us a message!
Looking For Wordpress Managed Hosting? Here's 5 Reasons to Consider WPX Hosting.
Disclaimer: Some of the below links are affiliate links, so we may receive compensation at no additional cost to you. Despite this, we will only ever recommend services we have used extensively, continue to use, and trust ourselves!
An Introduction to WPX Hosting
We’ve experimented with a fair amount of hosting providers over the last 5 years of business, and have come to the conclusion that there’s only one option if you’re a smaller website looking for managed hosting: WPX.
We started using WPX in 2020, and have been incredibly impressed with their service – so much so that we’ve used WPX for a variety of client projects to great success.
We’re not alone in our admiration – their Trustpilot reviews are almost impossibly good, with 96% positive feedback at the time of writing. This seemed, to us, too good to be true, so we went digging and unearthed an incredibly extensive study that set out to determine the reliability of these reviews…
Spoiler alert, they found that the reviews are good because WPX knows exactly who they’re catering to and provides exactly what their customers need.
We love WPX and would recommend them for a variety of clients and smaller projects, but there are certainly instances where we would opt for another hosting solution – we think WPX works best for smaller websites that don’t have extensive databases and for those that want a simple, easy to use managed hosting solution.
If you’re unsure if WPX is right for you, get in touch and we’d be more than happy to chat about your web and hosting needs.
How much is WPX Hosting?
WPX offers three separately priced packages – Business, Professional and Elite.
You can pay annually or monthly, with 2 months free hosting offered for annual payment options as well as a reduced monthly fee. Here are the two options:
As you can see, WPX is one of the more affordable hosting providers when compared to their competitors in the managed hosting space, especially when you take into consideration the factors that make WPX such a great company to work with.
Regardless of what package you choose, WPX offers a whole load of free features including DDoS protection, unlimited SSL certificates, automatic backups and more.
What Makes WPX Hosting So Good?
Whilst there are plenty of reasons we choose to use WPX, we thought we’d break down 5 points that set it apart from the rest for its price point – but first, let’s look at their pricing.
#1 – WPX Offers A “Fixed For You Guarantee”.
One of the most appealing features that WPX offers is their “Fixed For You Guarantee” (FFY Guarantee). This is a fantastic example of great customer service and is something we feel they absolutely excel at.
The FFY Guarantee is WPX’s promise to help get an offline website back to being live as fast as possible with as little disruption as possible.
So, if something breaks on your site or your site experiences downtime for any reason, all you have to do is message their live-chat support and they’ll immediately get to work figuring out a solution and implementing this for you.
Our experience with other managed hosting companies is that they may help figure out the cause of the problem, but then expect you to trawl through annoying articles and then try and sort the fix out yourself.
WPX responds within 30-40 seconds, on average, and has resolved every single problem we’ve had on our packages within a few minutes of investigation.
Oh, and all of this is free!
Obviously, there are some limitations here. WPX can’t recode or fix problems on 3rd party apps or plugins and can’t help you if you’ve got internet issues at your end, nor can they help with fixes to visual elements on your site.
Their priority is getting your site back up and running, not making your actual website better (however, that’s something we can help with!).
#2 – WPX Is Fast.
Speed matters when it comes to hosting, and a slow hosting provider can have a tremendously negative impact on your website’s performance. This can then lead to issues with SEO and UX and waste a lot of the hard work you’ve put into your website.
It’s safe to say that when we were looking for a managed hosting provider for our clients, speed was at the top of our list of requirements.
It’s a good job then that there are plenty of independent, and we mean actually independent, reviewers have come to the conclusion that WPX is fast.
These include industry leading reviewers such as Kevin Ohashi (of ReviewSignal and WpHostingBenchmarks) and Matthew Woodward – two of the most respected industry names.
These tests pitted WPX against competitive big hitters, with the results speaking for themselves.
When Matthew Woodward conducted his tests, WPX was fastest to load image heavy sites & plugin heavy sites and performed fantastically when undergoing stress tests.
WPX also came out on top with Kevin Ohasi’s test results – achieving “Top Tier” rewards across all price categories, from >$25 all the way through to $51-100 per month tiers.
What more could you want? For our clients that have migrated from slower rivals, the difference in their site performance is undeniable.
#3 – WPX’s Customer Support Is Phenomenal
As we’ve mentioned, hosting providers need to offer good enough speed and technical performance to enable you to get the most out of your website, but for us these technical elements are just the start of the story.
We would rather go with a hosting provider that is slightly slower than a competitor if the hosting provider in question offered faultless customer service.
Luckily for us, we’ve found WPX – so we don’t need to choose between performance & support.
We think WPX’s 24/7 dedicated live chat and support functions are the best we’ve ever experienced, and our clients have absolutely loved how responsive and professional the service is every step of the way.
We’ve already mentioned the “Fixed for You Guarantee”, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg – their live chat support is immediately available on the site whether you’re a customer or not, so you can chat to a real operator about any technical requirements, questions or concerns prior to signing up for a package.
They’ll then help you with any migrations (more on this later) or issues that need resolving.
But, the thing that really makes them stand out for us is the fact they’re proactive.
They’re actually looking for ways to give you a better user experience all of the time. Just yesterday, we logged onto WPX and saw that they had automatically given ALL customers 50% more disk space and 100% more bandwidth across every hosting plan.
#4 – WPX Removes Malware & Provides Automatic BackUps for Free
Much of what makes WPX a great managed hosting provider is their ability to give you peace of mind through their offering – and these two points do just that.
Knowing that WPX will clean your site for free if you somehow get infected with malicious code/malware is a massive bonus, and as long as you abide by their terms of service (which essentially say you shouldn’t give your password out like candy, avoid cracked plugins and themes and keep all plugins etc up to date) you can rest assured that you’re covered in case of malware attacks.
In addition, WPX’s servers are fully secured so even if you were to be infected with malware, the functionality of the main server is maintained!
For even further reassurance, your website is automatically backed up every single day onto a separate server, which is then stored for 28 days. This means if you manage to break your site or need to restore a previous version of your site for whatever reason, WPX have you covered!
#5 – Free Website Migrations
This service is an absolute belter, and our clients love how easy it is to move from their previous hosting provider to WPX.
If you’re using an existing hosting provider and find that you’d like to make the move over to WPX we’ve got some good news to share with you – they’ll handle it!
If you’d like WPX to manage the migration for you, all you need to do is hop onto their website and open a live chat with their support team. They’ll ask you to give some details about your current website hosting, purchase the right package on WPX itself, and then you’re good to go – they’ll handle the rest of the process for free.
WPX migrations typically take up to 24 hours – so after a day, give or take a few hours, they’ll have your site ready to go on the platform!
What Next?
If you’re looking to move hosting provider to WPX or you’re in need of a great managed Wordpress hosting provider for a new web project, click here to be taken to their website.
Alternatively, get in touch with us to discuss how we can help you with your website and hosting needs!
I Don't Sell Online, So Why Do I Need To Have A Website?
Websites Aren’t Just For Selling Online
A common misconception in the small business world is that websites are only really for e-commerce/selling products online.
Whilst e-commerce is a truly gigantic industry (one that’s continuously growing as time goes on), websites are relevant to every single business in 2022, regardless of size, sector, product or service.
The events of the past few years have only served to further evidence this claim, with the pandemic increasing web use by up to 70% and leaving businesses without any online presence at risk of being forgotten entirely by once loyal customers.
Here are five reasons why we think you should have a website if you’re not selling directly online:
Without A Website, You Don’t Exist.
It might sound a bit absolute, but it’s the truth. The modern consumer expects to find you online – websites are no longer a shiny impressive marketing tool, they’re the bare minimum.
Your customers are online, so you should be too.
Think about the last time you were looking to find out more information about a service, product or business – what did you do? There’s a pretty good chance that you, along with billions of other people every single day, headed over to Google and were one of 99,000 searches performed every single second.
How many of those searches are from potential customers?
By having a professionally designed website built with search engine optimisation (SEO) in mind, you can ensure you’re giving yourself a chance to appear where potential customers are expecting you.
Do this well, and you’ll be driving organic traffic to your site. As we’ll discuss in more detail later on, this gives you an opportunity to turn this traffic into conversions and intrigue into revenue.
Being found on Google also enables you to build up brand authority and be seen as more trustworthy by those that come across your site. In fact, 75% of consumers admit they judge the credibility of a company based directly on their website.
It’s also imperative if you’re a business aiming to serve clients or customers locally. 76% of people end up visiting a business they’ve searched for online on the same day, and the search terms “where to buy” and “near me” have surged 200% in popularity in the past two years alone.
To conclude, your customers are expecting to find you online, are much more likely to shop with you if they do, and will mentally match the quality of your website with the quality of your business!
If You’re Not Online, Your Competitors Will Be!
In 2018, around half of all small businesses reported they were online. That figure is now closer to 80%.
If you’re a small business without a website, you’re handing over all of those potential clicks, conversions and customers to your competitors without even putting up a fight.
Take a look now – head over to Google and search for an industry term, a relevant product or service and you’ll likely see plenty of results from your competitors.
Not only are you giving away sales and leads, but you’re also allowing your competition to establish themselves as authoritative brands which lead above you in your industry. They’re beating you just by showing up.
The stats really do speak for themselves on this one – with recent studies showing that brands that have a website and a regularly updated blog enjoy nearly 70% more leads than those with a website alone, whilst those that have no website whatsoever are losing an average of 75% of their potential customers.
Websites Help You Learn More About Your Audience
Having a website, and knowing how to use it, gives you the opportunity to turn the tables on your audience.
They can use your website to find out more information about you, your business and services, and you can use analytics reporting to discover information about site visitors that can help drive decisions and optimise your offering.
Powerful analytics software, such as Google Analytics, allows you to uncover a treasure trove of data on your website visitors.
This includes behavioural data (looking at how visitors use your website and interact with its content) as well as powerful demographic insight which can reveal exactly who you’re reaching with your online presence.
Combined with Google Search Console, a free tool that helps you monitor your performance in search results, you have the ability to determine how you are being found, who is finding you, and what they’re looking for.
If you’ve built your website through a site builder like Squarespace or Wix, then you’ll have some in-house analytics on those platforms too. Whilst nowhere near as powerful as what you can achieve with Google Analytics, they’re a good place to start familiarising yourself with what metrics matter.
Utilising data is one of the most important things you can do as a business in the digital age; it can remove the guesswork from some vital decision making and ensure your website content and design is continually being optimised to improve performance across the board.
You no longer have to rely on assumptions or outdated and expensive 3rd party data.
Websites Support All Other Marketing Efforts
Think about what marketing methods you currently implement or promote for your business. Word of mouth? Social Media? Print ads?
Good news…
A website enables you to direct all traffic from all marketing channels to a space that is entirely yours, fully optimised for your target audience, and easily discoverable through search.
In a recent report by Nielson, word-of-mouth was shown to be the most effective form of marketing, followed incredibly closely by a website. The relationship between the two has become inextricably linked. Here’s why:
When someone is recommended a product, service or business, they might make a mental note, save it on their phone or write it somewhere like a notepad. When they’re ready to contact, purchase from or discover more about the business in question, what are they most likely to do?
Yep, you guessed it… search Google, or go directly to their website!
All roads lead to Rome!
You Still Need Conversions If You’re Not An E-Commerce Store!
So, you don’t sell online – that doesn’t mean you’re not interested in “conversions”!
Whilst the term is more commonly associated with an e-commerce purchase, a conversion can refer to a tremendous variety of actions that businesses want to promote, direct traffic toward, monitor and optimise.
Tracking conversions is an important activity that gives you the ability to analyse the performance of your marketing strategies – this means you have to decide what a “conversion” means to you, as well as where and when you should monitor for conversions taking place.
There are two types of conversions: Micro and Macro.
Think of macro-conversions as the ultimate end goal you’d like your site visitor to achieve – this could be something like a lead generating form response/contact form, a phone call, or a paid subscription.
A micro-conversion occurs when your site visitor completes an action that indicates they have taken a step forward in their journey toward your macro-conversion (or end goal). Common examples of these include signing up to your newsletter, downloading something like a whitepaper, PDF, or ebook or even watching a video or interacting with other site media.
Utilising Google Analytics, you can track multiple conversions on your website for free. You can then work out something called your “conversion rate”, which is:
“CONVERSIONS OVER A SET TIME FRAME”
Divided By…
“TOTAL SITE TRAFFIC FROM SET TIME FRAME”
Equals:
“YOUR CONVERSION RATE”
This metric is incredibly important as you can look to continually improve/optimise your conversion strategy once a baseline has been established.
For example, did you know that reducing the number of form fields from 11 to 4 in your contact form can generate 120% more conversions?
Every single website should be created with a macro-conversion in mind, and yours is no different.
What would you want your site visitors to do?
So, What’s Next?
Now you’ve read just important a website is, you might want to consider developing one of your own. That’s where we can help.
We can partner with you to create a website designed with conversions in mind – with on-page content optimised for search engines as well as users at every stage of the buying journey.
We can also help you digest data and turn it into real analytical insight.
Sound good?
Start your project today.
Frederick Ostrovskis-Wilkes
Hello, if you’ve enjoyed this article want to see more then sign up to the Wilkes Wood Newsletter for industry insights.
Newsletter
Sign up to the Wilkes Wood Newsletter for industry insights, helpful free resources and interesting curated content from around the web.
SEO VS PPC - What’s The Difference & Which One Is Right For My Business?
When looking to invest in marketing strategies for your business, it’s inevitable that you will end up comparing two or more channels together to decide what is best for your business, audience and objectives.
More often than not, this conversation features two of the most popular marketing activities in 2022: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Optimising your website for search engines can help improve your rankings on organic searches, whilst PPC efforts (like Google Ads) are paid for methods of advertisement allowing marketers to compete for coveted paid placements on the search engine results page.
What’s The Difference?
Put simply, the main difference between the two lies in SEO efforts being “Organic” and PPC being “Paid”.
So, What is SEO & Organic Traffic?
Think back to the last time you purchased something online or wanted to find out more about a product, service or company. There’s a pretty good chance that your journey started with one thing: a Google search.
There’s also a pretty good chance that you clicked on a website shown on the first page of your results – in fact, over 95% of clicks come from the first page of search results, with the first 3 results alone getting a combined click through rate of over 60%.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about directing the right web searchers to your website from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, all without the use of paid advertising (PPC ads).
SEO still requires investment. If you’re doing SEO work yourself, that could be an investment of time, or if you’re using an SEO agency like Wilkes Wood, it could be a financial investment. But, you can’t pay directly for performance – i.e you cannot pay Google to guarantee you a certain organic ranking for a keyword.
We’ve written a whole introductory guide to SEO if you want to learn more about SEO works and the benefits it can bring to your business.
The truth of the matter is that SEO is a slower burning long term strategy.
Let’s look at some of the phases that an SEO professional may go through when working on your website:
- Research into your business, audience, keywords, competitors.
- A full audit of your website from a technical point of view.
- Website optimisation and development.
- Content planning, research and creation.
- Internal linking & Backlink strategies.
This isn’t a swift process in itself, and then you have to be patient to reap the results of your hard work. There’s no set time frame for SEO work to pay off, but most industry experts agree that even with a healthy SEO budget, you’re looking at a 3 month period before your ranking starts to see serious improvements.
But, those improvements are worth it. Your rankings will improve, your organic traffic will grow, your authority will improve and, whilst you’re waiting for more results, you can continue to optimise your website and put out keyword driven content.
With PPC, your ads disappear when your budget ends. SEO lasts way, way “beyond the spend” and this is why so many marketers see SEO as such a great investment – in fact 49% of marketers report that organic search has the best ROI of any other channel.
It’s also worth noting that organic search drives 53% of website traffic, whilst paid search only accounts for 15%!
You can read more information from Google on organic search or head to our blog on SEO to uncover more of the basics.
To summarise: SEO is powerful, but slow. It wins over the long-term.
What Is PPC & Paid Advertising?
Pay-per-click advertising (or PPC) is a form of paid advertising on search engines, such as Google Ads. The aim of PPC on Google Ads is to bring immediate traffic to your website by strategically “bidding” on search terms against competitors, with winning bids ensuring your advert is placed somewhere on screen.
PPC is also used across all social media platforms, but we’re not going to cover those here.
One of the most appealing elements of PPC is that it gives marketers the opportunity to target specific audiences that they want their deal, product, event or content to appeal to.
You can target audiences on Google Ads using demographic data such as location, age, profession, annual income and even interests – this is incredibly powerful, as you can imagine, and is why Google Ads is so popular (accounting for over 80% of Google’s entire revenue).
It is called pay-per-click because you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your advertisement. If you’ve used Google, you’ll have seen ads before at the top and bottom of the search engine results page. The average cost of a “click” is, at the time of writing, around $2.69 (£2.35).
Average click through rates (CTR) differ wildly between industries, with an average of only 1.9%. To uncover the average CTR for your industry, head over to this article by Search Engine Land.
PPC is popular because it offers immediate results, unlike the long term strategy that SEO aligns itself with. However, as soon as your spend stops, so do the benefits, and depending on the budget you have, your ad might be limited in how long it could run or what size audience it could reach.
There are some downsides to PPC, such as spam clicks/traffic, and over 40% of internet users now use some form of ad blocker.
Just like with SEO, Google will be ranking your efforts, and optimising Google Ads is no easy task. It’s a discipline all of its own and successful campaigns require constant monitoring, testing and tweaking to avoid precious ad spend being wasted.
To summarise: PPC costs per click, and is immediate. It wins in the short term.
So, Which One Is Right For My Business?
As with most things in marketing, the answer is: it depends.
Do you need immediate results? Are you happy to wait for long-term rewards? Do you have a set budget? How much work would your website need? What are your competitors doing?
These are just some of the questions that could help narrow down your options and leave you with the right choice.
A lot of small businesses and start-ups lean more towards SEO as they lack the sort of budget required to fully set-up, test, optimise and implement a PPC campaign. If you’re prepared to think and plan for the long-term, SEO is budget friendly and, once results start showing, you should see steady improvements to your organic traffic.
If you have established your business within a niche market, you may even be able to find keywords that have the “Big 3” – high relevancy, low competition and decent monthly search volume. This would be a golden opportunity for SEO.
If you’re in a highly competitive market, such as an e-commerce store selling products that are in competition with industry behemoths like Amazon, it’s unlikely that you are going to find massive success in ranking for organic positions, especially early on in your efforts. PPC could be great here to help boost your brand awareness.
The truth is, both SEO and PPC are great ways to grow your business, whether they’re used on their own or in conjunction with one another.
There are, however, a few instances where one would be much more appropriate than another.
There are, however, a few instances where one would be much more appropriate than another – for example, if you’re looking to sell out an event in a short period of time, PPC is your best friend!
In Conclusion…
If you wanted to maximise the potential of your business, and had the budget to accommodate, we’d always recommend that you invest in both SEO and PPC. With a combined effort, you’re likely to be able to achieve results that would not be possible if each were implemented in isolation.
However, we’re aware that not everyone lives in this “ideal world” and you may have to prioritise one over the other, at least for an initial stretch of time, so let’s break it down:
PPC will require initial and ongoing investment, and will not leave you with any lasting or enduring results when your spending stops. You should look into PPC if you need immediate results, you have a higher budget, or if your product, offer or event is time sensitive.
SEO will require an investment of time or money, but will still be cheaper than PPC over the long term. You should look into SEO if you have a smaller budget, want to prioritise a long term ROI and want to create impactful, powerful content that’s relevant to your audience at all stages of the buying journey.
What Can We Do To Help?
We’ve been helping our clients with their SEO needs for over 4 years, and have a dedicated, in-house team to do just that.
Head over to our dedicated SEO page to see our packages across content and maintenance.
For a free SEO audit of your website, get in touch!
How Can SEO and UX Work Together For Your Website?
Whilst it’s true that User Experience (UX) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) are two distinct practices, now more than ever they should be looked upon as a necessary partnership with a common goal: to give your website users the best possible experience.
Long gone are the days of relying purely on keywords to boost your SEO; Google’s algorithm has evolved to such an extent that your website must provide a rich, tailored user experience to your website visitors in order to be in with a chance of boosting your organic search rankings.
With Google’s own UX guidelines suggesting that a seamless UX is a critical ranking factor for organic search, and with recent studies showing development of your website’s user experience can boost customer conversion rates up to 400%, it’s clear to see why so many businesses are investing in UX as part of their SEO strategy.
To put it simply: investment in SEO makes your website optimised for search engines, and investment in UX makes your website optimised for site visitors. However, investment in both can successfully leverage each discipline to maximise their performance and boost results across the board.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, aims to improve the performance of your website on search engine results pages (SERPs). It aims to boost your organic rankings and drive targeted traffic to your website. We’ve written a beginners guide to SEO here if you want to discover more about SEO and how it can help small businesses.
What is UX?
User Experience (UX) is a pretty self descriptive term, and simply serves to describe the experience a site visitor has whilst interacting/using your website.
If your website provides a seamless, intuitive and targeted experience to your users then congratulations, you’re delivering a positive UX – however, if your website is slow, hard to navigate and provides little value through its content, you’re delivering a negative UX (and making 88% of your online customers leave with no intention of returning…)
Core elements of User Experience include:
- Your website’s internal structure/architecture (43% of site visitors want websites to remain simple & nearly all negative user feedback relates to this)
- The journey, content & touchpoints of your site visitors (over half of all site visitors prefer content that is personalised to them & their needs).
- The responsiveness of your website across mobile/desktop (50% of site visitors will use a website less if it doesn’t work on mobile, even if they love your business…)
Stripped down to its basics, UX is about ensuring that a site visitor finds it easy to navigate through your website, its content and interactive elements, and feels like the experience has been tailored to them at every stage.
So, How Does UX Impact SEO?
As Google’s algorithms have evolved, the weighting and prioritisation of ranking factors has differed wildly. You may have heard about the early days of SEO, where insane amounts of keyword stuffing could guarantee some degree of success in achieving rankings…
It’s safe to say we’ve come a long, long way from Google relying on signals that can be easily manipulated, like keyword stuffing, link spamming and other outdated practices.
Google is now “user-centric” and has developed its algorithms accordingly, wielding complex technology across the AI and machine learning space to deliver search users exactly what they need to feel satisfied with their search results.
The myriad ranking factors that Google “judges” your website with are now substantially aligned with providing a rich, positive user experience for your website visitors.
This ranges from technical elements like site speed (slow site speeds lose site owners billions of £s across the e-commerce world each year) to measuring site visitor behaviour like bounce rate, whether or not your site is bookmarked by users, if users came across you through search or direct, and the list goes on and in (with over 200 more factors!)
If you are providing a positive UX through your website’s development and design, you will undoubtedly be supporting site visitors in behaving in ways Google deems to be positive – they’ll stay longer, interact more with your content, perhaps return more often, and are more likely to bookmark, share and promote your website across social media/word of mouth.
All of these, inevitably, contribute to bettering your search position and send positive signals to Google’s algorithm.In order to better your SEO through UX, you need to ditch the SEO goggles and take the time to understand your audience, website and content from a user’s perspective. It’s time to step back, reposition yourself, and work through your website from the perspective of your target audience.
Image source: Ash Shah
What Web & Content Factors Influence SEO and UX?
As mentioned above, there are over 200 ranking factors that Google takes into consideration when ranking your website for search results. Here are a handful of critical factors that link UX and SEO together to boost your website’s performance across both areas…
1 – A Thorough Understanding of Your Audience
Both SEO and UX require you to thoroughly understand your audience as the first step in any strategy.
SEO requires you to know your audience so you know exactly who you’re targeting with keywords and content.
UX requires you to know your audience so you know exactly what they want to see, do and consume whilst on your website, and enable you to make your website perfectly tailored to these needs.
To discover your target audience, you need to be able to answer questions beyond demographic information of age, gender and occupation. Here are some example questions you might want to use to frame your research:
- What is a site visitor wanting from your website?
- What would a site visitor search for online?
- How would a site visitor seek out/look for the information or content they desire?
- What would they expect from tone/content?
- How would they want to interact with your website? What forms, buttons, purchases, links, or downloads are they expecting to be able to engage with?
You might also want to look into current data if you have analytics at your disposal.
This can provide vital information on how users journey through your website, how they behave, how long they stay for, and how often they interact with buttons, forms, purchases or any other conversion you’re monitoring.
You want to build up a clear picture of your audience – without this, you will have nothing to guide your UX and SEO strategies as they will not be directed toward a targeted group of users with shared interests, wants and needs.
I could sit here and tell you that 70% of users prefer to use companies that share their sense of humour or that over 70% of users judge how credible a website is based on its aesthetics…
But if you don’t know what humour your target audience would appreciate or what your target audience deem to be appropriate aesthetically, you are making it nearly impossible to meet their expectations, thus compromising any SEO or UX efforts before they’ve even begun!
2 – Have You Done Your Keyword Research?
Furthering on from the above point, successful keyword research will enable you to increase your understanding of your target audience.
This works for both SEO and UX.
Keyword research is a fundamental building block of SEO – knowing what keywords to target and what content to produce is absolutely critical to any successful SEO strategy – without it, you will not achieve any significant results.
For more information on how SEO works, click here.
In relation to UX, keyword research helps by providing further information on site visitors, for example their search intent.
Look at these two searches:
- “Good first cars”
- “Used Ford Fiesta 1.5L 2005 blue for sale now Sheffield”
The first search is on the lookout for content/information that could help them answer their question and determine what cars to look into further.
This is a broader search that indicates someone is in the exploratory/information seeking stage of the buying process.
The second search seems to have much more of a purchasing intent – they are seeking a specific product in a specific area with a somewhat defined specification.
The presence of “now” indicates they are looking for the ability to complete a purchase immediately if they like what they see.
Both are searching in relation to cars, but at different stages of the buying process and with differing degrees of intent.
What makes great content and UX for one may be a bad UX with poor content for the other…
3 – What Are You Pushing Your Audience Towards?
A well designed website will successfully push site visitors toward a particular action, event or conversion through elements like buttons, prominent calls to action (CTAs), chat-bots and more.
To facilitate a positive user experience, you need to balance your desire for site visitors to perform an action with their desire to navigate your site and content in an intuitive manner.
Lean too far either way and you’ll be losing out on conversions or annoying site visitors by preventing them exploring your site in the way they want to.
If your SEO efforts are successful in bringing in more organic traffic, it can be tempting to try and capitalise immediately on this boosted audience.
However, you should be wary of compromising UX on purpose…
Sacrificing good UX with pop-ups, intrusive ads, or flooding every paragraph with “buy now” buttons may seem appealing for short term profits, but long-term you could be dissuading site visitors from ever returning and moving from “User Experience” into “User Exploitation”.
Here are two ways you can help improve the performance of clickable/interactive elements:
- Place them in locations that users will be familiar with/expect – don’t try and be too tricky or “cool” with how you present interactive elements.
- Design interactive elements to be as visible as possible and ensure that site visitors will know immediately that they can engage with the element – that’s why hyperlinks are different colours!
- Ensure your content can be easily shared on popular social media channels.
- Make sure you’re using CTAs throughout your page content to encourage visitors to further explore other pages, content or convert.
You might be asking yourself how these UX elements contribute towards your website SEO?
By optimising your webpages for site visitors and making it easier for them to spend more time on your website/explore different content on your website.
This means you’re reducing bounce rates and showing Google that your website is highly relevant and of a high enough quality for visitors to interact with it for longer. Optimal bounce rates are strongly correlated with achieving first page spots with. Google rankings
By encouraging social sharing and conversions, you’re further proving this point.
4 – Focus on Your Site’s Foundation & Navigation
How your website is structured has a tremendous impact on both SEO and UX. If you’re building a website, you have to take the time to consider the foundation of your website and ensure it is following best practices.
This is referred to as your website architecture. A website constructed with an optimised site architecture allows search engines to more easily discover your website, index its content and follow internal links to be able to journey through the entirety of your site.
From a technical point of view, there are plenty of things to consider – ranging from optimising your URL structure to using H1 and H2 tags in your site content to ensure that the content hierarchy is being established.
However, a fundamental element of site architecture that is critically important to both SEO and User Experience is that of website navigation…
How to Optimise Website Navigation:
It’s important to remember that there’s a very high chance your site visitors will be landing on a different webpage to your homepage.
In order to allow site visitors to easily explore and journey through the rest of your content, you need to ensure that your navigation is optimised:
- Your top menu should be clear and prominent, with no silly page names that may confuse your visitors.
- Your pages need to be organised into appropriate and manageable sections/groups to ensure you’re not flooding your menus with too many options.
- Content needs to follow SEO best practices & prioritise clear formats with headers, lists, and appropriate imagery/site media.
- Internally link to relevant content and utilise CTAs to help your site visitors explore your web content further.
- Utilise categories and menus for your blog to keep posts organised and accessible.
- Consider using breadcrumbs to easily allow users to return to previous pages or menus.
- Minimise the amount of clicks needed to get to any given webpage.
- Avoid any pop ups, ads or features that may hide important information or menus – this is a common criticism with poorly designed chatbot features.
- Don’t leave users with a dead end.
Cleaning up your navigation makes it easier for both users and search engines to explore your site – that means it’s equally as important for SEO and UX.
Through optimising your website navigation and architecture, there’s a chance that Google will display other pages within your main result on a search page – these are called sitelinks and are fantastic as they enable you to take up more of the screen/results and attract more clicks and visitors.
Take a look at Wilkes Wood when you search for us on Google:
5 – Make Your Website Optimised for Mobile
Here are 4 statistics that you need to know:
- 85% of your site visitors expect your mobile site to match or outperform the quality of your desktop site.
- Nearly 50% of users are actively annoyed by sites that aren’t optimised for mobile.
- Nearly 70% of users will choose to reward your website with a purchase if it’s optimised for mobile and your competitor’s websites aren’t.
- More than 50% of traffic is now from mobile search.
Mobile optimisation is no longer a cool thing for your website to do, it’s an absolute necessity. Those that do not invest in responsive websites are absolutely going to suffer – your site visitors are expecting content to display correctly no matter what device they’re using.
From a UX standpoint, it’s non-negotiable.
Unfortunately for those with clunky mobile sites, it’s also vital for SEO.
Google has repeatedly stressed how mobile-friendly websites are favoured in search results, and if that wasn’t enough to convince you, Google’s crawler now conducts mobile-first indexing – there’s no two ways about it, responsive design is an expectation of search engines and users alike.
Make sure that your website has accessible and clear fonts, has a seamless mobile navigation menu, loads fast on mobile devices and has functional CTAs – you can even make the latter mobile specific, with “Call Now” functionality!
6 – Is Your Website Speedy?
Page speed is another example of something that is equally important to real world site users and search engines alike.
The verdict is unanimous: if your site is slow, your visitors will leave.
In fact, if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, you’ll have already lost more than half of your traffic and on the opposite side of things, even a 0.1 second site speed improvement has been shown to improve online sales.
If your site is loading too slowly and causing visitors to abandon ship, you’ll see a negative impact within your bounce rate and time on page analytics – this is why Google uses page speed as an important factor in deciding your rankings.
Luckily, you can use Google’s free tool to determine how your site is performing and receive feedback on how you can take steps to improve your site speed. This should give you a pretty good idea of how much work you need to do and where you need to turn your attention to.
A common mistake that has a massive impact on site speed is to upload site media without optimisation/compression – here’s a quick guide if you need to revisit your photos/videos on your site.
Can You Help Me With Improving My Website SEO or UX?
Yes. If you think you need some help optimising your website for search engines and users, get in touch with us today and our experienced in-house team will take care of the rest.
Want To Write Better Web Copy? Here's A Short Guide To Website Media & Optimised Page Copy
Website Content Guidance.
This short guide aims to help you create and curate the best content possible for your new website. If you want any further clarification or guidance, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.
Site Media
Site media refers to any images, videos, animations, and PDFs/downloads on your website. These elements are incredibly important when building a site that conveys quality and trust to your website visitors.
Here Are Some Golden Rules for Website Media:
1 – Quality Over Quantity
A website is only as good as its media. It is better to avoid cluttering your website with low quality images/videos and instead focus efforts towards fewer, high quality elements. Poor quality site media can completely diminish the effectiveness of your website, no matter how well it’s been designed.
2 – Compression is King
Website speed is a huge determining factor in providing a good user experience, and uploading huge image or video files can immediately bog down your site speed. Optimising these elements for your website requires compression to a more manageable size.
Check out our blog post on file compression here.
3 – No Content > Bad Content
Your website gives you a chance to make an impactful first impression on site visitors. If you don’t have good photo/video of a service, your team, or office, we’d always recommend utilising stock libraries or designing around a lack of site media for the first iteration of your site, then switching out to high quality elements when you’ve got them at your disposal.
4 – Version Control & Accuracy
If you’re offering downloadable elements like pricing packs, service specs, PDFs or certificates, it’s imperative that you keep these up-to-date so they reflect accurate and reliable information to site visitors.
How Do I Optimise Website Copy?
Site copy is the lifeblood of your website. It is how you will tell your story, drive conversions and showcase what makes your products/services so special.
So what makes effective and compelling copy?
Develop Your Brand’s Tone & Voice
The tone of your copy needs to match your brand. If you’re a legal firm targeting FTSE 100 companies you’re going to communicate differently to an e-commerce store selling pick & mix sweets to teenagers.
Making sure your tone is appropriate and directly speaks to your target audience can be hard, and it all starts with knowing exactly who you are and exactly who you’re trying to reach.
Let’s break those points down…
1 – What’s Your Mission?
Starting with your brand’s mission statement can help you to really drill down into the key elements and ideas you’d like to weave into your content & help form the basis of your brand’s tone/voice.
It’s a good chance to familiarise yourself with what your ambition, purpose and values are before trying to represent these on the page.
2 – Who is Your Target Audience?
In order to successfully develop the right tone (and the right content) for your audience, you need to know who that audience is.
It might sound obvious, but taking the time to develop and understand your target niche is often overlooked. It’s time to take a step back and really think about your audience…
- What gender are they?
- What age are they?
- What do they like in content?
- Do they want content to be funny and lighthearted or straight talking & informative?
- When are they consuming content?
- How are they consuming content?
- What level of education do they have?
If you’re answering these questions (and more!) then you’re on the way to creating a buyer persona – these are detailed descriptions of individuals who represent your target audience.
Once you’ve crafted your own buyer persona, you can write for them, giving you a great reference point to build the voice, tone and content of your brand around.
3 – What Content is Popular & Why?
If you’re already creating content for your website or social media, this is the chance for you to sit down and dig through the data.
What have been your most popular posts? What hasn’t gotten any engagement at all?
Putting aside outliers like competitions or polls, pay special attention to the tone and content of these posts and make notes for both what you think you want to focus on and avoid in future copy.
After you’ve done this, it’s time to look into your competition. What is working for them? What would you do differently? Why would/wouldn’t their tone work for your target audience?
This doesn’t mean you have to try and emulate this – it simply gives you a better understanding of what the competitive landscape looks like and how your brand tone/voice will fit into this arena.
4 – Create Your Guidelines
After all this research, you should be in a position to establish what your tone is and isn’t. This is often the step that feels the hardest, as you’re boiling down all of your notes into set parameters.
Whilst there’s no set formula to do this, we think it’s usually easier for you to start by contrasting what you’re not with what you are. For example:
“We are fun but not silly.
We are informative but not dry.
We are casual but not sloppy.”
However you do it, you should end up with some guidelines that you can rely on to ensure every bit of copy associated with your brand carries the same voice and tone to your target audience.
Great Copy Has Great Clarity
Copy that lacks clarity is not going to drive conversions on your website. It’s as simple as that.
Your copy needs to be focused and clear; if it isn’t, site visitors may miss what you are trying to communicate and you won’t be able to generate leads, sales or interest in your brand, product or service.
Here’s what to avoid:
- Unnecessary phrases
- Long paragraphs
- Pretentious language
- Filler words
- Repetition (unless used for a purpose)
- Overcomplicating phrasing
- Spelling & grammatical mistakes
Website copy is typically brief, only giving site visitors the amount of information required to move them onto the next section, page or action.
Attention spans are short and only getting shorter – if you don’t keep things clear and focused you will struggle to keep traffic from bouncing off your site.
This doesn’t mean you should exclude more detailed content entirely from your site, but you should be hesitant about flooding landing pages with dense copy. A blog page is ideally positioned to house more lengthy and in-depth content, so keep that in mind when building out your site.
Speak To Your Audience From The Page
When you’re writing about your own business or brand it can be tempting to focus on yourself rather than the audience. This is where personalisation comes in.
Take a look at your copy and notice how many times you’re focusing on the following:
- We
- Our
- I
- Us
- Me
It’s so easy to slip into this way of writing as it’s what comes most naturally when trying to express something about yourself.
Unfortunately this present us with a problem:
People don’t care about you.
They care about what you can do for them.
By switching the focus of your copy to “you” and “your”, you can craft copy that feels like it’s personalised entirely to your audience and appeal to them on that deeper, more personal level.
This means you’re speaking to them directly from the page and, if you’ve got your target audience and tone truly dialled in, you’ll be able to persuade, impress and convert site visitors with much greater success.
There are times where speaking about yourself really is necessary (an “About Us” page would be pretty tricky without it…) but always try and personalise where you can.
Provide Value Through Research & Detail
Your copy needs to deliver something of value to your audience. That could be anything from answering a question they didn’t even know they had to presenting them with original content that’s unique and interesting to someone in their position.
To achieve this, you need to put some effort in. There’s no other way to do it.
Shallow copy with no real meat to it is very easy to see through by site visitors and search engines alike. If you’re not delivering value, your site visitors won’t be encouraged to engage or convert whilst on your site.
It’s the same story with stolen or cloned copy from competitor’s websites. There’s a fine line between taking inspiration and being too close for comfort and it’s imperative that you don’t slip into the latter.
You don’t want to be perceived as a knock-off version of another brand, you want to be seen as an authority all of your own.
That’s where research, detail and informative copy come into play.
When I say research, I don’t mean you should be donning a lab coat or breaking out the coffee machine in the early hours of the morning…
I just mean you should be providing yourself with enough information on your subject, product, service or industry to be able to speak with expertise and detail.
Positioning yourself as an authority in your industry means site visitors will be much more likely to listen, trust, and convert.
Optimised Copy Is Always Keyword Driven
Aside from communicating effectively with your audience and driving conversions, your website copy is the foundation of your SEO efforts and can have a huge impact on your visibility in search results and how organic traffic is driven to your site.
Want to know more about SEO, here’s our guide to the basics.
Keyword driven copy ensures that you’re targeting the right niche with your content and enables you to compete for organic positioning on relevant search queries on Google, Bing and other search engines.
It also enables you to generate the most effective titles for pages and posts and optimise URLs.
To successfully target keywords, you will need to use some tools and services.
Here are some great free ones:
- Google’s Keyword Planner
- Answer the Public
- Google Search (input in keywords and see what variants it provides – see the pic below for an example)
- Wordtracker
- Google Trends
As these are free, there may be some limitations to how much data is provided or how often you can use them.
If you’re really serious about SEO, you’re going to need some paid for tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush.
When it comes to keyword research, it’s safe to say that the most frequently searched terms are going to be the most competitive and therefore the hardest for you to improve your rankings on.
It’s better to start out with keywords that have lower search volume and competition and get ranking for these before working your way up to keywords with higher competition and volume.
If you stumble across any relevant keywords with high search volume and low competition, you’re in luck!
Make sure to utilise Google Analytics and Search Console so you can see what is working to drive traffic to your site.
Page Specific Copy Guidelines:
So what makes good copy on your website’s pages? Let’s look at a few popular page types and look at how copy might vary between them.
How Do I Write Copy For My Home Page?
Your home page is your digital shopfront and will likely be the landing page for many of your site visitors – overlooking its importance can be a costly mistake!
Your first 5-25 words on your header banner or first block have a huge impact on conversions, bounce rate and click through rate. This is your chance to immediately show visitors they’re in the right place, demonstrate what you do and what benefits you can offer.
A good home page has a single focus, like summarising your services, products or blog categories. You want to encourage site visitors to go somewhere or do something, whether that be clicking through to your services or products or heading to a contact form.
Use call to actions to direct your site visitor’s behaviour.
We usually recommend writing homepage copy last, as content from other pages can inform the approach & content here.
How Do I Write A Great About Page?
It might sound counterintuitive, but a good about page shouldn’t just focus on yourself. Take your story, experience and unique offering and explain to customers how you can benefit them.
A good about page covers the following areas:
- Communicate the journey/story of your business – why it was started and what it hopes to achieve
- Outline your values and ethos
- Identify and describe the customers, clients or causes that you serve – cite examples of key clients
- Further explore your services and products – Why are they different? How are they made?
- Showcase what your customers or clients will get from your business
What About My Team Page?
Getting to know the faces behind your business can help customers trust your brand. A good team page demonstrates experience, role and hierarchy within your company, but also conveys personality in line with your brand’s tone.
Here’s what a good team page:
- Introduces your employees/key stakeholders
- Gives a human face to your company
- Showcases experience and strengths
The approach may differ between companies. For example, if you’re a smaller company you may want to feature your whole team and have more of a flat hierarchy. If you’re a larger organisation, it’s most likely that you only want to feature key decision makers/executive level management.
For each, a standard format would be a professional headshot with a short biography detailing your team member’s name, role/job title, experience, and a bit more about them. This is where you can inject some personality!
How Do I Write High Converting Copy Product Pages?
This is your chance to showcase your product offering, and can be instrumental in driving more conversions on your product pages.
To start, you need to clearly define your audience – the more you narrow this down, the more you can tailor your copy to these individuals.
Do you know what problem your product is solving for this niche? Do you know the main features (factual elements) and benefits (emotional elements) of your product?
This is where you want to let benefit-oriented copy shine by emphasising key selling points and weaving in key customer testimonials to further validate your claims.
People don’t care about your company, they care about how your company solves their problem.
Put yourself in the shoes of a new customer – you need to answer every single question they may have:
- What does it do?
- Who is it for?
- How much is it?
- How reliable is it?
- How long does it take to ship?
- What if I want to return it?
- How easy is it to use?
Between product page copy, technical specs and FAQs, every product page should give site visitor easy access to all the information they’d need to make a purchase decision.
What Makes Great Copy For Service Pages?
Service pages can get messy if you’re not careful, with confusing layouts and unclear pricing.
We recommend thinking of service pages as clear sections:
- Define your service & who it’s for
- Explain your deliverables
- Show off client testimonials
- Deep dive into features/benefits
- Pricing
- Contact/booking form
Each section gives you the opportunity to push page visitors down toward the next step of the funnel, all with the aim of producing valuable leads.
How Do I Write A Contact Page?
Contact pages follow a relatively standard format site-to-site.
You may want to consider a contact form and the questions contained within it, as well as providing contact details, addresses of your business offices or stores, and maybe even some FAQs.
There’s no need for extra waffle here. If a site visitor is on your contact page, make it easy for them to get in touch!
Help! Can You Write Our Website Copy?
You may have got to the end of this guide and thought “ That sounds like a lot of work…” Good news – if you don’t fancy writing copy for your entire website, we do!
We’ve been writing effective results driven copy for websites and ecommerce stores for over 4 years. If you’d prefer us to take the wheel, our in-house copywriting services are here to help drive organic traffic and maximise your conversions through professional, keyword driven copy.
Get in touch today for more information.