Optimize Your Website For More Visitors-Digitalhaiyaar: How aware are you of the effect your website has on the visitor? How do you actually attract your visitors and how do you get them to do what you want them to do? 

In this article we give ten tips to optimize your website. Five website optimization tips for more visitors to your website and five conversion optimization tips for improving your conversion.

Website Optimization Tips For More Web Traffic

Smaller companies in particular are often unaware of the importance of web traffic. They buy a domain, post their content and leave it at that. This is a shame, because without actively generating traffic, no one will see the website.

For example, research found that only 17% of small businesses invest in search engine optimization (SEO), one of the most effective ways to drive potential customers to a website. 

To give your web traffic a nice boost without much effort, we recommend that you carefully read the following five website optimization tips and perhaps apply them to your own website.

1. Optimize your website for SEO with the SEO audit

There are several useful tools that analyze in a few minutes what you can adjust on your website for better findability on Google. The SEMRush SEO audit, for example, results in a handy list of technical aspects that are easy to edit. Think, for example, of pages that do not function properly, elements that are difficult to find or a lack of internal or external links. The better a website is put together, the more often Google will show it to the target group.

2. Optimize content

In addition to the technical aspects that emerge from an audit, optimizing content is also important. Does the content contain the right keywords and enough related keywords? Is it scannable? Does the page contain enough images and a good meta description? Are external links to or from other websites required? All these elements have a major influence on the online findability of a website. 

There are several tools that indicate exactly whether a text contains the elements that Google considers ‘good’. The SEMRush writing assistant , for example, can be added as an add-on to a Google Doc and indicates exactly what you should pay attention to in order to make your text as SEO-friendly as possible. The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin also gives such tips, but then when you put a text in WordPress.

By using a combination of the above tools, you can be sure that your content has the words, tone, length and structure that Google likes to rank high in the search results. And the higher your text scores on Google, the more often it will be viewed. 

3. Lower the bounce rate

Are visitors coming to your website? Then you will have to make sure that they hang around for a while and do not immediately click away again. The percentage of visitors who land on a website and immediately leave it is called the bounce rate . 

The bounce rate should be as low as possible. Besides the fact that a visit that is too short will never end in a sale, a high bounce rate also has a negative effect on the SEO of a page. Google immediately notices that the visits only last so short and concludes from this that the website is probably not relevant (or of good quality). As a result, the page appears lower in the search results, which naturally results in less web traffic.

So how do you lower the bounce rate? You do this, for example, by placing internal links between relevant pages, limiting advertisements, ensuring good scannable content, paying attention to ease of use ( UX ) and ensuring a fast website. 

The most important thing here, however, is that the website is of value to your target audience. When visitors can immediately find what they are looking for, they will have no reason to click away. 

4. Provide a fast website

We mentioned it before: the faster a website works, the better. Research showed that 39% of visitors leave a website if it loads too slowly. This is a huge percentage that can easily be maintained by regularly testing how fast the website loads and what could be improved. 

With handy tools such as GTMetrix you can easily measure how long it takes to load your website and which elements may cause a delay. 

5. Optimize your website for mobile

Within many industries, at least half of website visits are on mobile. If a website does not function optimally on a smartphone, you run the risk of losing at least half of your web traffic. 

With Google’s mobile-friendly test you can see in a few minutes whether your website is mobile-friendly and what you can do to improve it.

6.Optimize your website for better conversion

When you have sent enough traffic to your website, you naturally want your visitors to take action. What this action is depends on your business and strategy. Possible conversion goals are making a purchase, filling out a form, downloading a document or sending an email. 

Unfortunately, a large proportion of entrepreneurs are not consciously working towards a conversion goal. For example , as many as 70% of small businesses don’t have calls to actions (CTAs) on the home page. This means that it will not be clear to visitors what they can do on the website, so they will most likely do nothing.  

How do you ensure that visitors do take action? By trying out the five website conversion tips below, you can optimize your website for conversion and there is a good chance that a website will yield more and more.

7. Don’t forget the call to action

We called it before, the CTA (call to action). It is a great shame how many companies have a good website, but forget to encourage the visitor to do what the website was made for. 

Therefore, make sure that every page directs the visitor towards a certain action. This can be a contact button, for example, or a nice offer. 

Put your call to actions in a prominent place and give it a color that contrasts with the rest of the page.

8. Add a popup

To give more visitors to your website an extra incentive to take action, it is advisable to add pop-ups. Examples of good popups are: 

• The exit-intent pop-up that appears when the visitor appears to be leaving the website
• A pop-up asking you to subscribe to the newsletter 
• A pop-up offering a free product (lead magnet) in exchange for leaving data

A ‘gamified’ pop-up in which an offer becomes a game. For example, think of a wheel with different discount percentages that visitors can spin.

 9. Remove all distractions

The fewer distractions, the faster a website visitor will be inclined to perform the desired action. 

Therefore, make sure that this action is the only logical step for the visitor. For example, has your visitor ended up in the shopping cart, ready to checkout? Then make sure that he can do nothing else than click on ‘order’. Are there any other products on the screen? Or can the visitor click on a nice image, blog or social media link? Then there is a good chance that it will be diverted and that the sale will not go through.

10. Pay enough attention to your web design

The design of a page is at least as important as the text. When visitors come to a website that looks unkempt or complicated, this immediately creates a bad impression and the visitors are likely to drop out. UX design  and usability optimization (UI) are essential here.

For example, in a Hubspot study, 38% of internet users said they would leave a website if the content or layout looked unappealing. 

So always make sure you have a beautiful, easy-to-navigate site that matches both the target group and the style of the company itself.

11. Run A/B tests

Finally, it is important to regularly test whether the website is having the right effect. With handy tools it is possible to perform A/B tests. These are tests where you simply compare two versions of a page to see which one has the best effect. 

For example, create two different CTAs and ensure that half of your website visitors see CTA A and the other half see CTA B. Do more visitors respond to CTA B? Then after some time you can decide to show all visitors this CTA. 

Useful tools for performing A/B tests are Google Optimizer , VWO and Optimizely .