June 2023 | Digital8

Our Guide To Increase Your Website Speed Optimization – Complete Guide

Getting more leads attracted to your business is likely when your website is optimised to meet user needs. Boosting your business website speed is step one in getting more leads and converting these leads into paying customers. Designing an effective website with speed in mind is crucial–the longer it takes for your site to load, the likelier it is that users will ditch your page before seeing any of its content.

The probability of a customer bouncing increases 32 percent as load time goes from one to three seconds, making site speed one of the most important factors to online success. Despite the importance of website speed optimization, too many businesses don’t take the time to optimise their site design for an improved site experience. This article will help you tackle slow loading times and reach more leads by exploring the benefits of site speed optimization and the best practices to attract more traffic to your business. Let’s get started!

The Benefits of Website Speed Optimization

Website and page speed optimization have several advantages, especially for businesses looking to attract more customers by providing a satisfactory online experience. Below are some of the benefits you can unlock by optimising your website for speed.

Enhances User Experience

Increasing your website speed optimization will cause faster load times, resulting in a better user experience and making users more likely to engage with your content. Enhancing the user experience is essential to boost overall user satisfaction, foster trust between users and the site, and boost the likelihood of users returning to your site. A slow website will frustrate users, leading them to abandon your page and seek information, products, and services from your competitors.

Impacts Your SEO

Keywords aren’t the only factor that impacts your search engine optimization (SEO). Your site speed plays a significant role in determining how you rank in search engines like Google. Faster-loading websites are likely to rank higher in results pages because search engine algorithms prioritise fast and efficient results for users.

An efficient loading time proves your legitimacy to search engine algorithms, giving you a better chance of appearing high in results lists while increasing your visibility, generating organic traffic, and opening the door for potential business opportunities.

Lowers Your Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. The slower your page loading times, the higher your bounce rate becomes, and the less legitimacy your brand has in the eyes of search engines and consumers. High bounce rates indicate visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for or having a poor experience with your website.

Without site speed optimization, users will lose patience and leave before they’ve explored your content thoroughly. By optimising your content for speed, you can increase the chances of site visitors exploring multiple pages, engaging with your content, and purchasing or subscribing to your offerings.

Improves Your Conversion Rate

Site loading time can influence your customer conversion rates. Because a faster site loading time encourages users to stay on your website longer and explore different offerings, users will likely engage and purchase from your site. Ultimately, loading time likely plays a much more critical role in your company’s success than you imagine.

Best Practices to Enhance Website Speed

website speed

Website performance optimization can make or break your site’s success and your ability to attract your target audience. Though it’s undoubtedly essential to improve website performance capabilities, you may question how to optimise website speed to attract more visitors and convince them to engage with your offerings. Here are some of our top suggestions to optimise your website’s speed and reach untapped audiences with your content.

Optimise Images

Optimising image sizes should be one of the first steps to improve your website speed. Most websites incorporate images into content frequently. While images are crucial to keeping your site visitors engaged with your offerings, images that aren’t compressed or with too high of a resolution can harm your website’s performance.

Neglecting to consider image resolution means that only a few online visitors can navigate your website without slow loading times. You waste bandwidth by leaving your images as they are and creating an unappealing user environment.

Enable Browser Caching

Caching is essential for optimising your website speed and a crucial factor for web performance best practices. Caching involves saving versions of your files in a storage location known as a cache. Caching your files lowers bandwidth consumption and can significantly improve your loading speed.

Browser caching enables your browser to store essential information and present this information to avoid reloading the information every time a user visits the website. This process optimises page loading speeds to ensure visitors have a pleasant experience with your website and return to your content in the future.

Lower the Number of Plugins

While plugins provide essential functionality and features for many websites, the more plugins your site uses, the slower it loads and the more resources are necessary to operate. As you adopt more plugins to suit your evolving needs, take inventory and consider which plugins you no longer need to make your website design what you want. Aim only to keep necessary plugins that contribute to your site’s functioning and eliminate unnecessary plugins to optimise the user experience.

Get Rid of Redirects

Whenever a page redirects to another location, the HTTP request becomes more extended, and the loading response becomes more tedious for the average user. Eliminating page redirects when they aren’t necessary to guide users throughout your website is crucial and will significantly improve your page loading times for a more enjoyable user experience.

Though redirects are sometimes necessary–such as when you’ve just switched to a new domain and need to direct users to your new website–they are often unnecessary and only deter potential customers from your offerings. Do your best to avoid creating redirects when you’re link-building, and take note of any misplaced redirects on your site.

Minify Your Files

Minifying your files involves optimising your JavaScript, CSS, and HTML code by eliminating or shortening any symbols in the file’s source code. These symbols could include unnecessary characters, spaces, comments, and other details that increase the file size and contribute to slow loading times, causing users to leave your website before exploring further.

Once you’ve minified CSS and JavaScript files, you can combine files into bundles for better code and faster page loading speeds to enhance user satisfaction. The smaller the file size, the more effectively and efficiently your site can load and give users a memorable experience.

Implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network (CDN) can significantly increase your website speed and optimise your content for a better user experience. A CDN is a set of site servers that increase page loading speed by hosting copies of your website content from distributed, global web servers.

Hosting your website on a single server means that all visitor requests are sent to a single hardware location rather than multiple servers, increasing the time to process individual requests. CDNs direct site users to the nearest geographical site server, meaning your content reaches users efficiently.

Optimise Your Hosting Solution

Your site loading speeds might be low because of your current hosting solution. If you aren’t sure how to improve website performance, reassess your current host. While shared hosting services are popular because they are the most affordable way to host your website, these aren’t usually the most efficient and will likely cause slower loading times and higher bounce rates.

Rather than shared serving, where you share resources of a specific server with others, consider the following options:

  • Virtual Private Servers (VPS): a VPS uses multiple server machines rather than a single machine like shared servers
  • Dedicated: a dedicated server involves a single server machine that you rent while a system administrator maintains the server
  • Serverless: serverless hosting removes the need for maintenance and setup procedures, making it an innovative option for many site owners

Improve Your Website Performance With Digital8

Website speed optimization is crucial to succeeding in the online market, and without taking proper steps to optimise your site speed, users will likely turn away from your content in favour of your competitors. A well-designed website is the first step to making a name for yourself and your company online, and by prioritising your site speed, you can access benefits including an enhanced user experience, improved SEO and higher search engine rankings, lowered bounce rate, and a higher conversion rate.

Digital8 has all the resources you need to thrive in your market and reach an online audience that engages with your content. Converting site visitors into paying customers is possible with expert design guidance from Digital8. As a leading web design agency, Digital8 ensures that all of your website needs are met so you can provide visitors with the best user experience possible.

Finding success with your website is possible when you work with Digital8. Contact Digital8 today to start optimising your site design and converting more leads.

How to Improve Your Brand Awareness

Brand awareness can seem complicated, but it’s simply a matter of getting your brand in front of the right people! In essence, brand awareness represents how familiar your audience is with your brand’s identity. 

So, why is it so important to improve your brand awareness? 

Particularly in the early stages of creating a brand, you must build trust with your audience and promote your company’s offerings to maximize long-term success. One of the best ways to establish brand trust, create positive brand association, and influence positive perceptions of your products or services is through improving your brand awareness. This means that your brand awareness strategy completely sets the tone for your audience’s experience, and contributes directly to your business’ overall success! 

In this article, we are going to explore the top strategies to improve your brand awareness. Let’s get into it! 

 

Create a Google Adwords Management Strategy

Google Adwords, also known as Google Ads, is a pay-per-click advertising platform where advertisers pay per click on an ad. Given Google’s expansive reach, chances are you’ve likely seen another company’s Google ad.

As Google is the most used search engine, implementing an effective Google Adwords management strategy is one of the best ways to introduce your brand to your target market. Each Google search provides an opportunity for your brand to be placed in front of your audience. By creating Google ads that show off what your brand is all about, you can place your brand name in front of your target audience each time they search. 

Once you get your brand name in front of your target audience repeatedly, this will likely boost your brand awareness, website traffic, and overall brand recognition. Over time, you are able to optimise your Google ads accounts through an effective management strategy to increase your reach and maximise your brand consideration. 

Google ads marketing

Implement an SEO Optimization Strategy

Having the perfect search engine optimization (SEO) strategy in place is one of the best ways to build your online presence. SEO works to improve your site’s visibility by ranking your business keywords  as highly as possible on Google search results. The aim of search engines is to provide users with the most relevant answers and information. This means that their algorithms choose the most relevant web pages to your audience’s query, and display them in order of relevance and authority. 

Essentially, the higher your site ranks in your target audience’s search, the more visible your business will be for your customers. By maximising your brand visibility, this can lead to improved brand awareness and increased website traffic. 

The key to creating the perfect SEO optimization strategy is to understand what your customers are wanting to see, and providing them with the best possible answers. Using these key inputs, your brand is able to rank on the first page of Google and be seen by the people who are wanting to engage with your content. As a result, the perfect SEO optimization strategy can increase the quantity of traffic reaching your website to maximise brand awareness.

 

Use Social Media Marketing Strategies

Social media channels are likely being used by your customers multiple times each day. This provides a great opportunity to get your brand seen by your target audience on a daily basis. By creating an effective social media marketing strategy, you can grow your online presence to exponentially increase your reach and brand awareness.

To increase brand awareness by means of social media, the first step is to create clear goals. These goals could include the frequency of posting, what types of content are being posted, and how interactive your brand will be with responding to customer queries through social media. It’s important that your business focuses on creating interesting and engaging content to maximise your brand’s reach. Posting engaging content is the best way to catch your audience’s interest and increase the likelihood of your content being shared across your audience’s social networks. 

In particular, Instagram currently boasts over 2 billion monthly active users, making it one of the most popular social media platforms for businesses. With the right Instagram marketing strategy, your brand can significantly increase your online presence, reach, and engagement rates – to maximise your brand awareness! 

One of the best ways to establish an online presence and build awareness using Instagram marketing is to encourage your employees to involve themselves in the social media strategy. This can work to create an online community, where your followers can create meaningful connections with your business to boost brand awareness, loyalty, and engagement. 

If you’re looking for some new ways to engage with your followers and create an online community, our experienced digital marketing experts here to help.

social media marketing

 

Ensure a Functioning & User-Friendly Website

An interactive and user-friendly website will not only attract more visitors, but it will also strengthen your brand credibility. A user-friendly website makes it easy for users to navigate your website’s information across any device. Because your website is easy to navigate, users will spend more time interacting with your products and offerings, resulting in increased conversions. 

To ensure that your website is user-friendly and interactive, it will need a unique web design and a clear path of discovery. Having a unique website design is a great way to set a good first impression. The first impression of your website is key because this will directly influence the credibility of your website and the trust that your audience has in your brand. If your website is clear, user-friendly, and interactive, this will lead to a good first impression, causing increased engagement and trust amongst your audience.

Once your audience is engaged by the unique web design, it’s important that your customer has a clear path of discovery. The webpage design should allow for easy navigation, to ensure that your user never feels lost. If there is not enough information to guide the user, they will likely leave your website and find another competitor’s website. To avoid this scenario, a good way to guide the user through your website is through the use of dynamic imagery, appropriate font size, and optimal placement of information. 

Once all of these elements have been implemented cohesively, your target audience will view your brand as credible, leading to increased trust, loyalty, and conversions.

 

How Digital8 Can Help Improve Brand Awareness

Are you feeling ready to get started with improving your brand awareness, but not quite sure where to start? Meet our team of Social Media Marketing and SEO experts! 

Here at Digital8 , we are here to help you reach your business’ full potential by connecting with thousands of potential customers across all social media platforms. Our Social Media Marketing team can provide you with a tailor-made strategy that focuses on increasing brand awareness to connect you with your customers. Digital8 is the leading SEO company in Brisbane to help businesses increase their online visibility and brand awareness. 

If you’re looking to grow your business and maximise your brand awareness, get in touch!

How To Write SEO Optimised Content For Your Website And For Google?

With roughly 8.5 billion searches per day on Google alone, you can see why SEO is important. SEO is the process of optimising your website to improve the ranking on the search engine result page. Search engines are only as good as the results they show, which is why they only show the most relevant and high quality websites. 

SEO copywriting is the process of writing content whilst targeting the relevant keywords to increase your organic search traffic. As paid advertising costs rise and organic traffic continues to dominate the search engine traffic, strong SEO content has become a valuable advantage.

When writing copy for SEO purposes there are a number of things to consider. For this blog article we have created a checklist on how to create the best Search optimised content.

 

How do search engines determine what is good content

Search engines discover and rank websites and web pages by crawling and indexing each of them. This is a continuous process of updating the index with new content or changes ensuring that the search results reflect the latest information available on the web.

Search engines discover new and updated content by crawling the internet using so-called crawlers, also referred to as spiders. They continuously move from one webpage to another and add new content to the index. The crawlers analyse the page’s structure, headings, title tags and other elements to understand the content. 

The information is then processed and stored in a huge database, also known as the index. The index holds all the high quality content that has been discovered and collected by the crawlers on the internet. Once a search query has been put through, the search engine will go over the content in the index and rank the web pages based on relevance and quality to the search query. This specific order is what will appear for the user as the search results and determines the ranking. 

By writing your content whilst keeping SEO best practices in mind, you can help give the search engines a better understanding of what your page is about and it will be more likely to rank.

The most common best practices to follow for the best results when writing your SEO content are;

  • Target keywords and phrases that match the user’s search terms and search intent. Search engines determine the relevance of your content by looking at the keywords in the text, headers and tags.
  • Focus on creating unique, informative and engaging high-quality content.
  • Regularly update the content as search engines aim to provide the most relevant and up to date content to its users. 

This will increase the chances of ranking higher whilst resulting in a steady growth of your organic traffic. 

SEO contents

 

Find the Digital8 Content Writing Tips

 

  1. Match search intent

    As search engines are committed to providing the most relevant content, it is crucial to understand the underlying reasoning behind the user’s query. This will allow you to write content that aligns with the user’s search intent, thereby making your content more likely to appear at the top of the search results. Once you know the search intent, you are able to write content that is relevant, valuable, and aligned with what users are searching for. By meeting user expectations, you can improve your visibility, engagement metrics, and overall SEO performance. The four types of search intent are:

    1. Informational – ‘How to grow tomatoes’
      Informational searches are performed when users have the intent to collect information or learn something specific. They often start with words like ‘How to’, ‘What is’ or ‘Tips for’. Search engines prefer to show informative content such as articles, guides and blog posts that provide answers or explanations.
    2. Navigational – ‘www.tomatogrowers.com’
      Navigational searches happens when users have a specific destination in mind, the queries often include specific URLs or brand names
    3. Commercial – ‘Tomato taste reviews’
      Commercial searches are all about finding information about products or services to compare brands and read reviews. They indicate that users are seeking further information before moving to the purchasing stage.
    4. Transactional – ‘Buy tomatoes’
      Similar to commercial search intent, however, in this case the user has the intention to make the purchase. Often the search query includes words like ‘Buy’ or ‘Order’ and the search results often include product listings and online stores.
  2. Perform keyword research

    By researching the keywords you can identify the specific words that are being used in search queries to find certain information, specific products and or services. It is a critical part of writing SEO content as it allows you to optimise your content for your target audience. There are several keyword research tools in the market are useful to use such as SEMrush, Ahrefs or Moz Keyword Explorer. They can provide valuable insights into the search volume, keyword difficulty and related keywords. When determining which keywords to use, it is important to consider search volume as well as keyword difficulty of each keyword. For example, the higher the search volume, the higher the keyword difficulty is and the harder those keywords are to  rank for. Which is why it is recommended to focus on long-tail keywords. These often have lower search volume and keyword difficulty however, they often have a high intent.It is important that your keywords align with the search intent of your target audience to improve your visibility and grow the organic traffic to your website.

  3. Create high quality content

    Search engines prefer to rank high-quality, relevant content. Which is why it is important to ensure that you create unique, informative and well structured content that aligns with your target audience’s search intent. High quality content creates a better user experience, establishes authority and attracts backlinks. These all in turn improve the search engines ranking. Investing in high-quality content significantly improves your SEO performance and helps you to achieve long-term success.

  4. Use headers strategically

    Headers are an easy way to help search engines understand the structure and hierarchy, making your website more easy to crawl. They also improve the readability of your page for your page visitors, thereby improving their user experience. When writing your H1 it is important to ensure that it contains your main keyword and that it describes your page’s subject. The H2 and H3 can be used to organise your content and allow users to scan over the content for the information they are looking for.

  5. Optimise the meta description

    Meta descriptions are an important part of your SEO strategy as they appear directly  on the search engine results page and describe the content of your webpage. They are the first impression of your page that a user will see on the search engine. Which is important to ensure that it includes your keywords and convinces the searcher that your page contains the information, product or service they are after. We recommend writing a meta description of maximum 120 characters in an active voice with a call to action.

  6. Use your visual content

    Not only does visual content allow you to convey complex information in a clear visual way, it also can create valuable backlinks. For example if you create high quality content, it is more likely to be shared, thereby creating valuable backlinks. Backlinks are references to your content from other websites, these references are used to determine the authority of your websiteWhen adding images, it is important to ensure that they are compressed and properly formatted to keep the page load speed optimal. It is important to provide Alt text for each image on your website as it is an alternative for both search engines and people that use screen readers to read the content. Best practice for writing alt text is to keep it less than 125 characters and include any related keywords for further contentVisual contents

  7. Strong backlink building strategy

    We already briefly touched upon backlinks and explained that they influence a website’s authority. There are a few factors which determine the quality of the link, such as the popularity of the linking site, the topic relevance and the trust in the domain. Search engines regard high-quality backlinks as votes of confidence for your content and website. This is especially the case when the backlinks are coming from reputable and relevant websites in your industry. There are a few things you can focus on to generate high quality backlinks as part of your link building strategy. For example, develop relationships with influencers in your industry, publish content on third party websites, and write SEO content that attracts organic traffic.

  8. Responsive website and content

    With the rise of smartphones and tablets, it is crucial that both your design and content are responsive across all devices. This means that your website and content automatically adjusts its layout and design to fit various screens. As responsive websites lead to better user experience, they are favoured by search engines. This combined with high-quality content significantly improves your SEO and increases the organic traffic.

Now that you know the basics of SEO content writing, you can get started on optimising your own content and start ranking higher on the search engines. Digital8 Brisbane SEO agency team and content writers are always happy to jump in and help you and your business! Feel free to reach out to us for our SEO and Content Writing services, let’s grow your business together.