Web Design Tips Archives - GLO - Generate Leads Online

2022 Digital Marketing Trends

John Parnell — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 14:45:52 +0000

2021 is coming to a close and it has been another year of change. Google (as always) updated many algorithms. Twitter started Fleets and killed it again. LinkedIn started stories and killed it again. Third-party cookies being blocked by Chrome has been delayed until 2023. And who can forget Facebook’s announcement of the Metaverse and name change to Meta?

With the digital landscape constantly changing and so quickly, you would be a fool to make any predictions for 2022, wouldn’t you? Well… We are going to do it anyway, as we want to help you stay ahead of the curve.

(Mark Zuckerberg showing his ‘metaverse’ avatar during Connect 2021 Facebook)

SEO trends 2022

Core Web Vitals

Google’s user experience update around Core Web Vitals started to roll out in June 2021, showing us that Google not only wants to deliver the most relevant result based on the user’s search, but also wants to make sure that websites provide a great user experience. There will be updates to this algorithm and Google will develop new ways to measure user experience.

High-Quality Content

A key part of user experience will be the quality of content that the audience can consume, site-wide. Increasingly, we are seeing pages in Google Search Console that are discoverable but not indexed. This means making every page (including campaign landing pages) valuable.

GLO’s 2022 SEO Tip

If you want to win at SEO in 2022, make sure every page on your website gives a great user experience and provides genuine value to the people visiting those pages.

Rich Media Trends 2022

Google Lens

Websites that have unique images will be rewarded in search results. Google Lens is tech that Google has on all of its Pixel phones and is connected to image search, discover, and shopping results. More and more, we are seeing images pulled into the main search results, not just the images or shopping results. Google understands what users want when they search and can offer richer content as a result.

Google Ads Image Extensions

Likewise, Google Ads is encouraging image extensions to help text ads look more appealing, pointing to the importance of images in 2022.

Metaverse

Similarly, Facebook’s announcement of the Metaverse (which will be highly reliant on rich media), means that now is the time to make sure you are also producing regular video content for your business.

Youtube

Make sure that you are using unique images and video on your website, that you have a YouTube channel, and that content is tagged correctly to help the search engine understand what the content is about.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has had its ups and downs over the years. At first, response rates were high, but over time this declined as the medium was abused and our inboxes became saturated with messages trying to sell us products and services.

End of third party cookies

With the end of third party cookies (in 2023), and search engines and social media platforms constantly changing their algorithms, one of the few constants you can control in your marketing armoury is your first-party data (email addresses, telephone number etc).

Audience Segmentation

There will be more companies turning to email marketing in 2022, so you need to make sure that your content stands out and is better than your competitors. One way to do this is to understand your audience and segment it. Deliver personalised content about what is important to them; make sure your emails bring your audience value and are not just constant sales messages.

Google Shopping

Free listings

When Google Shopping started back in 2002, it was free; it was a way to get more products on Google and take market share back from Amazon. As it became more popular, it then turned into a pay per click only option. In 2020, Google decided to change this back to free (for some placements) in the UK.

Surfaces Across Google

With Surfaces across Google, it’s possible for Shopping results to appear in search, Shopping, Maps, Images, and Lens. We have already mentioned the importance of images and Google Lens in 2022, so if you sell products online, make sure you set up your Google Merchant Centre now.

Social Media

TikTok

Before the 2020 lockdown, most people hadn’t even heard of TikTok, but the perfect storm of isolation and fun, low-quality, vertically-shot video to popular music caused it to become one of the most downloaded apps of all time.

Now, we all know what TikTok is and despite Facebook/Instagram’s attempts to take audience share back with the release of Reels, it continues to be one of the biggest and fastest-growing social platforms, with 1 billion monthly active users.

We remember having conversations with businesses about Facebook and being told, I don’t need to be on Facebook, we are having the same conversations about TikTok today…

It’s a place to grow an audience and share your brand, values and business journey. You don’t need to be funny, able to dance, or to know about popular music – it’s a place to be real and raw.

GLO’s Social Media Tip for 2022

In 2022, more businesses will be adding TikTok to their social media marketing. We advise you to get there before it’s too noisy. And remember, if you are advertising on the platform, make TikToks, NOT ads.

Request a Callback

Are you already applying all of these trends to your digital marketing strategy for 2022? Request a callback or schedule a free digital marketing consultation to get free advice about how you can make the most out of your digital marketing budget for 2022.

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A/B testing for CRO

John Parnell — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 16:10:43 +0000

CRO is an acronym used by marketers referring to conversion rate optimisation – the process of increasing the number of conversions a website receives. There are several types of conversions a business could be aiming to increase; transactional sales, form completions, email signups or the number of visitors creating an account. These are all dependent on the business’s goals.

In order to optimise your website’s conversion rate, you need to understand what your customers’ needs and wants are when visiting your website. Simply asking your customers through surveys doesn’t guarantee any quality feedback that you could rely on. Instead, taking the data-driven approach using analytical tools, such as Google Analytics and Hotjar, enables you to physically see what is and isn’t working, ultimately preventing your conversion rate from increasing.

What is A/B testing?

CRO and A/B testing typically go hand in hand, as optimising a website’s conversion rate requires various testing to be carried out. A/B testing is simply the act of testing two or more variations of pages, content or elements, to help pinpoint what contributes to customers successfully being pushed down the marketing funnel and converting. There’s no correct “one size fits all” way for your website to appear and function to be successful; what works for one company’s website may not work for another. The specific data collected from your visitors is key to understanding where any metaphorical “roadblocks” are along the customer’s journey, enabling you to eliminate them through the process of A/B testing.

But what data should I be tracking?

Within Google Analytics, the ‘pages per session’ and ‘average session duration’ metrics are good to be aware of but need to be approached with discernment. Having a high average session duration could suggest customers are having to spend more time trying to find what they want which leads to frustration and abandoning the site. To ensure this isn’t the case, view and examine your analytics – when visitors are viewing lots of pages, are they resulting in conversions? If not, it might be an indication that there are too many roadblocks on their way to converting.

The two metrics which are essential to track are Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate. If there is a high Bounce Rate on a certain page, you can take that as a good indicator of where to start A/B testing. Once you identify the problem and fix it, your Bounce Rate on this specific page is likely to decrease, resulting in a spike in conversions. After all, Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) leads to more completed purchases or sign-ups, depending on the goal, rather than just increasing the traffic that comes into the site.

How does A/B testing work?

Once decided on an A/B testing tool, some of the best being Optimizley, VWO, Omniconvert and Google Optimise, a code needs to be placed into the website in order to gain full control of the site and users’ experience. Now, using any of the website analytical tools previously mentioned, analyse where your visitors appear to be dropping off within your website. Identifying that helps narrow down what pages need reviewing and testing, allowing you to start building the new variations to test against within the A/B testing tool. Having conducted your research prior and identified where your visitors are dropping off, you can build the variations within the A/B testing tool, creating as little as one to as many variations desired.

Tip:

If conducting multiple A/B tests simultaneously, ensure none of them conflicts with one and other. Avoid testing anything which can be viewed at the same time, as although some testing tools do limit each visitor to only see one campaign at a time, others however don’t. Consequently resulting in both test results being contaminated by one and other. So in general it’s good practice to keep the tests separate and prioritise one over the other initially.

The A/B testing tool allows you to decide what percentage of your site traffic are recipients of the test. For example, 100% traffic would equal 50% of visitors seeing the original site, also referred to as ‘the control’, the other half seeing the variant. The delivery is completely random, ensuring there are no biased results depending on external factors.

Before launching the test, there will be an option of setting goals for your tests. This is dependent on what you are trying to achieve. Either increasing conversion rate or something more specific like multiplying click-throughs of a button or being directed to the next stage of the funnel.

Browser cookies track and save whichever variation visitors land on. Though, if a visitor were to delete the cookies’ data before returning to the website or open it on another device, they could potentially view the control or another variation.

Each test should last for a minimum of 1 to 2 weeks, to ensure enough data has been collected and the results have normalised, clearly stating a ‘winner’. Keep in mind that the duration of your test will vary depending on your site’s average number of visitors, especially if you have multiple variations. Low traffic means the test needs to run longer to collect enough data and vice versa. The successful variation needs to be implemented for 100% of traffic until it’s been permanently built into the website.

Marketing Funnels & CRO Strategies

When it comes to testing, you’re able to change basically anything that already exists on site which your customers can see. There are some limits though, you’re unable to add net-new pages without adding them to the original website. For instance, if the homepage needed to be completely redesigned, you couldn’t test this without adding the new page variation to the original website. However, using your A/B testing tool, you could redirect a proportion of your visitors to the new page and the others to the original. The other limitation to testing includes the site functions which don’t already exist in the original code. For example, if you wanted to test an ‘Add to wishlist’ function, it would need to be written into the code first, but then be suppressed for a percentage of traffic.

You could test:

Images or Videos
Copy
Call to actions
Buttons
Pop-ups
Navigation
Forms

If you are just starting out with A/B testing then begin with features that everyone can see! Landing pages typically receive the most traffic, so are a great place to start pushing those new visitors down the funnel and further into your site.

Further A/B testing ideas

If your website data isn’t showing you the results you were hoping for in terms of conversions but are unsure of where the issue lies, here are some testing suggestions:

Perfect your checkout – Your visitors are on the home stretch, ready to make a purchase. The checkout should have as few distractions as possible, to ensure your customers make that transaction. Test removing irrelevant content which could persuade the customer to go backwards in the funnel. Display shipping costs upfront as this can be a surprise expense which sometimes discourages the user from continuing. Simplify navigation, so there’s no confusion. Remember to continue showing any price discounts, original price and the new price. This will remind the customer how much they are saving which will motivate conversions.
Experiment with major elements – Large blocks of content can be overwhelming so try hiding parts or breaking them up into smaller pieces. Show/hide banners or images which are pushing important content further down the page. Cyber security logos may be off-putting for customers, so test which works for you.
Auto sort by popularity – Try sorting your product categories by popularity. This may improve the chances of new visitors finding what they are looking for quicker.
Create clarity – Test any call to actions (CTA’s) that have a lot of text vs a short snappy one. Chances are the short one will generate more leads. Any ad copy, headlines or CTAs should be clear and simple to drive a response.

A/B test results: How to identify the winner?

As mentioned earlier, each test should last at least 2 weeks. Your A/B testing tool will have a reports page that provides key information which contributes to deciding when the test should end and what variation won. There will be a metric called ‘confidence rate’ or ‘chance to beat control’, providing a percentage to each variation whether it’s predicted to be more successful than the original ‘Control’. The percentage has to be above 50%, otherwise, it’s a clear indication it has lost. To consider using any of the variations, they need to be at least 90%. Meaning there is little risk of the variation becoming a failure.

Next, a graph will present all the results. Ignoring the first few days, each line should have flatlined and stayed like that for 10 days or so to be able to stop the test.

Combining each of those points plus a sufficient amount of traffic will indicate a ‘winner’ of the test. If the confidence percentage is good but does not receive enough traffic, then let the test run longer, in order to obtain a fair result.

No clear A/B test winners?

Some tests may be trial and error, not all will result in the variant being crowned the ‘winner’ but that doesn’t mean the test was unsuccessful. You have gained more information about your visitors’ browsing habits, which will help guide future tests. But how can you utilise this information to your benefit now? The best way is to analyse the data and create user personas to paint a clear picture of your target audience, which can not only guide your further CRO efforts but also inform your social media posts or email marketing campaigns.

Building a User Persona

Forming one primary persona and perhaps a couple of secondaries from analysing previous reports enables you to build specific segments within your analytical tracking tool to identify what website elements the target audience is using and where A/B testing should be implemented. To give an example, using demographics within your analytical tool, enables you to identify both the age and gender of your key persona. At this point, start to build a new segment within the tool including that information. Take a look at your customer interests and narrow down what your primary persona interests are, then add those to the segment too. Also, key information to incorporate is ‘Geo’. Your key persona’s language and geographic location are valuable in order to target specific regions for future campaigns. You can make the persona segment as specific or vague as desired, depending on your website traffic volume or business goals. Now having built the segment, you’re able to see the pages and elements which are the driving factors of your key persona making a conversion. However, more importantly, you’re able to recognise where they are dropping off within your site which pinpoints exactly what to A/B test to optimise your website for your key persona.

How many A/B tests do I need to run to see an increase in conversions?

The first test won’t magically increase your conversion rate overnight. A/B testing is an iterative process of removing both big and small issues throughout your conversion funnel, creating a seamless experience for customers. Removing a stumbling block in the middle of the funnel won’t automatically make the entire journey clear too. It will take several improvements throughout the funnel until you start seeing your conversion rate increase.

It’s vital to regularly track your website’s data through analytical tools, in order to identify more testing opportunities. Through constant tracking, you will begin to spot behavioural patterns within your data. Completing one test and observing the subsequent data could potentially reveal another page which is now in need of testing. That new issue that arose as a result of a recent improvement proves how necessary observing your website’s data is at every step of the testing process. For example, improving an element on one page and successfully increasing the click-through rate will inevitably lead to more traffic being directed through to the next page. Consequently, the following page to which you have successfully boosted traffic levels, may not have previously received sufficient data to identify any testing opportunities. However, as a result, you may now be experiencing a high drop off rate, clearly showing the need for this case to be tested and optimised to increase conversions.

Here at GLO we continually analyse the data we are tracking to spot patterns and testing opportunities, which in turn help us to optimise our website and offer a seamless experience for our visitors.

Common CRO mistakes to avoid

Now, if you are sitting there feeling slightly overwhelmed or confused after reading the entirety of that information, let’s take a step back and recap. Conversion Rate Optimisation is an ongoing process that involves tweaking elements of your website in order to improve user’s experience and as a result generate more conversions, whether those are sales, form submissions or email newsletter subscriptions. By working on your CRO you can generate more leads via your website as your visitors will come across fewer roadblocks.

One of the best ways to improve your CRO is through A/B testing – the process of testing new variations of pages or elements on a website against the original. To decide what to test, use a website analytical tool to figure out where most of your current traffic is dropping off or start with landing pages that typically receive the most traffic. Some of the metrics that may indicate areas or pages worth testing include the Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate. Run your tests for a minimum duration of one to two weeks and allow the results to normalise – you know which version is your winner when you see one with at least a 90% success rate.

And finally, don’t forget that not all A/B tests you do will have the goal of increasing your conversion rate, especially in the beginning. You could set the goal to measure the number of times a specific element that’s being tested is clicked and therefore pushing those users closer to making a conversion. Furthermore, not all tests will have a clear winner but the data you collect can still be utilised to build a primary persona. This data can help you to understand who your key customer is and constantly ensure any A/B tests are increasing the conversion rate within that segment.

Conclusion

Just like with any optimisation efforts, it is important to strike a good balance between not responding to the data and doing too much to try and fix the issues. Every visitor wants a simple and easy browsing experience. So when it comes to optimising or redesigning your website here are some mistakes you should try to avoid:

Over personalisation – Personalised shopping experiences may be the latest trend but that doesn’t mean a customer’s experience should be 100% personalised. It can be off-putting sometimes for a customer to see actually how much information you know about them, resulting in potential losses. Test what performs best, do visitors want to see suggested items based on what they’ve already viewed or view new products that they may not have considered before?
Having multiple navigation methods – You want to ensure a streamlined experience. If adding new navigational methods, ensure it is easy for a customer to use or give hints on how to use new features.
Obsessing over colour – Of course, some colours are more eye-catching than others but overall it’s not an element to spend too much time worrying about it. Fix substantial problems before testing little details.
Carousels vs Static Images – Carousels that are especially featured on landing pages can bring the site to life and make it instantly more engaging, however, users typically click on the first slide, therefore missing the rest of the information. A/B testing will determine which works best for your users.
Don’t test without any data to back up your decision – This is a waste of time. Randomly testing elements to see if they work better is very time-consuming too. Figure out what content needs to be tested using your site’s data. You should A/B test new content before adding it to the original site in case it damages your conversion rate.
Focusing too much on the landing page – Yes, the landing page is very important! But if you know there are bigger issues further down the funnel, test and fix those first before driving more customers into the funnel.

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Are you already applying any of the above ideas on your website? Request a callback below to get free advice about how you can improve your conversion rate.

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Website CRO Tips | Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide

John Parnell — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:18:06 +0000

In this Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide, we are going to drill into Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) and provide you with our top 10 CRO tips that can help improve your conversion rate on your website, meaning you will generate more leads and subsequently, more revenue for your business.

The first thing you hear when you start a business is that you need a website. But what is the point in having a website? One thing that is pretty consistent with businesses, whether you are selling something on your website or simply have it up there for informative purposes, is that you want it to be able to help you convert potential customers to paying customers.

At GLO, we understand that in order to generate leads online, you need a website that converts web traffic into customers. Understanding the importance of CRO is the first step in the process. After all, the higher the number of ‘converters’ in relation to web visitors, the higher your conversion rate is. You may have thought to yourself in the past:

“I get a lot of visitors to my website but I haven’t got any enquiries from them.”
“My website is just my online business card.”
“I get all my business from referrals, I don’t need a website.”



This reminds of a saying from Henry Ford, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right”. I mention this because all the people who believe their website is not there to generate their business more leads are probably right! And the reason for this is most likely that they are unaware of their conversion rate and the ways to optimise it. If the website wasn’t designed with the purpose of convincing people to convert then it’s not likely that potential customers will convert, or even having anyways their customers can ‘convert’ in the first place.

Firstly you’ve got to start asking yourself, what do I want my website to do for me? You may want to sell more of your products, increase subscriptions to your mailing list or get people to enquire about your services. What is the point in having a website if it’s not working to achieve the goals you’ve set for it?

What is a conversion?

A conversion is a point at which a visitor on your website completes a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out an enquiry form or subscribing to your email newsletter. The conversion rate of your website is, therefore, the percentage of web visitors that complete a desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors.

Micro Conversions vs Marco Conversions

Macro Conversions

Your ‘Macro Conversion’ is the end goal that you are looking to achieve after your website visitor goes through the different levels of your marketing funnel.

It is important to note that this ultimate goal looks different for every business. An e-commerce website will be looking to get a purchase from its visitors. However, a service provider may wish to focus their efforts on getting visitors to request a quote for one of their services.

Micro Conversions

To get to a ‘Macro Conversion’, the visitor may take a series of smaller steps which can be defined as Micro Conversions. These can then be further split into categories, known as Process Milestone and Secondary Action.

Process Milestone

As the name suggests, a process milestone is a significant step on your potential customer’s journey where they take an action that brings them closer to a macro conversion, i.e. your ultimate goal. Some examples of process milestones include a visitor inquiring further about your products and services via live chat or adding products to their wish list.

Secondary Action

Secondary actions are still desired actions taken by the user but are seen as more distant from reaching a macro conversion. An example of a secondary action is a user coming to your website and downloading any free resources you are offering by entering their email address, commenting on your blog posts or signing up to your newsletter. Your website managed to get their attention and create some interest, but it may require a bit more nurturing to bring this particular user to a macro conversion.

What does Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) mean?

CRO is an umbrella term used for all of the tools and methodologies digital marketers use to optimize their sites and campaigns. In this article, we’re talking specifically about website CRO and things you can do on your website to improve your conversion rate.

Traffic may be coming your way via an effective SEO, paid search, social or content strategy, which is great! Unfortunately, the people visiting your site aren’t achieving the goal you actually intended them to achieve in the first place. They’re not converting. It’s time to think about conversion rate optimisation.

Digital marketers track the percentage of web visitors that are converting (conversion rate) in order to assess how well your website is getting web visitors to perform your goals (completing a conversion). Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of optimising your site to increase the likelihood that visitors will complete that specific action.

This continuous process of tracking the user browsing behaviour and adjusting the website elements accordingly, to get an increased percentage of users to perform your desired actions is known as Conversion Rate Optimisation.

Marketing Funnels & CRO Strategies

Every business has a marketing funnel in place. This is essentially your customer’s journey with you, and it usually includes the following steps: Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty and Advocacy.

Converting a lead will mean something different at every stage of the marketing funnel and so each stage may need a different CRO strategy.

Furthermore, CRO strategies vary from business to business but there are some best practices we can offer you today that can help optimise the conversion rate of your website.

As a business, you are out there to make a profit. Spending hundreds or thousands of pounds on a website that isn’t converting is not going to help you achieve that goal. Conversion rate optimisation is an ongoing process that will transform your website into a lead generating tool, helping you earn more revenue.

10 Website CRO Tips – Our Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide

Understanding Your Customer & Adding Value

Develop and express empathy for your target audience. Walk a mile in their shoes during every interaction and step, but go further. What brought the potential customer to this specific page? For the visitor to convert you need to show them you fully understand them. You, as the business owner, most likely do. But your website, as an extension of the business, needs to translate that understanding.

It is a good idea to go back to your buyer personas and make sure you understand who your ideal customers are, what their pain points are and how your product or service solves that issue. This reminds me of when I used to work in telesales (please don’t judge me). Every prospect I spoke to had sales objections, or reasons they’re hesitant to buy the product. If the buyer didn’t have reservations about the price, value, competitors, product fit, relevance to their situation, or their purchasing ability, they would have already bought it. To be successful in sales, reps must learn how to both discover and resolve these objections. This is exactly what you have to do to optimise the conversion rate on your website! These objections could be organised easily in a FAQs section, where you list common objections in a question format and responding in a way that changes their mind or alleviates their concerns.

Once you refresh your understanding of your customers, visit your website as a potential client with a specific problem in mind and observe how easy it is for you to find what you need, and how convincing and encouraging is the value proposition on your website.

Note the places within your marketing funnel where perhaps you could add more value. Would your potential customer appreciate a free downloadable PDF with your ‘Top 10 Tips on how to…[input your expertise]’? Or perhaps showcasing some case studies of how your product or service helped someone else could help you win their trust?

Harness Web Analytics & Behavioural Analysis Tools

To fine-tune these strategies you need real data. You may have a good understanding of how your customers browse your website but gathering data with the use of tools such as Google Analytics will give your CRO efforts more precision. From this information, you can begin to learn about the target audience segments that convert the most. This information helps us to modify the content and user experience to improve the conversion rate for the buyer personas you attract.

You can analyse user behaviour with snapshots, heatmaps and recordings with platforms such as Hotjar or CrazyEgg. This helps you to understand at which point a specific type of customer drops out and can even show you how customers interact with your website. This information will help you rethink your content, web design and how you add value.

Copywriting

Before you even think about changing the design of your website to optimise the conversion rate, you need to focus on your copy. It will be your words that will evoke the emotions needed for the lead to convert. Therefore, catchy headlines are vital to capture their attention fast. You can use a headline analyser to see how those headlines will appear to visitors – many people only read the beginning and end of a headline!

Remember to always start your SEO copywriting with the end goal in mind. What is it that you want the user to do on this particular page? This will make your content more structured and will reveal where you should be putting your ‘Call to Action’ buttons.

You should also always lead with the benefit in mind. How is your product or service helping them to solve a problem? How is it addressing their pain point? If you are still unsure what those pain points are, you should go back to Tip #1.

Optimise for Mobile & Page Load Speed

Each year the number of people visiting websites from their phones vs desktop raises. The percentage went up from 16.2% to 53.3% between 2013 and 2019 and is predicted to keep increasing. What this means is that your website needs to be mobile optimised. You need to make sure the user experience on mobile is just as effective as it is on the desktop.

What’s more, pages on your website need to load fast on mobile and desktop. Slow websites frustrate visitors and negatively impact your conversion rate. A study by Soasta showed a decrease of 20.5% in conversion rate on mobile pages that had 1 second slower experience. That one second could be very costly when is comes to your conversion rate.

Pop-ups

In the digital marketing world, pop-ups are overlays that appear on your screen and draw your attention to something different than you have been looking at on the website. For example, they are often used to get the visitor to sign up to an email list.

Many people find pop-ups annoying but there are many different pop-up types. Some appear the moment you open the site, others after a few seconds and then there are exit pop-ups that would only appear when you’re about to leave the website.

This latter type is considered as one of the most effective ways to keep your visitor happy whilst they’re browsing the website, yet capture them and make a micro-conversion when they’re about to leave.

When considering adding a pop-up to your site, make sure you:

Make it relevant to the page on which it pops-up
Make it easy for the visitor to close the pop-up
Make the design consistent with your branding
Use a compelling CTA
Use cookies. This way you’re not showing the pop-up to those who already signed up or to those who always close the pop-up without reading it.

Strateigic CTA’s

Congrats! You’ve attracted a visitor to your website – we could say this was one of your micro conversions, as if you have a Facebook Pixel, you can use remarketing to show them relevant ads to get them back to your website and to convert in the future.

So they’ve landed on your website, now what? What are you trying to capture next? Perhaps it’s their email address. How and where on the page will you entice them to do that? To lead them through a series of micro-conversions towards a macro conversion you will need to use visible, clear and effective ‘Call To Action’ buttons (CTAs).

This is why the strategic placement of your CTAs is so important. Think about your micro and macro conversions and the behaviour patterns of the visitors in the different stages of your marketing funnel. If they’re not yet at the stage of requesting a quote from you, what else can you do to stay connected with them?

Consider using the language of the prospect and including multiple CTA’s to speak to different audiences at different points in the funnel. Make the CTA buttons stand out by playing with their design, as well as the copy. Benefit-oriented copy, such as ‘Get my free eBook’, ‘Request call-back’ or ‘Stay connected’ perform better than a button that simply says ‘Click here’. And remember to split test your CTAs. Monitor what placement, design and copy work the best and adjust over time.

SEO your Inner Service Pages

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) helps people find your products and services online from search. However, time and time again I see businesses ‘SEOing’ their homepage for their services and giving very little effort put towards their inner services pages. A customer is a lot more likely to convert if they are displayed the service information they’re actually searching for. Here’s an example:

The customer searches “web design Ipswich” into Google and they click the first link. The website displays the homepage of the digital marketing agencies website which shows all of their digital marketing services, including; SEO, Google Ads Management, Social Media Marketing and then finally has a link to their web design services. In finding this link to the information your potential client was initially searching for, half the amount of searchers may have given up and chosen one of your competitors.

This is why it is important to pay just as much attention to your inner product/service pages as your homepage when it comes to web design and SEO. We pay close attention to getting service pages to rank higher than the homepage for service related searches, to improve the conversion rate. Someone searching for ‘web design’ may have different pain points as someone searching for a ‘digital marketing agency’, so your inner service pages need to reflect this.

Build Authority & Credibility

One way to increase the conversion rate is to build trust with your potential customers. In order to do this, you can add qualifications or trust stamps your business has, such as a high number of good reviews. This helps to build authority and makes you stand out against your competitors.

People trust other customers who took the time to review your products or services. Showcasing testimonials that relate to a particular service or product when the lead is in the ‘Consideration’ stage of the marketing funnel could convince them to move towards conversion. As with almost everything on this list, you can split test the effectiveness of your trust stamps, qualifications and testimonials to optimise your conversion rate.

Live ChatBot

One of the things that can kill your conversion rate is visitors not being able to get the information they came to find. If they become frustrated they will simply leave your website. To keep them from doing this, you could provide extra support with a Live Chatbot plugin.

Adding a live chatbot to your website makes your website visitors trust you and give them an impression that there are real people behind the chatbot 24/7, ready to support them with their queries. It is a cost-effective way of improving customer service.

Providing that extra reassurance is not only convenient for your website visitors when requiring extra information, but could also help them make a decision on whether they’d like to try your product or services. Live Chats are the most popular way for customers to request support. We recommended LiveChat or ChatBot, depending on your need for automation.

A/B Testing

Now let’s not get CRO and A/B Testing mixed up. CRO is about using tools and methods to optimise the number of conversions from your website. Testing is about verifying these tools and methods.

A/B testing is used throughout digital marketing. The glory of digital marketing, after all, is data. It is especially used effectively in paid media campaigns, by showing different variations of an advert to determine which gets the best click-through rate.

For website CRO, A/B testing is a popular method of comparing the effectiveness of two different versions of the same website, by showing different content or designs to visitors and analysing the data in order to find out the version that brings the most qualified leads. It helps you identify what works and what doesn’t.

We have ended our ‘10 Website CRO Tips’ on A/B Testing to show you that with testing, conversion rate optimisation is never-ending and you can constantly test different variations of every one of our CRO tips to get the best results from your website.

Request a Callback

Are you already applying any of the above ideas on your website? Request a callback below to get free advice about how you can improve your conversion rate.

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As a business, you are out there to make a profit. Spending hundreds or thousands of pounds on a website that isn’t converting is not going to help you achieve that goal. Optimising your conversion rate is an ongoing process that will transform your website into a lead generating tool, helping you earn more revenue. It was a pleasure to write our ‘Website CRO Tips’ to help you to survive COVID-19. Please get in touch if you have any questions.

The post Website CRO Tips | Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide appeared first on GLO - Generate Leads Online.

SEO Tips For Your Startup Business

John Parnell — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:18:05 +0000

As a company just beginning to start out in business, you need to target your potential clients online, as over 97% of consumers go online to find a business. One of the most efficient ways to do this is by using search engines, such as Google and Bing. Unless the potential customer has already heard of you or been recommended, they wouldn’t be searching your brand name. This is why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has to be at the forefront of your marketing strategy and an important consideration when planning your business. A startup that implements a strong SEO strategy during developing a business plan is more likely to achieve success through setting the foundations of the business with necessary SEO components.

So how can a startup achieve SEO success from the start? This blog will address how to consider SEO while developing your business plan, and share with you our top SEO tips for your startup.

The most fundamental SEO tips for Startups

Starting a business is not an easy process and it becomes even harder when rapid expansion in on the cards. If you’re just starting up, you need to be there in as many of your potential customer’s touchpoints and digital platforms to advertise your products or the services you are offering, especially social media platforms and search engines. For any startup or small business, a solid SEO strategy is essential to driving growth and brand awareness, therefore these startup SEO tips will help to take your small business to the next level:

Know your target audience
Fix technical issues and optimise your page
Register and optimise with Google My Business
Manage the local business listings and citations
Add schema markup
Register with Google and Bing webmaster tools
Register with Google Analytics

Know your audience to master your SEO efforts

The very first step to developing search engine optimized web content for your business is to know your target audience.

Keywords. Conversion. User experience. Search engine optimization.

What do all of these words and phrases have in common?

They all relate to how you will attract, engage, and convert your target audience.

The crux of any good digital marketing campaign is to identify the specific characteristics of your ideal customers, including geographic, demographic, and psychographic variables. This is very important because you will know who you are selling to and your target market. When you know who your target audience is or will be, it becomes easy to market your products or services, create content and search for the keywords to use among other things. Therefore, you need to research your target audience to make the right choices. The more you know about your audience, the more powerful your digital marketing efforts will become.

Fix technical issues and optimise your page

One of the most common issues that come up when a business fails to incorporate SEO into its startup plan is the emergence of technical SEO issues later on down the road. If you do not know much about SEO or you have very limited knowledge about the subject of SEO, it would be advisable to hire an expert SEO agency, such as Generate Leads Online to do a professional job.

Your website should not have any technical issues like duplicate content, broken links and slow page speed. If these issues are not fixed, they will affect your rankings and traffic to your page, making it hard to benefit from SEO strategies. While Google and other search engines have made big strides in their ability to evaluate sites, technical SEO issues can still create problems that make it more difficult for your site to be properly indexed and to rank well within search results.

In order to combat this issue, it’s important to have the technical aspects of SEO addressed as you begin developing your site and other web properties, in order to avoid costly complications that could be difficult to fix down the road.

Nevertheless, here is a list of several common technical issues that often arise and become more difficult to address the longer they are avoided:

No automated or cohesive process for removing or updating pages without creating links to missing pages, losing authority from external sites that linked to those pages, or redirecting users to irrelevant pages unrelated to the original.
The inclusion of URL query strings for campaign tracking, user filters and sorting operations, customization, and so on, that generate pages with largely identical content but located at different URLs. These should be avoided or addressed using the canonical tag.
Duplicate title tags.
Insufficient original content or excessive duplicate supplementary content on pages.
Links to “infinite spaces” where a virtually infinite number of pages are dynamically created that would be irrelevant in search results.
Poorly implemented or missing .htaccess, robots.txt, and XML sitemap.
Poorly set up analytics that fails to track user actions or loses information about their referral source.
Make sure that your startup game plan addresses the necessity of clean technical SEO during the development process as well as a part of regular site maintenance.

Once the technical issues are fixed, you need to optimize the page by creating quality content by conducting thorough research. Some of the things you need to optimize when creating content are:

Titles.
Meta descriptions.
Alt text and images.
Body content.

Register with and optimise Google My Business

Google Local SEO is a tactic that you need to consider when developing a marketing strategy for your business. It boosts the local search traffic and protects you from online fraud as well.

Google is used when you need to know anything from the best barbecue joint to best salon services in the area. With the help of Google Places all the relevant information like addresses, contact number, website link, reviews and available to the targeted audience in an instant.

It is essential for businesses to get the attention of the customers in the area it operates. With Google Local only the local searches are focused. Searches are limited to the business in a certain locality that makes it a great possibility to been seen by potential consumers.

Small businesses can take great advantage of Google Local SEO without spending any money on print ads or television. With the help of Google Places, you can market and promote your products and services in the target locality in a cost-effective manner.

Manage the local business listings and citations (NAP)

When optimizing your business, you need to understand that consistency and accuracy is very important to avoid confusing people. As a result, your business’s name, address and phone number (NAP) should be accurate to improve your local presence. If you don’t know your accurate NAP, you can look for a service that will distribute your NAP information so that you can update the info on your page.

NAP is critical for businesses wishing to rank well in the local organic search results because search engines like Google take the data into account when determining which companies to show for geo-targeted searches.

For starters, make sure that your NAP is correct – both on your website as well as on other sites throughout the web. Local SEO experts believe that Google and the other search engines cross-reference your NAP information across a variety of websites as a validation that you are a legitimate business. The more “local citations” you can build up with consistent NAP information, the better. In terms of local citations, it’s probably worth listing your business on any reputable directory – especially local directories and/or industry-specific directories.

Add Schema markup

Schema markup is one of the most under-utilised SEO techniques out there. This is surprising because it is one of the most valuable and powerful tools available to search engine marketers in 2021.

Schema markup is code you put onto your website to add context to its content for non-human readers (i.e. Google). It gives Google information in a consistent way that is easier for it to process, which in turn allows Google to serve this content to its users in search results.

Schema markup usually sends search engine signals about the components of a page, including:

Phone number.
Address.
Business number.
Ratings.
Business hours.

Register with Google and Bing webmaster tools

Google’s Webmaster Tools are essential for any strong SEO effort. To understand their full potential, it’s helpful to think about what Google Webmaster Tools’ role is for webmasters: it helps you see your website as Google sees it. The toolset gives you insights into what pages have been indexed on your site, what links are pointing to it, your most popular keywords, and much more.

If you have a website already, you need to register with search engines such as Google and Bing and submit your sitemap. This is very important because you will find out what the search engines understand and know about your search engine content.

Register with Google Analytics

Even though the webmaster tools can offer you a wide range of information from about search engines, Google Analytics offers a lot of information about users’ views. Knowing your users’ views is important because you will know their experience on your website and understand how you can offer them a better experience by improving your content or services. Google analytics should help you find out the following:

The most popular landing pages
The most popular exit pages
The pages that are commonly visited
Major traffic sources on your page

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Top 10 Local SEO Tips & Optimising GMB 2021

John Parnell — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:18:05 +0000

In this blog post, the GLO team discuss helpful tips to optimise Google My Business listings and illustrate local SEO tips that help you show in the top of Google Maps and help your business rank higher in search engines. Simply put, we’ll help you understand how to maximise your GMB SEO.

As we move into another week of lockdown many small business owners find themselves planning ahead to make sure they stay afloat during this period and come out stronger on the other side of the pandemic crisis. With more time on your hands, this is the perfect time to work smart to retain existing customers and prioritize the tasks that will see you thrive despite the downturn that the economists are expecting.

So what exactly could you be doing right now to help your business during, and beyond lockdown?

The obvious answer is (well to us anyway) – make sure you can be found online.

We’ve prepared 10 tips to improve your local SEO and optimise your Google My Business (GMB) listing. This will make your digital marketing more effective and help your business come back stronger after the coronavirus lockdown.

Google Maps is taking up more of the Google SERP (search engine results pages), especially for local searches. Being the most prominent free feature in search, it has never been more important to optimise your Google My Business location.

Google My Business is the universal marketing platform for Google Maps. Being universal, everyone has the same weapons in their arsenal in order to dominate local searches but not every business is reading our local SEO tips.

A lot of people assume that once you add information and photos to your listing then you are done, which is the opposite of the truth. Google has an algorithm that they use to determine which businesses stay on top of search results, and they always favour the business listings that are constantly updating their GMB.

Sign Up and Claim Your GMB Listing!

The vital first step for maximising your GMB SEO. You may think you’ve got a Google Map listing but until you’ve completed verification, you won’t be able to edit the business information that appears on Google Maps and therefore, you won’t be able to optimise your listing.

In order to claim your Google My Business, you’ll need a Google Account, you can set one up here. Once you have set up your GMB listing, you’ll need to verify it. Google will send a postcard to your business address with a verification code, once you enter this, your listing will be verified and you can start optimising your GMB listing.

Adding Correct Business Hours and Special Hours

Make sure customers know when you’re open for business and avoid negative experiences, such as a customer travelling to your business just to find out it is closed. Many bricks and mortar stores had to close their doors in order to help flatten the curve. Google My Business automatically updated the information for many businesses and marked them as temporarily closed, informing the admins about the change with a simple email. If your business is still able to operate, make sure you didn’t miss that email and that your opening times are up to date on your Google My Business page.

Choosing the Right Category for your Business

A local gas engineer approached us asking why his business wasn’t showing up in Google Maps. We advised him to make sure he added all the relevant categories to his business (you can choose up to 10, with 1 of them being the primary category). He was amazed that such a quick edit would mean that he could start appearing in the local ‘Map Pack’ (normally 3 listings in the maps section in SERP). He was so impressed with the results that he is now one of our clients.

Keep your Content Fresh by Adding Photographs

This helps give a good first impression to new customers finding you through search, sending a clear and positive message. It’s also a good idea to add an exterior photo so that people can recognise your business if they visit. Google reported that businesses with photos receive 42% more requests for driving directions and 35% more click-throughs to their websites.

This turns into more customers for you, which turns into more profit for you. Yep, just from adding photos. In order to keep your competitive edge, once you add your base photos, you should be adding new photos every 7 days (latest products, service projects, employees or events).

Ask for Reviews

Gaining Google Reviews is hands down one of the main ranking factors to consider when using GMB, period! Our director of marketing says, “My father’s plumbing business has consistently shown up in the map pack for the last 10 years for a competitive search term, ‘plumber Ipswich’, mainly because he has more positive reviews than his competition”. You might feel awkward asking but asking for Google reviews from your customers is the most effective way to compete in Google Maps. Not only does this increase your rankings but it will also increase your conversion rate, as customers are more likely to choose your business above your competitors.

Another quick tip, ask your customers to use keywords in their review that you’re looking to be found for, for example, “I’d recommend GLO’s digital marketing services, especially SEO & Web Design”. Google will find this information within the 0.40 seconds it takes to show Google Map listings.

Respond to your Reviews ASAP

One of the best ways to recover from a negative review is a well thought out, constructive response, showing customers, your business not only thinks their opinions are important, but you’re always interested in improving customer experience.

People are also a lot more likely to remove their negative review if you respond to it, even if you can’t correct the problem. Responding to positive reviews is important too!

As we mentioned, Google favours businesses that are constantly updating their GMB, so try and be as responsive as possible. We set ourselves a rule to respond to a google review within the hour.

Use the Posts Feature

The posts feature lets you create a single post to add to your Google My Business listing, with an image, an attachment and a button to interact with. This feature is a great way to not only increase your ranking within Google Maps but also increase the amount of search you take up. Posts typically last one week so make sure to update regularly.

Posting at least every 7 days is a good idea. Google is obviously focusing on expanding the capabilities of GMB, as they are constantly adding new features, more recently, different types of posts, such as; Add Offer, Add Update, Add Event and Add Product. Google has even added a section in posts for COVID-19, “Let customers know about any changes to your business due to COVID-19”.

Ensuring Your Citations are Consistent

Ensuring consistency within local citations is very important when trying to rank in the Google Maps section. The term NAP might mean something completely different to you, but to us it means; Name, Address and Phone Number. Ensuring all the business information you post online is consistent with your GMB is essential to building authority within Google Maps. Don’t confuse Google.

If you’ve got a Yell account or Facebook profile with 100 reviews from your clients, ensure these profiles have the same NAP as your GMB listing, as well as all other information. This lets Google build confidence that they are presenting the correct information in search and from trusted businesses. Find the most popular directories to use as local citations at the end of this blog post.

Add Services & Products

This is a GMB feature which allows you to list the services you provide and include keywords that can help your business get found for the services you offer. GMB only allows you to supply 750 characters in your general business description. This feature allows you to add multiple services per category and you can input up to 300 characters per service!

The second feature is products which allow us to upload a picture, price, title and description. Adding your main products helps you to put more links in the Google ecosystem, improve your GMB SEO, and allows more potential customers to find your products.

Combined with the aforementioned updates to Products and Services, GMB really is turning into an online shop window for your business. Searchers have an immense amount of information at their fingertips on GMB, significantly reducing the need to visit your website. I expect to see a crossover with Google Shopping very soon.

Use the Q & A Feature

Google My Business provides an option of asking questions about any business. The problem here is that anyone can answer those questions. Many times their answers won’t give the full picture to your customers. To overcome this, you can add some questions and answers from both sides.

These should be the questions that you think your customers will be most interested in knowing. You can even chuck in a few of those targeted keywords you’re looking to rank for, for example, “digital marketing agency“.

Whether you like it or not, GMB features are becoming more prominent in search. It’s what you do to maximise your GMB SEO that will separate you from your competition.

Setting up things in place that offset the negative effects of unexpected situations, such as the pandemic we are dealing with now, makes businesses stronger and more ready to remain profitable no matter what. As the pandemic has shown us, tending to your online presence and visibility is important to all businesses. As discussed, Google Maps and GMB features are taking up more and more of SERP and it’s never been more important to optimise your Google My Business and implement GLO’s local search tips. Use the time wisely and apply our 10 Local SEO tips to generate more leads online now and beyond the lockdown period.

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The post Top 10 Local SEO Tips & Optimising GMB 2021 appeared first on GLO - Generate Leads Online.

Image SEO – Website Image Optimisation

John Parnell — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:18:04 +0000

Images should be essential, whether you’re an amateur blogger or your write for the leading marketing magazine. An image can tell a thousand words and can make your article easier to read and understand. The reason that you are reading this article, however, is because images also contribute to your websites SEO and we’ll give you an in-depth explanation how to optimise all your images to improve your search engine ranking and how to use images for the best user experience. Let’s dive into Image SEO.

Why Images are Essential in Posts

When used correctly, images help readers process and understand an article, can be used by illustrating data in a chart or just make an article/post more exciting. It’s recommended that every post should include pictures as visual search is getting increasingly more important, for more information about this, check out Google’s vision for the visual of search. Therefore using images not only make an article more appealing but also could provide you with an increase in traffic. If you have visual content, image SEO should be high on your agenda.
Google’s most recent interface for Image Search was released at the start of August 2019, with features such as filters, metadata and attribution, which shows that Google has increased knowledge about what is in an image and how it fits into the bigger picture.

Selecting the Best Photo to Use

Rather than stock photos, it’s always better to original photos rather than stock photos, for example, your team pictures should be your actual team, rather than everyone in your company looking like models. I’m not saying they don’t already.

The image that you choose should be relevant to the subject of the article and the area of the article it’s positioned. For example, I have used the photo that I took when I was travelling the east coast of Australia to demonstrate the importance of not using stock images and the fact you are reading about it now puts the image into context and is therefore relevant to the article. If you just choose any random photo to complete your SEO plugin’s content analysis, then you need to re-evaluate your SEO strategy. If you have a main image or an image you’d like to rank, then locate it at the top of the page.

Avoid Stock Photos

Even if you don’t have any original photos of your own, you can still avoid using stock photos, there are other ways to find appropriate photos online. As long as you attribute the original photographer, you can source good quality images from Flickr.com. It’s important that you understand what Creative Commons license is attached to the image you are using – there are eight different license categories and not all images on Flickr can be used the same way.

Choosing photos that look genuine is important unless you took them yourself, which is always the best route, and steering clear of obvious stock photos is a must!

GIF’s are getting more and more popular but don’t go overboard, it can make your post harder to read as the movement of the image can distract the reader’s attention and slow down your pages load speed.

How to Optimise Images for SEO

Once you’ve found the optimum photo for your article or blog post, whether it be an illustration, chart or image – the next step is to optimise it for SEO for your website. Here is an Image SEO checklist:

File name optimisation
The correct format
Image display size
Responsive images
Compressed images

File Name Optimisation

The first thing to think about when it comes to image SEO is the file name. Your need Google and other search engines to know what is in the image with even looking at it. For example, the image is of a sunset in Thailand, then the file name should be “Thailand-beach-sunset.jpg, not the original file name such as “IMAG8482”. The main key phrase or keyword should come first at the beginning of the file name, as its the main subject of the image, for instance, Thailand.

The Correct Format

The correct format depends on the image and its application and therefore, there isn’t a best image format to always use. For instance, image formats are used for the following reasons:

JPEG – for larger photos or illustrations (it will give you good results in terms of colours and clarity with relatively small file size)
PNG – to preserve background transparency
WebP – to produce high-quality results with smaller file sizes (you can use tools like Squoosh to convert your image into WebP)
SVG – for logos and icons (with help of CSS or JavaScript you can manage SVG images such as resizing them without loss of quality

CanIuse.com can check whether the format you intend to use is supported by the browsers or devices that the largest part of your target audience use. Now it’s time to resize and optimise your image.

Image Display Size

Images that you use have a major impact on your web pages loading times, especially when there isn’t any need for your image to be that large, for example, if your image is displayed at 250×150 pixels and you’re using an image with 2500×1500 pixels, your whole image still needs to be loaded. The image load time is very important when it comes to user experience and search engine optimisation.

It is important to resize the image to the size you want it to be displayed. WordPress actually helps by providing several different sizes of the image after upload that show depending on the display, however, this doesn’t mean to the file size is optimised as well, therefore you should have the file size as low as possible without being pixelated.

Responsive Images

Having responsive images is an essential factor for image SEO, however, WordPress has made this easy since it was updated to version 4.4, where the platform makes images responsive for you. If you’re not building you website with WordPress, then your images should have srcset attribute, which enables a different image to be should depending on the screen width, which is especially handy for mobile displays.

Compressed Images

It is important for the image file size is compressed to be as small as possible, for web page load speed, user experience and therefore SEO. The easiest way to reduce the size of the image whilst keeping it high quality is by using web tools such as JPEGmini, which can dramatically reduce image size and remove to EXIF (Exchangeable Image Format) data to reduce the file size even further. This is increasingly important in a world of retina screens.

We also recommend using other tools to compress images; ImageOptim, jpeg .io or Kraken.io.

You can test your site with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, WebPageTest.org or Pingdom.

Adding Images for Optimum SEO

It is very important to add your optimised image to content that is related to it. While Google and other search engines are getting increasingly skilled at recognising what is in an image, you should still provide as much context as possible and therefore fill in all the relevant information.

Image SEO – Captions

Image captions are important in an article as people usually tend to pick them up when skimming through a web page, as well as headings and images. The image caption is the text the accompanies an image stating what’s in the image. Image captions are good for SEO but you should avoid over optimising your webpages and only add a caption when it makes sense to the user’s journey to have one. Not every image needs a caption as they are often the image itself is self-explanatory.

Alt Text & Title Text for SEO

If for any reason the image can’t be displayed, the ‘Alt Text’ or ‘Alt Tag’, which is the descriptive text will be shown in its place. The reasons in which the image can’t be displayed is sometimes because the user has turned off images in their browser, such as Google Chrome or they are using a screen reader due to visual impairment, this ensures that no information is lost.

For search engine optimisation, be sure to add alt text to every image, so that both search engines and people can make sense what’s in the image. The Alt Text should include an SEO keyphrase for that page where appropriate.

Add Image Structured Data for SEO

Once you understand the method of schema markup, you can optimise your website in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Adding such structured data to your pages can help search engines display your images as rich results. Google can also add a badge to the images on your webpage, for example, if you have recipes on your site and add structured data to your images, Goggle can add a badge showing the images belongs to a recipe.

Image attribute is mandatory for SEO so that your images can be crawled and indexed.

XML Image Sitemaps for SEO

Google’s advice and is to include a number of images on the page or post sitemaps:

“You can use Google image extensions for sitemaps to give Google more information about the images available on your pages. Image sitemap information helps Google discover images that we might not otherwise find (such as images your site reaches with JavaScript code), and allows you to indicate images on your site that you want Google to crawl and index.”

Image SEO Summary

As you have seen from this article, image SEO is made up of several attributes. It is just as important to ensure that the image and its elements help towards a good user experience which in turn plays an important role in conversion, as it is for SEO. With Google getting smarter and smarter at recognising element in images, it wouldn’t be a good idea to try and hack the algorithm.

Here is a quick summary and checklist of what you’ve learnt from this post:

Use an appropriate image that compliments your content
Carefully choose a file name with keywords or phrases
Ensure image size matches displayed image
Use srcset attributes if possible
Reduce file size for faster loading
Add a caption only if it compliments user experience
Use image alt text. No need for a title text
Add structured data to your images
Count for images in your XML sitemaps
Provide all the context you can!

The WordPress plugin Yoast can help with SEO!

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