What it means to optimize the site: areas and SEO interventions

Every day, Google processes an average of more than 40 thousand search queries per second, representing more than 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. These numbers alone-referring to just one of the online search engines, albeit the most widely used-are enough to make us understand the intrinsic value of organic visibility, which can only be gained by making the site as attractive as possible to search engines and real people. Today, therefore, we are talking precisely about the necessary overview that should be the basis of any strategy aimed at achieving success on the Web, and we focus on the topic of optimizing Web sites from an SEO perspective and beyond: a work in progress continuously, because the competitive environment, the audience and the search engine scenario are dynamic and change frequently, prompting us to try to stay up-to-date and deploy the most suitable techniques to reach the most coveted positions in the SERPs.

What is website optimization

Optimizing a website is a continuous and ongoing process that, through the use of tools, advanced strategies and experiments, aims to achieve a number of goals, such as improving the technical performance of the website itself, further increasing traffic, boosting conversions and increasing revenue.

Industry experts and SEO professionals have different ideas about what really makes web optimization efforts effective: many focus on specific areas, such as choosing and using targeted keywords to increase rankings for specific search terms, while others focus primarily on performance metrics or offpage work. In fact, they all are right (to quote Sorrentino) because every aspect can impact and potentially become profitable, but alone it is not enough. And not everything is specifically part of SEO, and therefore search engine optimization.

So the big picture is needed because, to borrow an expression we usually use to define SEO, site optimization is “a simple, multidisciplinary matter in a complex and variable ecosystem,” which in a nutshell seeks to tap into an untapped market in the most effective and efficient way (without necessarily investing in advertising), open the door to more conversions and revenue, strengthen the brand and improve user contact.

To capture customer interest and generate conversions, however, you need (at least) the basics: and the site needs to be easy for people (and secondarily for crawlers) to find and use, because otherwise it doesn’t matter how much time and effort we’ve spent creating great content that is invisible or useless.

And even though Google was launched a quarter of a century ago now, we can still refer to a number of evergreen techniques and interventions to build the foundation for online success, keeping in mind that it is not necessary (nor probably possible) to excel in all of the more than 200 ranking factors that govern ranking, because some variables carry much more weight than others and we can initially focus our efforts on only a few essential elements of SEO and site optimization.

How to optimize the site, key aspects

Optimizing the Web site for real people – and not just for search engines-is the right approach to try to gain the trust of visitors, start building relationships, and sell products and services through online pages.

SEO is part of this broader effort, because as we know, it represents the complex set of activities that are useful in fine-tuning pages and content on a site with the aim of improving ranking in Google’s organic results, intercepting crawler scans, user intentions and, ultimately, the action of search engine algorithms. It is therefore a complex set of interventions, to be carried out both onpage and offpage, in which it is often easy to “get lost,” and which are, however, only one of the angles to be intercepted – to put it otherwise, SEO is certainly an essential part of website optimization, it is not the ultimate goal of optimization.

In fact, wanting to be more precise, a holistic approach to website optimization combines a variety of disciplines, which work together to ensure that the website functions ideally in areas such as:

• SEO
• Copywriting
• Analytics
• UX design (front-end)
• Web development (back-end)
• CRO/landing page optimization.

Why website optimization is important

Today more than ever before (and less than tomorrow anyway…), the Internet has become an integral part of people’s lives, the place where people inform, communicate, entertain and amuse themselves, but most importantly the place where consumers make their purchasing decisions and buy products.

Indeed, in recent years, e-commerce has become an indispensable part of global commerce, and like many other industries, the buying and selling of goods has undergone a substantial transformation following the advent of the Internet because, thanks to the continued digitization of modern life, consumers around the world now enjoy the benefits of online transactions. There are currently more than five billion Internet users worldwide, and there continues to be a rapid increase in global Internet access and adoption, which leads to the number of people shopping online growing as well: by 2022, retail e-commerce sales were estimated to have exceeded US$5.7 trillion worldwide, and even some forecasts predict that 95 percent of purchases will be made online by 2040.

As we said at the beginning, search engines and particularly Google are the go-to destination for finding information about businesses, local or virtual, accompanying (or directly replacing) classic word of mouth and a friend’s recommendations. Positioning a business correctly, therefore, means increasing the chances of being found by people who previously had never heard of the business and turning them into customers.

But if we do not optimize the website and content, it doesn’t matter how many people search for terms relevant to our business, because the site won’t show up in the SERPs (or it will be in the back burner), and therefore won’t be noticed by anyone. And again, to actually harness traffic, we also need to optimize the user experience and the efficiency of conversion funnels, because a site content that does not offer the right answers to the needs of potential customers does not lead to conversions, but only generates frustrated and disgruntled users, who will bounce away from the site without making a single purchase.

In contrast, a site that is optimized in all aspects can aspire to maximize the number of leads and sales it generates from organic (and possibly paid) traffic, as well as improve brand awareness and build trust with the target audience.

What it means to optimize website

Browsing the Web, one frequently encounters the term optimization, declined in various meanings: lexically, this verb derives from English optimize and in technical and business language it has been chosen and used to indicate the set of actions and interventions that serve to make a project optimal, that is, to bring it to a condition and result that are considered the best possible.

In our digital field, optimizing a blog, site or eCommerce has an even greater meaning, because the possible actions include interventions on the source code of individual pages, content refinements, image management and so on, and thus everything that is needed to improve a site’s ranking, make it usable for search engines, optimize the site for mobile browsing and, as a result, increase the relevance of the pages, so as to increase the target and quality of visitors, the volume of organic traffic, conversions and, ultimately, the performance of the project.

Best practices for site optimization

Let us reiterate, however, that the ultimate goal is not just to improve organic rankings, but more generally to perfect the site, to ensure an ideal experience on every page and content, and ultimately to fortify the brand even in the real world and make it recognizable, memorable, and trusted by people.

The first step in improving anything is to identify problems: only by looking for critical areas and identifying what is wrong with our current site can we then actually take action to be able to improve it. This is the basis of any great optimization process.

Broadly speaking, website optimization strategies are based on a long process consisting of several steps, starting with an analysis of the market, the context, the users, and ourselves, and then reaching the specific details related to content, pages, and individual aspects. This path can be described as follows:

1. Identify the general market or identify a potentially profitable niche market.
2. Analyze user intent throughout the consumer journey.
3. Improve the UX with A/B and multivariate testing.
4. Create a smooth mobile experience without errors and obstacles.
5. Finding keywords.
6. Building backlinks.
7. Optimize content on the page.
8. Speed up the website.
9. Examine current user behavior.
10. Measure and monitor results.
11. Optimize images from a technical point of view.
12. Take care of image attributes.
13. Evaluate the use of a CDN to improve performance.
14. Back up the site before making changes.
15. Verify and document changes as we update the Web site.

Web site optimization, the SEO techniques to use

Much of this action, however, concerns actions that we can bring under the jurisdiction of SEO, a “magic” word that is often misused or used unprofessionally in the Web world and that we can consider a perfect combination of technical optimization and marketing strategy.

Literally, we should know by now, SEO derives from the initials of the English words Search Engine Optimization and indicates the complex of activities that serve to optimize a website and improve its ranking in the organic results of search engines (there is even a specific entry on Wikipedia in which it says that SEO “aims to create pages and sites that respect the rules – the tastes – of search engines by managing to improve its position in search results”).

There are those who bring SEO into being at the same time as the launch of search engines, but more likely we have to wait until the early 2000s for a conscious use of ranking strategies: in any case, the subject has been evolving ever since, and often guidelines that were valid in the past have become obsolete if not downright detrimental to ranking as a result of new algorithm updates.

In any case, SEO represents the package of actions that must be carried out to improve site indexing, intercepting Google’s crawler scans, and especially to understand users’ intentions and respond with effective content, so that pages can gain the approval of people and search engines, thus being judged as deserving of earning the top search positions on Google for certain keywords in response to queries, as provided by ranking sites according to specific ranking factors.

Optimize site, the three activities to be performed

Generally, we can decline the optimization of a website on the SEO side into three main activities, involving technical optimization, content creation, and content promotion – trivially, these are the three broad categories of practical SEO, viz.

• Technical SEO
• Onpage SEO
• Offpage SEO

That is, we must start with a thorough analysis of the individual pages on the website, checking for technical errors and taking action with quick corrections and resolutions. At this stage we can also focus on aspects such as optimizing the pages of a site through improving the site structure, URL structure, HTML code, and so on.

Then we move on to work on textual content, which must be of quality, useful and usable in compliance with the rules (written and unwritten) of SEO, without neglecting the management of headings, meta tags, images and videos present and so on.

Finally, one has to work for the promotion of pages and content, a task that falls under offpage activities, which, as we know, are not only link building.

And after putting all these strategies in place, the final step is to obtain data to perform monitoring of the site, pages and content, studying whether we have achieved the KPIs we set ourselves and possibly be ready to start again in case of failure.

How to improve a website: on-page SEO

Before seeing in detail what actions to perform, however, it should be premised that to improve the visibility of a site and its ranking other elements also concur, starting with factors affecting the appearance of the server, such as the reliability and speed of hosting, or the behavior of users on the site, and in particular dwell time and number of page views.

According to experts, parameters related to user experience such as average visitation time and bounce rate can have an impact on ranking, and to increase these values and increase average visitation time there are various strategies, which concern both the content creation side (insertion of videos or other interactive elements) and structural aspects, such as inserting internal links to refer to other related pages of one’s site and “retain” readers or visitors.

Strategies to optimize a site for Google

Interventions on the page also involve improving the SEO title, which is in a nutshell the title that you see in the search engine SERPs, and which some say continues to be one of the main factors in improving site ranking on Google and related sites and getting results. Basic guidelines recommend including the keyword in the title and keeping it under 70 characters. Other relevant elements of on-page SEO are the management of heading tags, subheadings (the famous h1/h2/h3, where it would be good to include the keyword at least once), the meta description (meta tag description, the summary of the content that appears in the preview in SERPs: although it does not directly affect search engine rankings, it is important for getting click through rates from search engine results pages and therefore indirectly could affect ranking) and the photos accompanying the article (optimizing images for website is also an important activity from an SEO and ranking perspective).

Optimize quality content to improve site visibility

Having solved any problems with the structure of the site and individual pages, we move on to focus on content creation, which must meet certain criteria in order to perform well and achieve the ultimate goal, which is always to rank on search engines. The process is “simple”: content that specifically responds to a search intent will be more appreciated by users and, consequently, favored by search engines, which reward the result most consistent with the initial query. In practical terms, as we have described in the specific articles, to optimize an article or even a product sheet of an eCommerce you have to start with the analysis of the context and the identification of a right keyword through good keyword research, which can identify a segment that is easier to position and has a good number of monthly searches.

To obtain good results, above all, one must pay attention to the search intent, an element that can influence to improve the site position on Google: that is, one must try to intercept the users‘ request as precisely as possible (if I were to search for this keyword on the search engine what information or products would I want to find?).

In addition, again as a general advice, one should avoid the keyword stuffing effect (unnaturally filling content with repetitions of keywords, which can cause Google penalties) and try to adhere to the “Semantic Web” philosophy, i.e., content that contains in its text words assimilated in semantics and search intent to the main keyword, which seem to be strategic for improving site position on Google.

Off-page SEO techniques to optimize website

The other side of the coin, so to speak, is represented by off page SEO strategy, that is, the set of activities “outside” the site, and in particular the management of inbound links (or backlinks) to a site, which represent (we have said it countless times) an important signal for search engines to judge the authority of a site: citations, especially if they come from sites that are already authoritative and (according to the latest guidance in terms of ranking factors) of similar topics and in one’s niche market, are an unequivocal way of telling Google that one’s is a quality site.

Essential strategies for website optimization

It is impossible to summarize in a single article everything you would need to do to perfect a site, partly because each intervention requires the necessary expertise and must be placed in the specific context; in any case, we can still analyze the basics of online success, which roughly answer SEO-related questions such as “what are the factors to focus on? How can you increase rankings? How can you create traffic in such a competitive environment?” as Chuck Price reports in Search Engine Journal.

1. Search Intent

It starts, inevitably, with search intent, because Google’s ultimate goal remains to understand the context of a given search query and deliver consistent results to satisfy the person. Certainly, machine learning, artificial intelligence and deep learning will have a greater weight in Google’s core algorithm, especially as they continue to evolve, and concretely this means that our keyword research activity will always have to be at an advanced level and adapted to new challenges.

In a nutshell, the contextual relevance of a keyword needs to be aligned with a search query, and before we launch into trying to rank a page (and spend time and resources) it is wise to understand the search intent and see which websites are currently at the top of the SERPs for that sentence. There will be some keywords and queries for which it will be impossible to rank our pages: for example, Price says, if Google has determined that people searching for “Personal injury lawyer [insert city]” want a list of lawyers to choose from, a number of reputable legal directories will show up at the top of the SERPs, and an individual or a single company will not replace those directories. In these cases, we need to refine the strategy.

       2. Technical SEO

We have already talked about this in a very superficial way, but now let’s devote a few more words to technical SEO, which aims as an overarching goal to ensure a solid website architecture that is not just a random collection of pages and posts. A site architecture optimized for SEO will guide users throughout the site and make it easier for Google to crawl and index pages.

After setting up the right architecture, it’s time to perform a technical audit or SEO audit: it may initially seem intimidating and complicated, but with the use of SEO tools, the procedures for checking and handling issues becomes much smoother, and even doing a full SEO audit or spider crawl becomes simple. In fact, today it is easy to perform this task, and the most complex part is knowing how to interpret the data provided and what to do with it. To begin with, however, we can check these elements and correct any problems discovered:

• Check for error status codes and correct them.
• Check the txt file for errors, optimizing if necessary.
• Check site indexing using Google Search Console; review and correct any problems discovered.
• Correct title tags and meta descriptions.
• Check website content. Check traffic statistics in Google Analytics, considering improving or eliminating poorly performing content.
• Correct broken links, enemies of user experience and potentially rankings.
• Send the XML sitemap to Google via Google Search Console.

       3. User Experience.

User experience (UX) focuses on gaining information about users, their needs, values, capabilities and limitations, and also takes into consideration business goals.

According to experts, a site ensures quality UX if it is:

• Useful – it publishes unique content that fulfills a need.
• Usable – the website is easy to use and navigate.
• Attractive – design elements and branding should elicit emotion and appreciation.
• Findable – integrates design and navigation elements so users can easily find what they need.
• Accessible – content should be accessible to everyone, including the 12.7 percent of the population with disabilities.
• Trustworthy – the site must be trustworthy for users to give it credit.
• Valuable – the site must provide value to the user in terms of experience and to the company in terms of positive ROI.

Multivariate testing and A/B testing are the best way to measure and create a better experience for website users.

       4. Optimizations for mobile users

For several years now, browsing from mobile devices has surpassed browsing from desktop, and since March 2018 Google’s mobile-first index has officially started: in short, those who think in a desktop-only perspective are out of time and must quickly take action on at least some basic aspects to make the site mobile-friendly. These are, specifically:

• Make the site responsive, capable of adapting to any device, whether desktop, mobile or tablet.
• Always resize images for responsive design, especially for mobile users.
• Use short meta titles that are easier to read on mobile devices.
• Avoid pop-ups or interstitials that cover content and prevent visitors from getting an idea of what the content is about.
• Often, on mobile devices less is more, and long-form content does not necessarily equate to more traffic and better rankings.
• Do not use mobile as an excuse for cloaking, because users and search engines need to see the same content.

         5. Performance and Core Web Vitals

Another topic we often dwell on are the Core Web Vitals, the essential web signals that Google has designed to quantify the metrics (precisely) essential for a healthy website, with the ultimate goal of providing the best possible user experience from a performance perspective as well. As of the second half of 2021, CWVs are officially a ranking factor, incorporated into the broader Page Experience signal, and thus the “loading experience, interactivity, and visual stability of the page content and their combination” (the foundation of Core Web Vitals) have a bearing on ranking.

Each of these metrics focuses on a unique aspect of the user experience and, moreover, is measurable and quantifiable for objective determination of the outcome. To analyze and measure Essential Web Signals we have a few tools at our disposal:

• PageSpeed Insights, which measures mobile and desktop performance and provides suggestions for improvement.
• Lighthouse, an open source automated tool developed by Google to help developers improve web page quality; it has several features not available in PageSpeed Insights, including some SEO controls.
• Search Console, which in the Core Web Vitals report shows URL performance grouped by state, metric type, and URL group.

          6. Schema Opportunities.

Schema.org markups are useful for enabling the display of rich snippets, the advanced features that appear in Google’s search results, and in general all major search engines – so even Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex – support the use of microdata and structured data, which can provide more context to a web page and improve the search experience, although officially they have no influence on ranking.

The applications of this vocabulary are really broad, and among the most common uses of markups that trigger rich results are recipes, products, articles, reviews, events, FAQs, Q&As, organizations, people, and Local Businesses. Implementing schema markups is actually quite simple, and there are also specific plugins that allow you to accomplish this task.

          7. Leveraging content marketing

It is not easy to stand out and make your work stand out because there is background noise that disturbs users and often distracts them: as Price reports, in 2023, 97 zettabytes of data will be created, acquired, copied and consumed worldwide (in 2019 it was less than half, 44 zettabytes), equivalent to 18.7 trillion songs or 3,168 years of HD video every day.

The challenge to overcome the clutter becomes exponentially more difficult as time passes, so it is important to curate the content marketing strategy wisely. Among the various aspects to evaluate are:

• Creating a combination of useful, informative and interesting content.
• Promote articles on social channels.
• Monopolize trending topics related to one’s content or promoted on social media.
• Remember that images and videos generally convert better than text alone, and also take advantage of your smartphone to take photos and video footage.
• Update outdated and low-traffic content.

           8. Take care of link building and off-page SEO

Competition in SERPs is fierce, and you can’t rely on onpage work alone: links have been a major ranking factor (for many, THE major one) for quite some time, and they still weigh heavily in winning top positions.

Of course, Google has become more adept at identifying and devaluing links containing spam, so it is critical that the link building strategy focus on quality rather than quantity of referrals. In addition, one technique that can yield good results-even if only as an improvement in online SEO reputation – is finding and claiming mentions to the site without links, which you can try to turn into actual natural backlinks.

Complementing these fundamental aspects of site optimization are two final strategic tasks: testing each change to verify the effects (giving SEO time to bear fruit) and monitoring the KPIs we have set, related to our ambitions and business goals.

The tasks to improve Google rankings (and the usefulness of an SEO Suite like SEOZoom)

But how do you go about performing all these activities efficiently? Our answer is pretty obvious, because SEOZoom is the “perfect” tool to support one’s site and blog optimization work, because it provides us with all the features to analyze, manage, monitor and improve every aspect of the site.

Among the various functions of the suite there are tools to start a new project in a competitive way, do SEO analysis in real time, create performing content, improve the performance of a site and manage the backlink profile and any link acquisition activity in a natural way, and then again a spider to check the health of the project in a short time, editorial tools integrated with AI to simplify the activities of editors and copywriters, etc. etc. In short, a complete support to bring to life an optimized strategy and put in place all the SEO techniques, which facilitate us in identifying the right corridor to which to direct a site and a page.

SEOZoom therefore does exactly everything we have described, adequately performing the first task of an SEO Tool Suite: to simplify the management of these complex activities, allowing users to be able to have at their fingertips data, information, tools to monitor the traffic trends of websites, but also to discover and analyze any errors present on the site, to study the moves of competitors, to check the backlink profile and to optimize text content.

The benefits of SEOZoom, a complete and efficient SEO Suite

In a nutshell and for those who don’t know us yet, SEOZoom is an SEO Suite that encompasses more than 40 features that are always up-to-date and allow you to get a very high amount of information about websites, keywords and niches, with indication of solutions to improve the performance of specific keywords and analysis of site performance.

It is therefore a business intelligence tool that gives access to statistics, data, charts that are crucial in decision making activities, to analyze, monitor and enhance each type of site, discover new opportunities, study competitors and increase organic traffic, online sales and revenue. And thanks to its proprietary metrics, such as Zoom Authority, it makes it easy and intuitive for everyone – professionals, SEOs, but also those with less expertise – to keep track of key information useful for developing and improving an online project.

In short, it is a suite to accompany the work of optimizing the site on the SEO side and start climbing to the top positions on Google.