10 SEO & Design Mistakes (That Will Cripple Your Business)

Website design and development isn’t all pretty shading and fancy fonts. Less obvious factors can totally crush your ability to do business online.

If your designer addresses these 10 SEO and design mistakes then you’re one of the lucky ones. But…

if they don’t know about these SEO friendly website design tips?

Maybe you should think about hiring a designer that isn’t crippling your progress.

Design Isn’t Responsive

PC is still king of conversions,¹ but the amount of mobile devices in use has long past PCs. Mobile may well be first point of contact!

Add mobile first indexing into the mix and you’ll understand how important this is.

A great mobile experience provides the chance to make great first impressions! At minimum go responsive. Even better, design pages especially for mobile devices.

Test your site: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Slow Loading

Ever waited for a website to load and just closed it in exasperation? Yup… you don’t want that on your site!

Possible causes:

• Bad Hosting
• Incorrect image optimization
• Incorrect database optimization
• No caching
• Excessive HTTP requests
• Too much traffic for your hosting package (actually, good news!)

Test your site: https://gtmetrix.com/

Bad Hosting

Before you fire your developer over site speed, make sure your host is delivering!

Treat affiliated recommendations and reviews with caution, hosting companies pay affiliates well.

Don’t assume swapping to a big name guarantees good performance. One known bad umbrella company owns many large subpar hosting companies.²

Site speed isn’t the worst issue either, try complete service outages!

Test your site: https://www.pingdom.com/

Navigation and Usability Problems

A visitor has done the research and wants to buy…

but can’t find the sales page.

Crazy right?

But it actually happens!

Make sure visitors can easily find:

• The sales page (no… really!)
• About
• A USEFUL 404 page
• Contact details
• Blog

Badly Structured URLs

Each URL should:

• Be readable
• Contain keywords
• If applicable, cascade through categories and sub-categories to the final specific subject/item.

Example: https://yoursite.com/books/paperback/horror/dracula

Not sold? It can also help you get free traffic. ;-)

Lack of Text (and Metadata)

If search engines can’t read your site, they don’t know who will be interested.
Thus… they’ll send nobody.

All good if you want to pay for traffic, but if you want free visitors then use…

• Keyword research
• Great content
• SEO

Test your site: https://neilpatel.com/seo-analyzer/

No Optimization and Analysis

Start with analyzing traffic, conversions and customer demographics before touching a site. If analytics is not already in situ then utilize it.

Possible options…

• Google Analytics
• Facebook Pixel
• Crazy Egg
• Split testing
• Visitor feedback forms
• Live/bot chat

Every page should have a purpose, analyze to ensure it’s doing its job. If not, improve it otherwise it may cause bottlenecks.

Security Issues

Treat security for your site and its visitors seriously.

• On WordPress, keep themes and plugins updated (and to a minimum)
• Use the WordFence Plugin for update alerts and security
• Premium themes and plugins lower the chances of malicious code
• Enable HTTPS protocol, some hosts provide this free

Not Collecting Emails

OK… don’t ram popups in your visitors face immediately, but an exit popup or in content signup form work well when used correctly.

Try lead magnets with free reports, trials, tools or discounts.

If you don’t collect contact details, you leave money on the table!

No Rich Snippets

Want an unfair advantage on search click-through?

Put rich snippets in place and your site will pop in the SERP’s.

Now, who doesn’t want that?

Test your site: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

References:
¹ https://www.webpagefx.com/blog/general/desktop-vs-mobile-converts-better-infographic/
² https://researchasahobby.com/full-list-eig-hosting-companies-brands/

The NoHatDigital Internship.

Learn the Exact Skills and Processes the NoHatDigital Team use to Dominate Online.

Learn More...