5 Affordable SEO Website Design Tips to Save Money
You want more people to reach your business’s website, right? There are a couple of things your website will need. One is a killer website design to engage your audience and the second is getting your site to the top of the results page. Here are 5 affordable SEO website design tips to help you save money!
To get to the top of the results pages, you need to incorporate excellent search engine optimization practices. To make things better, there are plenty of great affordable SEO tips to get your website to the top!
Neglecting to follow good SEO practices will make your website nearly impossible to find. In many cases, search engines such as Google will penalize websites with poor SEO website design.
It’s more important than ever to ensure your website includes the best SEO website practices. Do you want to boost your website’s search engine ranking? Then check out these 5 affordable SEO website design tips that will save you money and improve traffic!
1. Use High-Quality Long-Form Content
Did you know Google and many other search engines love blog content? If you look at competitor websites or others in your industry, you’ll likely find a blog. The reason being blogs offer useful information and value to those visiting your site.
High-quality long-form content, like blogs, can improve SEO by targeting organic search traffic. With highly a targeted audience reaching your page, you’re more likely to see that traffic turns into leads, sales, and future clients! This a major reason why more businesses than before are using blogs to boost their SEO.
Long-Form Content Value
Not every blog, however, will automatically boost your search rankings. While this is an easy and affordable SEO tip, you’ll need to ensure the content you offer will be useful to your audience. Another important tip is you want long-form content, meaning you’ll need to go beyond the traditional 500 to 800-word blog.
Yes, creating quality long-form content may be time-consuming. In return, long-form content can accomplish two major goals.
The first is Google likes in-depth content rich with keywords. The quality of the content shares in-depth knowledge demonstrating your authority and experience in the industry. Readers will be able to derive a greater amount of value.
The second is you’ll reduce your website bounce rate. Site visitors will be likely to stay on your site for a longer period of time. When site visitors spend more time on a website, this tells search engines like Google that the content on your site is relevant and notable.
The ideal length of a blog post is around 1,600 words. The top 10 websites in the search rankings tend to have blogs closer to 2,000 words. Your blogs need to be the right balance of quality content and a length people will want to read.
This shows that long-form content offers the information and value they’re looking for. While many users like short quick answers, more are looking for broad in-depth content.
Sounds easy, right? But before you start crafting longer articles, pay close attention to quality. Overstuffing your blogs with keyword stuffing and fluff will result in poorer rankings.
Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes and think about what they want to learn about. Keep the focus of your blogs on quality in-depth content. Even if you don’t post blogs frequently, the fact you offer detailed useful information will boost your SEO rankings!
2. Take Advantage of Internal Links
Regularly posting quality content does more than only offer your site visitors valuable information. It’s also an affordable SEO strategy to promote internal linking. Unfortunately, many company’s overlook this small detail and focus more time on external links and content.
Both are important but internal links connect readers to more of your original content. Internal links also show your site’s hierarchy and structure by your most important posts consisting of more links.
The benefits of internal links don’t end there. Here are a few more ways internal links improve a website’s SEO.
Assists Search Crawlers
Internal links show search engines and search crawlers show the structure of your website. This helps them understand what your website is about and what it stands for based on these links.
Do you have an important article or guide consisting of valuable information? If yes, your smaller articles should contain links to it.
Google and any other search engine will read this and find the article or guide you’re linking to are important. This will help boost that particular guide’s ranking in the search results based on your keywords.
Audit Your Links
The catch with internal links is you can’t link them and leave them. They require maintenance. You’ll need to regularly audit your website from time to time to maintain and update your links.
You’re constantly adding more valuable content to your website meaning your pages will be changing. You’ll be adding new pages and removing older pages with outdated or less valuable information.
When you remove old pages, you or your site visitors may come across a broken link in another article. Broken links can negatively impact your SEO and the user experience of your site. Both will reduce your search engine ranking and cause you to lose the site visitors who do come to your site!
Whenever you’re updating and removing content on your site, you need to double-check your links. It’s best practice to update your internal links right away as you remove and update content. You can redirect old links to new pages or other existing pages that offer similar content.
Maintaining your internal links is one of the easiest and most affordable SEO tactics guaranteed to keep your rankings up.
3. Create a Responsive Website
Do you what type of device most people use to visit a website? Over 50% of people use mobile phones to access and use the web. Today, responsive web design isn’t an option, it’s a must.
Responsive web design uses a mix of grids, layouts, images, and CSS media queries. These items are flexible and designed to automatically adapt your website to fit on different sized desktops, mobile devices, resolutions, and more. Quality advanced websites should have the ability and technology to adjust to a user’s preferences.
Google and other search engines value responsive website. Responsive websites will have a much higher SEO ranking than those without responsive design. If your site doesn’t have the optimization for mobile use, you’re going to sink low in the rankings.
Site Usability
Optimizing your website with responsive design offers more great benefits to boost your SEO.
A responsive website improves overall site usability. Responsive sites are easier to use and navigate allowing users to spend more time reading valuable content rather than trying to find it. This typically results in users spending more time on your website.
A few affordable SEO items that help with site usability include:
- Clear well-labeled headers throughout the content
- Readable font size and style
- Pleasant colors with good contrast
- Optimized images
- Easy-to-use navigation
- Appropriate readability
- Simple content layout
Responsive web design considers these items to make the experience using the website enjoyable and pleasant.
Lower Bounce Rate
Sites with responsive web design have significantly lower bounce rates. The bounce rate is the time it takes for users to backtrack or leave a website.
Google pays close attention to the bounce rate. If users are leaving your site after a few short seconds, Google interprets that to mean the content on your site wasn’t relevant or useful.
Another reason users leave quickly is due to the poor design layout. If you have outstanding content but poor design, users will leave the site in a short amount of time. Responsive design takes the layout of content, imager, and more into consideration to make it easy for users to comprehend information.
No More Duplicate Content
Many businesses have two separate sites for desktop and mobile use. Both have different URLs but share the same content. There are a few issues with this.
The most apparent problem is you, the website owner will have more work when updating the site. Rather than updating one site, you’ll have to update two or more.
The other problem is you’ll have duplicate content and Google doesn’t like that. You’ll have to carefully index your website to clarify which content is most important. If you don’t, the search engine will index it for you which often results in lower SEO rankings.
Websites with responsive web design will not only attract greater web traffic, search engines will reward them. Creating a responsive web design is an integral part of any SEO strategy.
4. Optimize Page Loading Speed
Have you ever clicked on a site that seemed to take forever to load? No one likes a slow website and many more aren’t going to wait around for it load either. The days of slow loading times and heavy websites are in past.
Today, slow websites cause businesses to lose site visitors which is a loss in business. The average internet user will wait no more than 3-5 seconds for a website to load. The longer it takes for your website to load, the more people will leave your site.
Optimizing your website’s page loading speed is one of the most useful and affordable SEO tips. Those who are not fluent with web design or development may find optimizing page speed cumbersome.
The benefits, however, are worth it. You’ll not only improve your SEO ranking but you’ll gain more traffic and more business.
There are several ways to optimize your page loading speed. A few you and your web design team should consider include:
- Enable file compression
- Optimize your site’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code
- Reduce page redirects
- Use browser caching
- Optimize web images by using the right format and sizing
- Avoid using blocking JavaScript
- Boost server response time
Both you and your site visitors will benefit from a fast-loading website. Site visitors will have a more enjoyable user experience causing them to stay on your site for longer. This will raise your chances of gaining new business and loyal customers.
5. Update Your Content to Keep it Fresh
Imagine you just completed designing and building your new website. The content is fresh and your site is live. One of the worse things you can do is set your site and leave it.
An affordable SEO tactic you should already be doing is updating your website’s content. Over time, even a few short weeks, the content you originally posted can become outdated and useless. Regularly updating your content will improve and maintain your SEO rankings.
The two main ways to update your website include adding new content and updating the old. Google checks how fresh the content on your site is to determine its relevancy and quality. Fresh relevant content will get your site a much better rating.
What Content to Update?
The good news is you don’t need to update everything on your website all at once. Start by managing the articles that are already receiving a high volume of traffic. You can update the links, facts, and any other information without having to rewrite the entire article.
If you have a newer site with less content, focus instead on creating more original content. As your website matures you’ll be able to go back and update content as needed.
Use More Useful Content
Another way to update your content is by thickening it with more quality content. This does two very valuable things to boost your SEO.
Adding more detailed information will make your content and site appear more trustworthy, informative, and make you more of an authority in your industry. This detailed information will also improve long-tail search traffic.
If you’re not doing it already, you need to start updating and maintaining your content. Doing so will give your site a huge SEO rankings boost and attract a wider target audience.
Boost Your Website with Affordable SEO Today!
There are many effective and affordable SEO tips readily available to improve your website’s search rankings. By following these 5 simple cheap SEO strategies, you and your business will enjoy more traffic and grow your business!
Want to learn more? Let’s get in touch and start planning your SEO strategy today!
