Once you’ve performed on-page SEO, the next step is to monitor the results. This is a very important part; its how you know if your techniques are working to your benefit. The following are some of the things you should do to stay on top of your on-page search engine optimization.

Track your keywords

One defining aspect of on-page SEO is knowing how your keywords are performing. For starters, the Google Search Console offers a free and instant checker for your keyword rankings on the web.

You can also explore other tools for more in-depth analytics, including alerts for ranking drops, rankings per location, progress map, and so on. From there, you’ll see which keywords aren’t driving traffic to your web page and what can be done about it.

We also recommend checking how each individual page is performing. Through that, you can link under-performing pages to your high-authority pages. That way, the SEO benefit will trickle down to the poor pages.

Analyze your organic traffic

Gaining organic traffic is the primary goal when performing SEO. So to see how good your on-page SEO is, you should analyze the traffic you’re getting. That way, you can know if there’s a sudden slump or increase.

Aside from the basic numbers, you should also check the bounce rate of your pages. Take note that even if you have high volumes of traffic, an equally high bounce rate means all that traffic is for nothing.

This will vary from website to website and also the type of page visited. Usually, blog pages have the highest bounce rate, which is quite normal. However, in terms of product pages, you’d want to limit the bounce rate to get better conversion rates.

Experts suggest a benchmark when it comes to bounce rates depending on the type of pages:

• Blogs and dictionaries – 65% to 90%
• Landing pages – 60% to 90%
• Content websites (non-e-commerce) – 35% to 60%
• Lead generation websites – 30% to 55%
• Business to business (B2B) websites – 25% to 55%
• E-commerce and retail websites – 20% to 45%

Check your pages per session

This SEO metric pertains to the average number of pages that a site visitor visits per session. Take note that each session is slated at 30 minutes. This is a gauge of how effective your website is at retaining and keeping visitors engaged.

For on-page SEO, pages per session can be boosted through strategic internal linking, improved UX, and compelling content. All of these are within your control and can be improved through a solid content strategy.

It would help if you also aimed to make your website as mobile-friendly as possible. Ensure that every page is navigable, easy to read, and responsive.

This is important as it helps you monitor how effective your sales funnel is. You’ll see the pages visitors click until they drop off into conversion.

Final words

On-page SEO plays an important role in ensuring that your site visitors find your pages engaging and suitable for their search query. After optimizing your pages, you should check the results. Usually, it will take months to see your efforts pay off. Just be patient.

Appealing to your customers’ emotions is a strategy that you can surely rely on. Emotional design should be an essential in your website in order to ensure a pleasant user experiences for everyone visiting your site. Whether they are merely browsing or consider buying your items, an emotional appeal can definitely give them a nudge to finally take action.

I know, website owners tend to prioritize the technical first. However, this approach has made website have an impersonal vibe, neglecting the potential of emotional design. Donald A. Norman is a well-known professor and author writing about cognitive psychology. In his book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, Donald Norman reiterates that “attractive things work better.” Norman, and many other authors, acknowledge that emotions are crucial in unlocking the potential of web design.

In this blog post, I will discuss on how you should design your website. Not just to make things pretty, but to appeal to the emotions.

Secure a good foundation.

Whether what type of website you are building, you need to consider its foundation. Like when you are building a house, first and foremost, a good foundation is needed. Next, you need to plan the your goals and ask yourself, how you will partition the space available. In website design, you follow the same principle. You need to divide the “house” by adding walls. One space for products, another one for blog posts, and so on. Once you have a concrete plan to follow, then, you can concentrate on making the design come to life.

DEFINE THE GOALS

• Before anything else, you need to ask yourself what goals you want to achieve.
• Reflect on what image you want to portray, and how you want others to see your website. So, these goals in mind should be consistent with your actions. Also, it should be evident in your website appearance. Being consistent builds up your reliability and your trustworthiness.

THINK OF YOUR USERS

• Yes, you have to consider your business goals. However, when designing, you also need to consider the people who are visiting this website. Put yourself in the shoes of your potential clients. Will they like it? Is it easy to purchase on your website? Is the website even easy to use?
• So, you need to know your target audience. When you do this, you will eventually know what is important to your users.
• If you skip this part, then, you won’t clearly know your target audience. You won’t be able to create a website that is both useful and enjoyable to your users.

CONSIDER THE CONTEXT 

• Lastly, you should think of the context. What role do you play? Consider the emotions needed in the situation. Of course, if you are presenting mysteries and thrillers in your website, you would not add colorful rainbows and fluffy unicorns. Knowing this, it will be easier for you to reach out to your target audience effectively. The key here is to communicate the message to your audience well.

For the second part, I will add Norman’s ways in adding emotions in your website. Be sure to check out the link below!

Next? How to Add Emotions in Your Website? (Part 2)

For your website to thrive, you need an audience. Without a doubt, a website is useless without followers. For a blog, readers are needed. For an online store, customers are necessary.

Whatever type of website you are running, you need people. There’s no doubt in that. However, the question is… where you do your find your people? How are you going to start your search? Most importantly, how are you going to convert mere website visitors into actual buyers?

For starters, always ask for people’s email. As what I have discussed in 4 Easy Ways to Gain Traffic for Your Website, email is one way to reach many people. First, you got to find your target audience, ask for their working email, and send promotions to that email. The more emails you get, the better for your business.

How do you build your email list?

Well, there are a number of ways. First, you need to obtain their email addresses, and market to your email list. However, you should not send numerous of promotional emails at all once. Remember, it’s not all about telling them to buy. If you continue to send them with sales, your email subscribers will dwindle down. People will immediately unsubscribe if they see that you constantly pester them with spam emails. If you need more email ideas, refer to this blog post.

What can  you add to your email newsletter?

Remember, people subscribe to your email thinking that you have something valuable to share. So, give them value. Whether it is an important information, a freebie, helpful tips, or all of the above, give it to them.

Don’t just send them opportunities to buy. Instead, you should earn their trust. Link them to helpful blog posts, free ebooks, video tutorials, or podcasts that may help them. After leading them to a set of helpful content, then, you can add product offers. This is where you make money.

Don’t make it all about you.

Yes, you need to earn money to keep the business going. However, if you always think of the business side of things, you won’t earn loyal customers. You need to educate the potential customers about your products. Don’t directly sell it to them. Here are some tips to follow:

• Highlight the important features.
• Explain it to them in plain language and elaborate how the product can help them in their daily lives.
• Tell them how the product can offer convenience and comfort.
• Provide a demo through videos and images.
• Lastly, you need to give a little push. At this point, once you have highlighted the product images and showed them demo videos, it pretty hard to resist.

Plus, if you add in a special offer, like free shipping or discount voucher, they will grab this opportunity to buy. If people are hesitant to buy, then, you have to make it exciting for them. You need to create a desire to buy your products. It helps if you study on how to write effective product descriptions or study consumer psychology.

As I have discussed in 4 Easy Ways to Gain Traffic for Your Website, social media plays an important role in the growth of your website. If you are not active, then, it’s time to finally get started. Of course, you can’t just tackle social media without reading some guidelines. In this blog post, I will teach you the thing YOU SHOULD NOT DO.

Once you know the things to avoid, you can easily focus on the things that you should do. Whether you are mainly on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, these tips will help you foster nurturing relationships among your followers.

No Concrete Plan

In everything that you do, planning is an essential part. To be honest, many businesses use social media without knowing their purpose. They just start an account because they see that everyone is active online. No, you should not be like this. Instead, you need to go through the planning stage carefully.

First, you need to know the difference between Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sites. One of the many criteria, of course, is because your audience is on this specific website. If based on your research you realized that your target customers are on Facebook, then, focus on that first. Eventually, you will branch out to other social media pages when the need arises. For now, focus on the issue at hand, and establish a concrete plan on how to advertise your website.

Promoting the Business Every Single Time

Yes, social media is place to promote. However, if you repeatedly do it, promoting gets redundant. People don’t like that! Self-promoting over and over can be such a turn off to many people online. You should find the right balance in promoting your business, answering questions, and interacting with your followers. Once you take time to interact with others, your followers will become more tolerant to your promotional posts. Since you give your time to your followers, they will also give their time to you.

They will be more open minded to what you will send their way. So, don’t just focus on promoting because this will not help you gain thousands of followers.

Sending Too Many Messages All at Once

If there’s one thing that people hate, it is this: S-P-A-M. Spam does not only apply to emails; it can also be applicable to social media posts. The social media realm does not want to read all your messages at once. You don’t have to broadcast all your post at a particular time. Instead, you need to spread it out. Schedule your posts on Facebook to know which time most of your followers go online. For Twitter, there is a tool called Tweetdeck. It is Twitter’s official tool for scheduling tweets ahead of time, and tracking the engagements that each tweet will receive.

Remember, do not spam because if you do, your followers would not like it. People will stay away from any form of spamming. Before you know it, these people have unfollowed or unliked your page because they do not like the number of times you post each day.

Next? 4 More Tips on Part 2!

Now, this is the last of part of the series. Catch up on 3 Quick and Easy Ways to Improve Website Content (Part 1) and 3 Quick and Easy Ways to Improve Website Content (Part 2).

These are the tips you can do yourself:

7. Restructure your old content.

There will be topics that will forever be relevant. Moreover, recycling old topics are not exactly bad. The thing is, you can make it better, fresher, and greater. Tackle an old topic using a new perspective.

Perhaps, you might want to try podcasts instead of blogging. Try your luck on webinars instead of YouTube videos, or vice versa.

Here are some examples of what you can experiment on:

• Reupload old webinar videos into tutorials on YouTube.
• Add oldie but goodie posts on newsletters especially if the topics are still relevant to this day.
• Use your research to create helpful infographics.

Content is not a one-time deal. Surely, you can keep on rehashing and resharing your most engaging posts. Restructure them and share them on newer mediums and audiences. Remember, articles make it to magazines, and even books. Don’t ever hesitate on recycling some of your old — and still relevant — content.

8. Try minimize and simplify your articles.

For some articles, readers hesitate to read because it is lengthy. Yes, this can discourage people from reading. So, do your best to minimize and summarize lengthy articles.

Whether your blog post consists of 500 words or 2000 words, you should know when to stop.

For written articles and blog posts, longer paragraphs are fine. You can write a maximum of 15 rows. However, for emails, you should bring it down to only 5 rows.

Also, make the transition smoother. You can even use bullets and numbers to provide a easier flow and a better understanding of your topic. Aside from it making your lengthy articles short, bullets and numbers help the audience better understand the information you are giving them.

9. Never forget to add images.

Generally, people are visual learners. This is why your texts needs images. No matter how verbose and sophisticated it may seem, your posts will still need images.

According to Skyword.com, a content presented with a relevant image can have 94% more clicks than those without.

It does not automatically mean that we can upload any free stock photo we see. No, that won’t help. You need to give more time and though in selecting images. Here are some tips to follow:

• Professional shots: One reason why people hire photographers is that they want to ensure the proper lighting on all their images. Poor background concept and lighting can make a huge difference in the overall look of the photos.
• Overused photos: Nowadays, it very to get stock photos. Many of the usual stock photos we see are free. However, the popular ones are used by many companies. So, pick the ones that are not generic and still present the authenticity you are looking for.
• Use an appropriate image: Lastly, different images have different uses. For instance, adding a photo of your team is not a good idea for a video thumbnail. However, this photo would be great on the “careers” page. It will definitely encourage other people to be part of your growing company.