In 2023, there will be an average of 175 new websites going live on the internet per minute, which will equate to almost 252,000 new websites every day! With these high numbers, it is getting harder and harder to stand out from the rest of the pack.
With that much activity happening in the web space each day, you will want your website to be exceeding Google’s rankings factors. That will give your website the best chance of ranking higher within Google search results. Here are a few tools that Jordan recommends you use to ensure your websites impress Google ranking factors.
Page Speed Insights:
In our opinion, Page Speed Insights (PSI) is a fantastic tool that can help you vastly improve your website’s performance.
Page speed insights is part of Google Developer Tools and is used to identify issues that are slowing down your website or web application on mobile and desktop devices. PSI uses an open-source tool called lighthouse that collects and analyzes lab data combined with real-world data from the Chrome User Experience Report dataset. This data allows PSI to analyze your website and spit out a long list of improvements that you can make to your website.
One of the many ways that PSI can help you is by identifying your Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). CLS identifies if your website behaves in the way the user expects it to act; for example, content moves when a user tries to use the website.
CLS is only one of the many different web vitals that PSI can identify. Some of the others include Speed Index, First Contentful Paint (FCP), Time to Interactive (TTI) and many more. Web Vitals are critical as they have a massive impact on SEO. The better your Web Vitals within PSI are, the better your website will rank.
Page Speed Insights isn’t just useful for Web Vitals. PSI can identify an extensive range of issues impacting your website; for example, Render Blocking Resources, Time to First Byte (TTFB), Server Response Time (SRT), Unused CSS & JS, which images to Lazy Load and much, much more. These are all important factors to get on top of as they can have a direct impact on your websites speed and performance. For example, server response time is important, because the longer your server takes to respond, the longer your website is going to take to load. Overall, PSI is a potent tool available to you to use to your advantage for free!
Google Search Console:
Google Search Console (GSC) is another great tool that Google offers, completely free. GSC is like the PSI for search appearance and is helpful as it helps you analyze your website in the same way that Google does with its bots. GSC can help you improve your website by monitoring your links, recommending page improvements, recommending HTML improvements and much more.
We find that GSC is best for monitoring link performance, getting an in-depth view of which links are performing well and which are not and, viewing information on how Google crawls, indexes and serves your website to its viewers. Another powerful component of GSC is the notification feature. If an issue is found on your website by Google, you will receive an email explaining the problem and advising you how to act on it to improve your website further.
Some of the most common issues we see are related to mobile user experience. GSC is excellent at providing us with insights into the user-friendliness of our websites on mobile devices. For example, suppose the text in a section on our website is unreadable on mobile devices. In that case, we will get a notification email from GSC explaining which part of the site is affected so we can resolve it.
Another example is clickable elements. Google is not a fan of pages filled to the brim with closely placed together features or are overflowing the page on mobile devices. GSC will identify this problem and alert you about it. Overall, GSC gives you powerful insights into how your website performs within search. It offers you a variety of tools to improve your website usability and search rankings, raising your chances of increasing organic traffic to your website.
Yoast SEO:
If you are familiar with Yoast SEO, you probably think we’re going to write a long spiel about the importance of meta tags, descriptions and all that good stuff. But not today!
Yes, Yoast can help you with meta tags, but it can also help you improve your website’s readability. If you would like to read more about meta tags and website SEO in general, please check out the blog I wrote last month on the importance of SEO here.
Readability is a significant ranking factor within Google. Look at it this way; readability measures how clearly the text on your website can be understood by the person reading it. The purpose of readability is to improve user experience. If your copy is full of run-on sentences and mumble jumble, then your readability score is going to be low. Readability is becoming more and more critical as the use of voice search becomes more prominent in search.
Voice search in itself brings a whole range of other issues as it requires search engines to become better and better at mimicking humans. Along with tone and quality, other components of readability are just as important: for example, the size, colour, and font of your text on your site.
If you have 30 line blocks of text, in a light grey font colour, with a 200 weight in size 10 on a white background, there will be very few people capable of reading that.
The whole idea of readability is making it as user-friendly and accessible as possible. We recommend that whenever you create blocks of text on a page, go no lower than 14px in font size, use an easy-to-read font, use easy-to-read colours that stand out, and always keep a solid weight on your font. Doing this will ensure that your text will always be readable no matter what screen your reader is on.
At the end of the day, there are so many different tools you can be using to improve your website. If you can keep on top of these three, then you are definitely on the right track to having yourself a successful website!
Looking to build a website for your business? Or get a website refresh? Have a chat with our team at frankworks today!
