Today’s post is all about the issues that may be impacting your website performance and ultimately how these can push your website down the rankings super fast. Just because you hired a web developer to create your website does not mean that everything about your website is going to be working perfectly. Many web developers do not understand SEO and that means that their design can impact the way your site performs in the search engines. Then when you start adding content to your site it is very simple for you to make simple errors which could see your site being penalised and your hypnotherapy marketing ruined. Here are some simple things for you to consider when building and designing your site.
1) Mobile Usability – If you have not seen my previous blog post on this subject I suggest you read it to find out why having a mobile responsive website is hugely important. Websites that are not mobile friendly are actively penalised in Google. This is because Google wants to give its search engine users a great experience and if they are landing on a site that does not look good on their tablet or phone then they will click elsewhere. It appears that Bing will also be launching a similar penalty very soon. Paying for an upgrade to a mobile responsive website is now absolutely essential if you are serious about hypnotherapy marketing and building a great business.
2) Duplicate Content – This means that you cannot write content for web page and then copy and paste that content to another page and change a couple of words. It also means that you cannot write something on your website and then copy and paste that information somewhere else on the web such as on a guest blog post or article submission site. When Google is faced with two identical sets of information it does not know which version to trust or which should be placed in the search engine rankings first. Ultimately when faced with this dilemma it makes a simple decision to penalise you and place the content down the rankings.
3) Keyword Stuffing – So you want to appear high in the search engine rankings for the keyword hypnotherapy Birmingham. In order to achieve that goal you write those keywords multiple times on your first page and throughout your other web pages. This makes your posts virtually unreadable and is classed as a black hat technique by Google. As a general rule try and make sure that your keyword is used no more than 2-5% in your content.
4) Speed of Your Website – How fast your website loads is now a ranking factor. Nobody has the time or patience to wait ages while an old website slowly loads. You can read about what Google thinks about website speed in their Google blog.To test how well your website is performing then you can try a speed test on your website. Google PageSpeed Insights allows you to enter in the url of your website and analyses how quickly it responds. Once the analysis is complete it will tell you what changes need to be made to your website in order to improve performance.
5) Guest Blogging – Once upon a time you could quite happily write blogs on other peoples websites and place links within them leading back to your website. Writing a significant number of these could boost your rankings significantly but not anymore. Mat Cutts from Google announced that this form of SEO is now considered as spam and that from now on people doing it could expect to be penalised. You have been warned!
6) Geographic Location of Hosting Account – For those of you who don’t know about hosting there are companies out there who allow your website access to the web by placing your site on their servers for a fee. If you have a web developer they will have signed you up to a hosting account which you generally pay for monthly or yearly. What you may not know is that if your website is a .co.uk and your hosting is in The States you will find that your site is likely to be penalised in the rankings. As a general rule of thumb make sure that your hosting account is based in the country where your website is.
7) Low Quality Pages – So many therapists are guilty of this crime. They place up a web page with a picture and write two sentences about their product and that is it. Your website content needs to be useful and relevant to the people reading it if not Google will penalise you and your competitors will leap ahead of you in the rankings. Get your hypnotherapy marketing right and create quality content for your site instead.
8) Technical Issues – Ever used Google webmaster tools? If not sign up and add your website. It is a great resource and will flag errors appearing in your site. These technical issues may be preventing you from getting a higher ranking in the search engines. Don’t sit in ignorance and these errors will ultimately cost you money.
9) Fancy Web Design – So you hired a web designer to create you an all singing all dancing website. You have a video loading when people login or you have pictures that fade in and out or use flash on your site. Well don’t because the search engines don’t like it. They want a fast responsive website that can be read easily. If you have too much going on it slows down your site and can’t be accessed properly by the Google bots. If it doubt keep your website nice and simple.
10) Optimising Media– It is great sometimes to put images or videos on your website but have they been optimised so that they don’t impact your sites loading time. There is a line to be drawn between putting media on to your site and being penalised because your site takes too long to load.
For more interesting tips and tricks to increase your hypnotherapy marketing success you can buy my hypnotherapy marketing eBook online today. Don’t let marketing ignorance prevent you from building the business and income you deserve.