Website Examples of Changes That Made a Big Difference

Wrong or Technical Name

A decades old company in the electronics industry called their core product by a correct name but after researching it, I found that no one was searching for the products they sold using that name. Although there was some initial resistance to the change, changing the name caused those product pages which were ranked very low, and some not ranked at all, to be ranked by Google in the top 10 consistently.

The same thing can happen in every industry. Most industries use acronyms which are basic to the people who work in that industry but if on their website, they talk that way, the likelihood of attracting more customers/clients via the website is greatly reduced.

Meta Description Errors

For a website to be easily found by search engines, each page on a website needs to follow the correct meta description protocol and many do not. I remember working on a website where to make it easy on their website of over 1000 pages, they used the same meta description on all of the pages.

The problem with that is twofold. First, the purpose of the meta description is to tell the search engines what is on that page. When all of the pages are the same, Google dings you for the misuse of those descriptions. Second, if the proper length is not used, part of the description is truncated when it is being shown to prospective customers or if it is not long enough, the search engines don’t think you have much to say. Correcting the meta descriptions tripled the number of pages that were ranked by Google in the top 10.

Poorly Structured Headings and Titles

Imagine going into a grocery store or home improvement store with no signage or poor signage to indicate where things are. That is exactly the world search engines are put into where proper titles and headings are not used. Most of us have been on a website where the information was confusing or the specific information we were looking for could not be found. Using proper structured headings and titles eliminates those issues.

Pages That Load Slowly

Nothing will drive customers away from a website more than a page that takes forever to load. I was working on a website for a company that produced high quality videos and photographs. Some of the pictures used on blogposts were such large files that the loading time was excessive.

Pictures can be resized, compressed and sometimes a different file format is used to reduce the load time. Most of this can be done with very little affect on the picture quality. After making the appropriate changes in this example, there was virtually no delay to view the page and image.

Linking Errors

The most common linking error is a broken link. We click on a link and get a 404-page error and most often, those pages are not helpful to get us where we wanted to go. When proper internal linking on a website is not in place, search engines can view it as an orphan page and ignore it. Daily reports show when internal or external links are a problem so they can be quickly fixed. Recently, I was on a healthcare website where the link indicated it would take me one place but in fact, it took me to something totally different. While fixes like this are easily accomplished, if it is not done consistently, the website looks unprofessional.