Why is it important to choose the correct service provider to build your website?
Your website is nothing more than an extended electronic version of the old printed business cards that we hardly ever use anymore. It serves as a visual introduction to a potential customer informing them of what you have to offer and how they can get a hold of your business. If your website is not easy to find, navigate and visually engaging towards potential new customers, it servers no purpose towards growing your customer base and increasing your sales revenue. That is where a Service provider like Swart Digital Studio comes in. It is important to realise that there are more than 32 .6 Million South Africans that use the Internet in some way, shape or form, according to the International Telecommunications Union. A significant portion of users are business owners who have learned the power of connecting with customers and colleagues electronically. When you promote your website, you are only one website that needs to be found by a network of 32.6 Million people. This may sound like a lot of potential new customers but when you start to consider the influential statistic related to converting customers into sales the competitions become excruciating.
Competitors
It is safe to say that there will be thousands of competitors in your industry that are all competing to be seen first on the search results relevant to their industry. Search results refer to the list created by search engines, such as Google, in response to a query. Search results can be broken down as follows: Natural search results (usually on the left-hand side of search engine’s results page) Here you will see all the websites in a search engine’s index which are relevant to the query. The normal goal of almost any website is simple yet very complex to achieve. This goal is getting your website to rank as far ahead of the rest as possible. For example, when a user searched for a restaurant near me you must have third-party platforms, such Google My Business listings, in place to ensure that you display as high up in the search results on the first page as physically possible.
In most cases you Google My Business listing will serve as the first result displayed that is directly associated with your business. Your developer agency should know what integrations are optimal for your industry and how to implement these integrations for optimal market penetration. We find that a lot of times clients go to a developer with the sole expectation of just having a website. It is important to know that just being on the internet is not enough. The quality of the textual content, visuals and the overall user experience are just some of the things that make your website jump over the competition to the top of the search results.
What should your goal be?
Your goal should always be to outrank and outperform your competitors by using various strategies that are mainly based on SEO factors. SEO is an acronym that stands for search engine optimization, which is the process of optimizing your website to get organic, or un-paid, traffic from the search engine results page. To do this, search engines will scan, or crawl, a website to better understand what the site is about. After crawling and indexing your website Google will give you a score based on five optimisation categories: Performance, Best Practices, Accessibility, SEO and Progressive Web Apps.
Performance on your Website
In this category, Search engines Analyze how quickly a website or app loads and how quickly users can access or view the content. There are various aspects of your website that can decrease the loading speed of your website and your Service provider has to know all of the following:
- Reducing render-blocking resources
- Serve images in next-gen formats
- Enabling text compression
- Defer unused CSS sheets
- Ensuring that text remains visible during Webfont loading
- Using efficient cache policy on static assets
- Improving the Critical Rendering Path (CRP)
- Avoiding oversized images
- Delaying load of offscreen images
- Minify/compress CSS
- Minify/compress JavaScript
- Etc
Best Practices used by your service provider
The 16 Best Practices tested by Google mainly concentrate on security aspects of websites and modern standards of web development. Google analyses whether HTTPS and HTTP/2 are used, checks to see whether resources come from secure sources and assesses the vulnerability of JavaScript libraries. Other best practices look at secure database connections and avoiding the use of non-secure commands, such as document.write(), or incorporating antiquated APIs. Your Service provider must know this as well.
Google runs various tests on every website indexed with them to establish how well a website or app can be crawled by the search engine and displayed in the search results. These Optimisation tests that Google describes as “SEO” are extremely limited; anyone with a website or app that does not achieve a maximum score should make the required fixes. Once these changes have been made, search engine optimization offers huge potential for other improvements, which should certainly be explored.
Google currently runs 13 audits within the search engine optimization category. These mainly look at mobile-friendliness or PWA, the correct application of structured data and tags like canonicals, Hreflang, titles and meta descriptions, and whether a page can be crawled by search engine bots.
Accessibility
Google’s accessibility audits to examine how well a website or app can be used by people with disabilities. This includes tests on important elements like buttons or links, to see whether they are sufficiently well described, or whether images have been assigned an alt-attribute so that the visual content can also be described by screen readers for visually impaired users.
Google currently runs 13 audits within the search engine optimization category. These mainly look at mobile-friendliness or PWA, the correct application of structured data and tags like canonicals, Hreflang, titles and meta descriptions, and whether a page can be crawled by search engine bots. Accessibility Google’s accessibility audits to examine how well a website or app can be used by people with disabilities. This includes tests on important elements like buttons or links, to see whether they are sufficiently well described, or whether images have been assigned an alt-attribute so that the visual content can also be described by screen readers for visually impaired users.
Progressive Web Apps
This section was originally the core of Googles analysation and crawling platform – the analysis of Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs. Does the website register a service worker? Does it work offline with internet access? Does it return a 200 error? These audits were how Lighthouse began, but they are now just one of the five audit categories and one which is only of real importance for providers of Progressive Web Apps. We hope you enjoyed reading about making your website more successful and sticking with the website development agency that means something for your business in terms of expanding your revenue. We would gladly answer any further questions you might have about a service provider and Seo, please feel free to contact one of our developers for more information about optimising your website.