If you’re looking to grow your KBB business and generate a flurry of new enquiries, you can turn to a few quick fixes like Google Adwords, Facebook Ads or even flyers.
If you want a sustainable source of great leads, then you need to turn your attention to optimising your website for organic searches. This strategy is commonly known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – here are 5 common mistakes (and fixes) that most kitchen, bedroom and bathroom companies in the UK make on a regular basis.
#1: 404 Errors
You’ll have seen a 404 error before, and it’s always frustrating to stumble upon – especially when you need to see what’s on the page! Websites are an ever-changing thing, and this means that sometimes links break; the main cause of 404 errors. This can result in increasing bounce rates and poor user experience. The good news is that they’re easy to find and fix. Simply use a tool such as Yoast SEO for WordPress, your Google Search Console or Screaming Frog crawl software to find them. Once found, simply redirect the links to where they should go…
#2: Missing Meta Information
Meta descriptions are snippets of up to 155 characters (known as a ‘tag’ in the language of HTML). A meta description is what you see when you do a search on Google, and these are a crucial component of your SEO strategy.
Often pages are created and don’t have meta descriptions. Although these aren’t actually indexed and searched by search engines, they go a massive way to boosting your click-through rates because a user can read a small amount of info before they decide to click onto your website.
Think of a meta description as an advert for your page, so simply explain what the user can find on that page…
#3: Big, Slow Images
The kitchen, bedroom and bathroom industry is sold mostly on aesthetics, leading us to put as much impressive imagery on our site as possible. However, the more images with large file sizes that we put onto our site, the slower it will make it – and site load speed is a defining factor for the major search engines. The average site should only take between two and three seconds to load – any more and users will be going elsewhere. We’re an impatient breed!
Use some software to edit both the image size (dimensions) and file size (KB, MB or even GB). There are various tools out there like Photoshop or even Canva. Use an image compressor (like JPEG Optimizer) after you’ve resized the image to make it as web-friendly as possible.
#4: More People Are Using Mobile Than Ever!
We routinely see that more than 55% of people are using mobile devices to view our clients’ websites, and this is true for many other industries. Google has even started to crawl mobile sites to rank them in their results.
This all means that your site needs to be mobile-ready, and also provide a great experience for the user. Be careful here as desktop websites don’t always transfer well onto mobile. Spend a good amount of time on your mobile site looking at the experience. Would you be impressed as a potential customer?
#5: Secure Websites
If you’re a Google Chrome user, you’ll know that many sites are now showing as ‘not secure’ in the URL search bar. This is known as ‘HTTPS’, and Google have started to use it as a lightweight ranking factor. It’s a quick fix, and your web developer should be able to help you out with this. Get it on your site now!
So, there we have it: 5 common SEO mistakes and some quick fixes.
If you are having some challenges with search engines ranking your site, get in touch and we can spend some time on the phone reviewing your site and mapping out a way forward.