10 Simple Ways to Optimize Your Website on a Shoestring Budget

Summary

It’s crucial to monitor and optimize your company website's performance, even without a dedicated team or budget. Key methods include enhancing and refreshing content, utilizing free SEO tools like Google Keyword Planner, and ensuring a mobile-friendly user experience. Employing free analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity provides insights into user behavior and site performance.

Additional tactics involve promoting content on social media, compressing images for faster site speed, and crafting strong CTAs. Internal linking can keep visitors engaged longer, and optimizing images and alt text improve SEO and accessibility. Regularly monitoring performance helps identify areas for ongoing improvement.

By Lisa Heay, Director of Business Operations at Heinz Marketing

As part of my Marketing Operations role, one of my focus areas is to understand how our website is performing and where we have opportunities for optimization. But we don’t have a dedicated website team, advanced tools, or even a budget to put toward the effort.

In my research, however, it seems it’s not all totally necessary. There are strategies and tactics you can use to make optimizations without all those additional resources.

Here are 10 ways you can make improvements to your company’s website on a budget (or no budget at all)

1. Polish Your Content

First things first—take a good look at your existing content. Are there gaps where you don’t have content around a specific area of your business? Is there old content that may be out of date or no longer applicable to your business focus?

Adding more relevant information or refreshing old blog posts can make a huge difference in driving an engaged audience to your website.

We noticed a big uptick in our own website visitors when we put together a content theme with multiple angles around a unified topic. More content feeds Google and you’ll see the results in your search rankings.

2. Optimize for SEO

Speaking of search, you don’t need a big budget to boost your SEO!

Start with some keyword research using free tools like Google Keyword Planner. Once you’ve got your list of keywords, use them throughout all of your content and webpages. But also ensure your site’s title tags and meta descriptions are optimized for keywords and also compelling enough to encourage clicks.

3. Make User Experience a Priority

Is your website mobile-friendly? Get out your cell phone and find out. Check your friend’s phones! Check your mom’s old phone. Check multiple operating systems and devices. Your website should look great no matter what.

This was one that was eye opening for us. We once had a chatbot pop-up that looked great on the desktop, but took up the entire window on a mobile device – blocking the entire page so there was no way the visitor could navigate anywhere. It needed to go ASAP.

Site navigation is also important. Users should be able to find what they need easily and quickly without having to hunt for it. Menus should be clear and concise. You don’t have long before visitors will give up and abandon your site.

4. Use Free Tools to Your Advantage

There are so many free tools out there that can help you monitor your website’s performance.

You should at minimum be using Google Analytics to monitor website traffic and user behavior. In addition, Google Search Console is another fantastic resource to help you optimize your content by monitoring search queries. Finally, Microsoft Clarity is a great one that we recently started using that helps you understand how people interact with your website through session replays, heatmaps, and scroll and click tracking.

5. Get Social!

Social media allows you to reach a wider audience, improve brand awareness, improve link building and boost organic traffic. Promote your content across your social media channels on a regular cadence to drive traffic back to your site. The more traffic and backlinks your website receives, the more credible your content is to search engines.

In addition, make it a point to engage with your audience by responding to comments and messages to build up your community and brand awareness.

6. Speed Things Up

A slow website can drive visitors away. If a site takes more than a few seconds to load, you’re going to lose people. Fortunately, you can use free tools to compress images which can help reduce loading times.

In addition, try to minimize redirects whenever possible. While redirects can be important for sending users and search engines to the correct URL, each one adds an HTTP request-response cycle, which increases the website’s loading time. Too many redirects can also confuse users and search engines, which can lead to a poor user experience and dilute link equity.

7. Craft Strong Calls to Action

Make sure you have clear and compelling CTAs on your pages. Whether it’s signing up for a newsletter, contacting sales, or checking out a product, guide your visitors toward the actions you want them to take. They should be clear and spread out throughout the site – not buried in the footer where no one sees.

8. Utilize Internal Linking

Internal linking is a great way to keep users on your site longer. You can do this by linking to related blog content within new posts, or to your service pages or events. You could also add CTA’s to your content to view related assets, or engage directly with the team.

All this will boost SEO and provide more value to your website visitors, keeping them hooked and coming back for more.

9. Optimize Images and Alt Text

This is something easily overlooked, but don’t forget about images and associated alt text.

Alt text is the written copy that will appear in place of an image on a page if that image does not load on screen. It allows search engines to better crawl and rank your site, so you should be descriptive and include the relevant keywords you want to rank for to improve your SEO.

In addition, it also helps screen reading tools describe images to users who are visually impaired, making your website more accessible.

10. Keep an Eye on Performance

Website optimization is not a set-and-forget kind of thing. You need to regularly monitor your website’s performance using analytics and the other monitoring tools mentioned earlier. This will help you see what’s working, what’s not, and where you need to focus your efforts for continued improvement.

Wrapping it Up

By following these simple tips, you can optimize your company’s website without spending a dime! It’s all about being strategic and making the most of what you have.

Want to chat? Email us for a free brainstorm session!

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