Your website's functionality and presentation determine how long visitors stay to explore your product or service (also referred to as session duration), if they come back, convert, and share positive word-of-mouth with others.
But toss in a 404 error page, a complicated user journey, slow loading times, and mobile incompatibility—and user satisfaction will plummet.
Knowing how to identify problems quickly, troubleshoot potential solutions, and implement preventative measures helps you win over new users, set your business apart from the competition, and improve overall satisfaction.
84% of online searches are on Google, making it the most popular search engine in the world. Google Reviews is one of the most powerful tools for businesses today.
Build Trust
Google reviews give new customers insight on what to expect from your business from other customers. 72% of customers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more. Therefore, positive reviews can build trust and establish credibility, attracting new customers and revenue.
Pinpoint Areas for Improvement
Google reviews can help you identify areas to improve your business. If you see a recurring problem in your reviews, such as poor customer service or a lack of cleanliness, you can address the problem and make the necessary changes ASAP to improve your business.
Improve SEO and Online Visibility
Google reviews can boost your search engine optimization (SEO). Your business will rank higher on Google if it has more positive reviews on Google Business Profile. This will lead to increased visibility, more customers, and profits.
Gain a Competitive Advantage
Google reviews can help you stand out. If a business has more positive reviews, it is more likely to win customers over its competitors.
Navigational search intent: This is the case when someone want to visit a particular webpage. When someone searches for "Facebook," for instance, they intend to go to the Facebook homepage.
Informational intent:This is the time when learning is desired. When someone looks for "how to make a cake," for instance, they are seeking directions on how to bake a cake.
Transactional search intent: This is when someone wants to buy something. For example, if someone searches for "buy Nike shoes," they are looking for a transactional site where they can purchase Nike shoes.
Commercial investigation intent: This is when someone is considering making a purchase, but isn't quite ready yet.
Back-end development means working on server-side software, which focuses on everything you can’t see on a website. Back-end developers ensure the website performs correctly, focusing on databases, back-end logic, application programming interface (APIs), architecture, and servers. They use code that helps browsers communicate with databases, store, understand, and delete data.
To create the framework of a website or mobile application, back-end developers work in tandem with front-end developers, product managers, primary architects, and website testers. Python, Java, Ruby, and other programming languages are just a few of the many tools and frameworks that back-end engineers need to be conversant with. They ensure that in response to requests from front-end users, the back-end operates swiftly and efficiently.
An SEO tactic called a "keyword gap analysis" looks at how your website stacks up against those of your rivals to determine which keywords generate the most traffic and rank highest. Your keyword "gaps" are places where you have a chance to surpass and rank higher than your rivals. To put it briefly, it's a means of identifying keyword chances that you're passing up.
It's also a crucial component of a competitive study for SEO. You'll start by determining the keywords that rank for your rivals but not for you. Additionally, you'll find keywords for which you score poorly, such as those in positions 5 through 15. From there, you can devise a plan to "boost" poor ranks and appropriate terms from rival websites.
One of the most important factors in bringing organic traffic to websites is targeted SEO. Since search engines are always evolving, it's critical to employ tactics that align with user intent.
Understanding Your Target Audience
Before delving into specific SEO tactics, it is crucially important to gain a deep understanding of your target audience. Conducting comprehensive keyword research will help you identify the phrases and search terms your audience uses to find products or services similar to yours. You can make sure that your website satisfies the expectations of your audience and provides them with useful information by knowing what they want to see. Furthermore, by tailoring your website to your target audience, demographic data analysis can help you draw in the correct kind of traffic.
What searchers hope to accomplish following a particular search is called their keyword intent, sometimes referred to as their search intent.
For instance, when someone searches for "buy orchid seeds," they most likely intend to buy anything.
However, a person looking for merely "orchid seeds" might decide without buying anything. It's likely that their only curiosity is orchid seeds.
Google wants to respond to users' searches as quickly as it can. You will therefore have a higher chance of ranking for a term if your content addresses its search purpose.
Because of this, it's critical to ascertain the objective behind a term before crafting content that specifically targets it.
In general, Google reviews are actually online comments that your customers record about their experiences with your business, services, or products. These comments are accessible through your business profile in Google Business.
When the name of your company or brand is typed in the Google search engine, Google can display your ranking based on these comments. Also, the comments of your previous users and customers are displayed in the search results. Google is the largest search engine on the Internet. Therefore, the search results on this platform will have a significant impact on your online reputation and more sales in the future.
How do Google reviews work?
Google reviews actually make it easy to identify your business and validate it for new potential customers. Customers can review these reviews and check whether your business is the right choice for their needs and expectations. These comments also create an ideal opportunity for businesses to be aware of the unbiased and fair opinions of their customers regarding their products and services.
This helps to improve the service and get to know the customers better. Writing and reviewing Google reviews is a very simple process. You can ask your customers to write a review for your business on Google Review. Google receives customer feedback by providing a very simple form. As soon as it is submitted, the customer's comment will be visible in your Google Business profile.
Where to read Google reviews?
You have three different ways to check the opinions of your customers in Google Reviews or Google Maps:
Google Knowledge panel:
When someone searches for your brand or company name on Google, Google presents them with a page like a digital business card. In this digital business card, all information about your business (including address and contact number) is provided. This panel is known as Google Knowledge panel. Google uses your Google Business profile and the information contained in it to display this information.
If your business has different branches, Google assigns a local Knowledge panel to each of the branches. This profile provides local search results for the branch in question. Also, some comments of your previous customers are also displayed in this panel.
Google 3-pack results for local searches:
The following page is an example of Google results for users who searched for the phrase "nearest plumber to me". This result is called Google 3-Pack or Local Map Pack. This map actually contains three local businesses related to the search term.
Google shows the best results based on relevance, skill and proximity of businesses to the searcher. Google reviews along with business contact information are also provided in this profile. Thus, users can make an informed decision.
Search on Google Map:
Most of us use the Google Map service to find a store or shop. Google Map displays store information along with ratings and some comments from previous customers. When your customers leave a review for your business on Google, they are also visible in Google Maps search results.
So when someone searches for your business on Google Maps, they can see the rating as well as positive and negative comments about your business.
We talk about technical SEO when we act on very specific elements, linked to the technique of a website, with the aim of improving its SEO. Technical SEO encompasses several topics such as loading time or security.
Certain technical elements directly affect the ability of search engines to crawl and interpret a website. Working on this facet of SEO is therefore an important building block of the positioning process. It is also not uncommon for errors made linked to technical elements to seriously penalize SEO.
Conversely, a website whose technique has been worked on will more easily benefit from good visibility. This is all the more valid for websites which operate in particularly competitive themes, and which face other very well optimized competing sites. In this scenario, technical SEO clearly cannot be neglected. Carrying out a technical SEO audit makes it possible to identify problems or optimization deficits on a site, then to establish an appropriate action plan. This is a key step within any SEO approach.
What are the main technical SEO criteria?
Crawlability
Before offering some of their pages in their results, search engines crawl websites through their internal links. But they benefit from limited resources for this. One of the main challenges of technical SEO therefore consists of ensuring that the pages explored are those which are interesting for SEO. This involves organizing internal links and developing a tree structure that encourages the exploration of the pages to be positioned.
It is also important to ensure that the indexing robots do not encounter any problems during their passage (404 responses, pages that cannot be indexed by mistake, etc.).
Other levers allow you to act on the exploration of engines: the robots.txt file will allow them to prohibit access to certain directories or types of pages. This is with the aim of limiting the exploration of content which is of no interest for SEO, or which poses a problem, and to favor the exploration of those which must position themselves.
Duplicate content icon
The presence of duplicate content within a site is a bad point for SEO. When faced with identical content, search engines must identify for themselves which version should be taken into account for SEO. In the end, it is possible that none of the versions are actually positioned.
However, it is possible to guide search engines by indicating on duplicate pages, via the addition of specific HTML tags, the reference version (called “canonical”) to be positioned. These tags take the following form:
Note that a page can indicate its own URL in a canonical tag.
Managing duplicate content by adding canonical tags is an important point in technical SEO.
web performance illustration
Web performance (loading time and process) has been a positioning criterion for search engines, particularly Google, for many years. The latter has also recently evolved its algorithm to better evaluate the loading process of the analyzed pages.
The expectations of engines (and before them, users) on this subject are increasingly high. Today, a page that is very slow to load, and not very stable for the user, has less chance of being well positioned than an equivalent competing page, which offers an optimized experience.
Auditing your web performance and implementing optimization actions when necessary is therefore part of the technical SEO optimization process.
HTTPS secure site icon
Website security is also important in SEO. Today, and for several years now, the implementation of HTTPS is part of the standards. Obtaining an SSL certificate, among other things, gives users confidence that their data is secure. It is precisely for this reason that search engines have made it a ranking criterion.
A social media scheduling tool allows you to create content in advance and determine when it will be published on the networks.
Most platforms natively integrate options for this purpose, but they are rather basic. With third-party tools, you will have more flexibility and functionality. Additionally, you can schedule content for multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard.
By freeing up time for content creation, these tools actually offer benefits that go far beyond the practical side of programming.
Scheduling tools for social media offer a workflow that drives collaboration. It is in fact easier to work together on content prepared in advance than on publications pulled out of the hat at the last moment. This is a particularly important asset within large teams or organizations in regulated sectors.
This built-in collaboration process also allows content to pass through a predefined series of approvals. With certain tools, it becomes possible to ensure that everyone can contribute to content, but that only experienced members of the team can approve their publication.
Benefits of Scheduling Tools for Social Media
Create social media content in advance and develop a consistent posting schedule for multiple accounts.
Automatically publish content at predefined times.
Manage your cross-platform campaigns from a common interface.
Create and publish content in batches to focus your efforts and avoid constant interruptions.
Collaborate effectively with different teams.
Create an approval workflow to review all social media content before publishing.
Pause posts on all platforms in one click in the event of a major event or crisis.
9 Common Site Errors