Category Archives: Blog

On-Page SEO at a Glance

Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to bring relevant traffic to your website. By optimizing your pages, you can increase the position of your site in search engine results. In our previous article, we discussed SEO and some of the factors that are used to rank your site. Today, lets dive deeper and take a look at a specific category of SEO: on-page SEO.

What is On-Page SEO?

SEO is broken down into multiple directions we can take to improve our search engine ranking. On-page or on-site SEO focuses specifically on the optimization of your webpages’ content and elements.

On-page SEO’s goal is to make it easier for both search engines and human users to understand your website. By optimizing your webpage, you help both search engines and users understand your content and goals. Good on-page SEO helps search engines interrupt what users see on your page and what value they glean from it.

How Important are Keywords to On-Page SEO?

By analyzing webpages, search engines can determine what is considered high quality content to users. They then rank pages accordingly in their respective search queries. When thinking about users searching the internet, keywords may come to mind as an important factor.

In the past, the idea of keywords used to play a larger role in on-page SEO. However, search engines have become smarter and judge pages beyond what specific words they include in their content.

Today, search engines can understand webpages not only through keywords, but from synonyms, context, and specific combinations of words. This allows search engines to better measure the actual relevance of your page in a user’s search query. Keywords still matter, but are not the only thing you should be working on. Instead, understanding who your users are, what they want, and what content fulfills their needs is key to increasing your on-page SEO.

How is Good On-Page SEO Achieved?

Beyond keywords and quality content, a variety of factors are relevant when optimizing your page:

  • Linkage – Managing how many links are on your page can help increase the value of your content. If you have many links on one page, consider how relevant those links are to what you are trying to convey. Broken links can negatively impact your ranking, so making sure your links work is also important.
  • Speed – As discussed in previous articles, slow pages affect user experience. If pages are slow to load, search engines will rank those pages lower than others.
  • Organization & Structure – Organization and structure are important when creating a website that is easy for search engines to understand. Check out our previous article where we define structured data and the structure you should use.
  • Metadata – Metadata acts as instructions for search engines that are reading your page. Including metadata can help search engines better understand your page’s intent. It also acts as a map when search engines explore your site, guiding them to the pages you want them to see.

Overall, good on-page SEO should equate to creating good user experience. So long as your users find value in your website, your site’s search engine ranking should increase.

Want to learn more?

Carrie Saunder’s upcoming course, “The Converting Website,” will dive into SEO and other important factors that aim to optimize your website. Join the waitlist today to stay up to date on the classes release!

This entry was posted in Blog, Ecommerce, SEO on by .

Bring More Traffic to your Website – Technical SEO

To gain more customers, your business must be easy to find. With E-commerce businesses, many potential customers will be arriving to your site via search engines such as Google. Searching for products and services on Google will result in a hierarchy of websites that are ranked behind the scenes. The higher your site is on a Google search result, the more opportunity your business has to attract new customers.

In our previous article on how Google sees online businesses, we introduced the concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a method to increase your site’s searchability and search result ranking. Let’s look at some technical aspects of your site that effect your site’s position in search results.

There are three key factors that determine good technical SEO: speed, crawlability, and understandability. These factors not only effect how Google sees your business, but effect user experience as well. Good user experience leads to good SEO, so optimizing your site’s searchability is beneficial to your business.

Speed

We come back to speed often because speed is one of the first things people notice when they arrive on your site. How fast does your site load? How long does it take to get from one page to the next? As discussed in our previous article on Google’s Core Web Vitals, speed plays a key role in determining the first impressions of your site not only for users, but for search engines as well. Search engines such as Google are aware that page speed impacts user experience. When ranking your website in search results, Google measures the speed of your site against a set of ideal metrics. If your page is slow, Google will push that page further down in the search results.

Crawlability

“Crawling” is a term used to describe search engine sending out a virtual robot to “read” your webpages. These bots go through your pages and click on the all the possible links they can find. How many dead ends the bots find and the structure of your data determines the crawlability of your site.

Due to the constant evolution of websites, broken links are not uncommon. These links are pages that don’t work and thus cannot populate their content to the user. While bots crawl your site, they note how many broken links they find. Broken links impact user experience as it causes annoyance and confusion. Search engines include this factor when ranking your page. Minimizing these dead ends benefits both users and search engine optimization.

Understandability

Understandability tends to be a question of how well structured your website is. As bots crawl your page, they attempt to understand what your page is doing. The bot interprets your goals and products based on the content it can read. How easy it is for the bot to understand your content effects its understanding of your business. This information is essential in helping search engines decide when to share your site as a search result. How the bot interprets your website’s purpose impacts your ranking as well as the audience search engines will send to your site.

Other aspects that impact the understandability of your pages include international reach and duplicate content. Having different sites for international audiences can confuse search engines if not defined. Due to different languages, search engines need to provide the proper page to the proper region and thus need to understand the page’s intended audience. Having the same content on pages can also confuse search engines on how they should rank your pages since they may all look the same. In the end, this may result in ranking them all lower.

Optimizing my Technical SEO

Interested in learning more about how you can increase your website’s search engine ranking? Reach out to BCSE! Interested in learning about tools and methods that you can use on your own to optimize your website? Join the wait list today for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” This five-week course will explore a variety of ways to make your website turn visitors into customers!

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Staying in Compliance – Colorado’s New Retail Delivery Fee

Starting July 1st, 2022, the state of Colorado will require retailers to collect a $0.27 fee any time they deliver taxable goods to an address in Colorado. With E-Commerce’s ability to interact with customers beyond state boundaries, this will impact many online businesses. Both in-state and out-of-state companies will have to add additional items to their checkout process in order to comply with Colorado’s new retail delivery fee.

What do I need to Know about the Colorado Retail Delivery Fee?

Any tangible taxable good delivered by a motor vehicle to a Colorado consumer will require the new retail delivery fee. Some other factors to consider concerning this scenario are:

  • Operation or ownership of the vehicle used to transport goods to a Colorado consumer does not affect the necessity of the retail delivery tax.
  • Whether your company is sending the good from inside the state of Colorado or out of state, the retail delivery tax still applies.
  • The inclusion of free shipping of your goods does not affect the necessity of the retail delivery tax.

Are there any Exceptions?

The exceptions concerning this tax are as follows:

  • Consumers such as government and charity organizations, which are exempt from state sales tax, are not affected by the retail delivery tax.
  • Nontaxable goods are not affected by the retail delivery tax as long as the property that the delivery is headed to is exempt from the state sales tax.

Note that if a mix of taxable and nontaxable goods are purchased together sent out for delivery in Colorado, the retail delivery tax will still apply.

What do I need to do to comply to this upcoming factor?

  • Be informed. Make sure that you know and understand the implications of this new fee and how it will impact you and your business. You can read more about this new tax here on the Colorado Department of Revenue webpage.
  • Add a $0 line item to your orders with the OF400000 tax code.
  • Include the retail delivery tax line on your customer’s invoices. This tax will need to be displayed separately from the total tax line.
  • Sign up for a tax compliant service. To learn more about this option, reach out to BCSE to get more information concerning a tax compliant service that keep your business up to date with these ever-changing tax requirements so you don’t have to!

Where can learn more about complying to this upcoming change?

BCSE is always here to help. If you have questions or concerns about this upcoming retail delivery fee, contact us and we will get you up to speed!

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Common eCommerce Conversion Challenges

The world of eCommerce is full of challenges. Fast paced and competitive, one of the hardest aspects of eCommerce is adapting to the evolving expectations of your customers. Visitors of your site can decide whether or not to become customers with a click of a button, making it imperative that your platform is attractive and easy to use. Let’s look at some of the top eCommerce challenges that could be impacting your company’s conversions.

Speed

As seen in our previous article concerning Google’s Core Web Vitals, speed plays an important role in establishing a good first impression. How fast your site feels, which is determined by how quickly and smoothly your website loads for the user, can be one of the first things a user notices. If your site takes a long time to load, or loads unevenly, visitors may decide to hit the back button and look elsewhere for similar products or services.

Device Friendliness

Since users can access your site on multiple devices, how your site adapts between desktop and mobile can impact customer experience. Since smartphones allow customers to shop almost anywhere, having your site be navigable and optimized for use on mobile can be key to obtaining more customers. The easier it is for a user to scroll through your site, the more likely they will stay.

Unclear Goals

When someone arrives at your website, they should be able to determine fairly quickly what it is you are offering and how they can learn more about your product. This means that your site needs to have clear calls to action to guide them towards the end goal: becoming a paying customer. If becoming a customer is a complicated process, a user may opt to leave your site.

Complicated Checkout Process

Getting a visitor to the checkout process is the goal of most eCommerce businesses. However, a visitor arriving to the checkout form doesn’t mean they have become a customer yet. Depending on the length, clarity, and ease of use of your site’s check out process, a user still has the option of abandoning their cart. Making this final step easy and transparent can be imperative to converting customers.

How can I increase my Website’s Conversion Rate?

Want some tips and tricks on how to make your site convert more users to customers? Sign up for the BCSE Newsletter today and we will send you a 7-step guide on how to increase your eCommerce conversions and sales!

This entry was posted in Ecommerce on by .

Important Metrics to Track in GA4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a powerful analytics service that offers granular data about your site’s traffic engagement. In our previous article concerning GA4, we introduced GA4 and guided readers on how to start collecting data on their own websites. Next, lets explore a few important metrics to track as you use GA4.

GA4 has a variety of reports that can help you better understand how your site is turning visitors into customers. One of the pages you may visit often is “Report Snapshot” under “Reports.” While GA4 offers multiple metrics to explore user engagement, here are some important ones to keep your eye on while using this tool.

Users

Users is a major metric on GA4, taking up the majority of the “Report Snapshot.” In GA4, each user has a tag with a special ID to differentiated it from other users, even on different devices. This allows Google to identify new users from reoccurring ones.

Knowing how many new users are visiting your site can help establish if you are attracting new faces to your business. Such information can help identify if your website and advertising methods are working. Being able to identify reoccurring visitors helps measure if your website leaves a good impression. Returning visitors may mean returning customers, after all.

Other user reports such as demographic, activity, and retention can help further granulate who your users are and how your users see your website. Overall, user metrics are essential to understanding your ecommerce traffic flow.

Sessions

Sessions are a measurement of the volume of visits to your site. Moving beyond the number of users who arrive at your site, sessions keep track of how much time a user spends on your website. Located briefly on “Report Snapshot,” sessions do not take into consideration specific users. If a user interacts with your site on desktop, and then later visits your site on their phone, those interactions are two different sessions.

The sessions metrics plays a role in other reports that can help you understand more about how your users interact with your business. Average Engagement Time reports, can identify how long users stay on your pages. For example, you can track how long users stay on your home page. Depending on the length of time, your home page may have room for further optimization.

Another report that involves sessions is the Percentage of New Sessions report. This percentage compares new visitors and returning customers to see if you are retaining users. The “Session by Default Channel Grouping” report can identify where your customers are coming from. This helps you understand where your business advertisements are most successful, such as social media

Views

Views are visits to specific pages. With views, you can see what pages receive the most attention and what pages attract less traffic. High page views can help identify what kind of content users like. On the other hand, low page views can suggest disinterest or page issues that need addressed.

Views are also a good way to see how changes to your site impact traffic. We can compare views over time. By doing so, we can correlate changes in traffic to changes you may have made to your website.

Conversions

Conversions is one of the most important metrics GA4 has to offer. This metric is defined by how many visitors become customers. Customers are defined by how many visitors reach the page your business considers the end goal. This page could be a confirmation or thank you page, suggesting that the user has bought your product or signed up for your services.

Located at the bottom of your “Report Snapshot,” conversions are a great way to measure how well your website sells your business.

Want to Learn More?

BCSE is always here to help you with your website needs. However, if you want to learn more about how you can use GA4 to further your website, join the waitlist today for Carrie Saunder’s upcoming course! During the five-week course, “The Converting Website,” Carrie will explore GA4 and other powerful tools you can use to heighten your website.

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Making a Website that Works for You

It can be hard at times to tell if your website is working for your business. As the face of your business for online customers, your website is key to turning visitors into customers. Assessing if your website is working for you or against you can be confusing. We at BCSE have some questions that you can ask yourself when looking over your platform!

Is my website a successful reflection of my company?

One of the most important aspects of your site is the content itself and how it illustrates your company. Both visual and verbal branding can play a large role in distinguishing your company from others. However, there are other questions that your site should answer: What can your company do for customers? What are your company’s goals? How can customers interact with your company?

Your website should have clear calls to action. These help inform possible customers about what your company can provide. They also guide visitors about what your website expects them to do.

Another way to make your site represent your company is to share your story. When did this business begin? How has it changed? What do you want it to become? Sharing your story can help visitors and customers connect on a personal level with your business. Your story can also make your company stand out amongst competitors.

Is my website creating good first impressions?

First impressions can be key to any new encounter, and the same applies for websites. While brand and content are a big part of this, the look and feel of the website can impact a visitor’s impression as well. Aspects like navigation, page speed, and features can determine if visitors will become customers.

If someone visiting your site can’t find the products you are advertising, they may consider leaving. If a customer is having trouble finding the contact information for your business, they may be unable to buy your products . Changes in navigation when a customer views your site on mobile can also lead to confusion if not designed to suit the medium.

As we discussed in our previous blog, page speed and loading time can also impact a visitor’s decision to continue exploring your site. Time is a factor that can affect a visitor’s willingness to stay engaged.

Features like payment methods can play a major role in converting customers as well. If certain payment methods like credit cards or PayPal are unavailable, customers may be unable to buy your products. Difficult payment processes can also discourage visitors from continuing the purchase.

Overall, ease of use is the goal to create a good first impression. The easier it is for people to interact with your website, the more likely they will stay.

Is my website moving forward?

Updating your website is essential for its success. Your website informs customers about products, features, and upcoming changes to your business. Consistent updates also keep your customers confident in your business.

There are many free tools online that can help you find possible problems in your site. They can also as offer suggestions for further optimization. Fixing existing issues and mitigating them in the future helps keep your website healthy and moving. Adding different features to your site can heighten user experience through ease of use or enhance security. These additions can make your site even better for current and future customers.

These tools can examine not only physical aspects of your site, but also estimate user interaction and user experience. Such information offers a variety of opportunity to keep advancing your site.

How can I make my website work for me?

There are a many free online tools that can identify aspects of your site that may be working against you. If you want further help, BCSE is always here. If you want to learn more about turning your website visitors into customers, join the wait list for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course! The five-week course, “The Converting Website,” will dive deeper into the tools and tactics you can use to push your website further.

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Creating Good First Impressions with Page Experiences

In our previous blog, we introduced Google Search Console, a hub of tools that aim to help you improve your website as seen by Google. Last time, we focused on tools that optimized your site for use in Google Search, but Google Search Console has other powerful tools to explore. One such tool allows us to take a deeper look into how your page is being experienced by users. The first impressions of your site can be key to turning visitors into customers. Measuring how users are experiencing your pages can help you make your pages more attractive and friendly to both new and old users. Google measures website experience on a few factors, the most important aspect being Core Web Vitals.

Google’s Core Web Vitals

If Core Web Vitals sound like a familiar term, you may recall our past blog where we defined what Core Web Vitals are and some tools that we can use to measure them. Core Web Vitals are composed of three types of measurements that explore how fast your page is and feels.

Google’s Core Web Vitals.

Above are the three Core Web Vitals that Google focuses on. As defined in the photo, these vitals are measured by loading, interactivity, and visual stability. Let’s define these vitals by the questions they ask us:

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How fast does the largest piece of content on my site take to appear?
  • First Input Delay (FID): How long does it take for my site to respond to a click from a user?
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How stable is my site when loading?

Determining the status of these vitals on your site can be done by comparing them to the ideal metrics as defined by Google. For LCP, the ideal time it should take to load the largest element on your page is 2.5 second or less. For FID, a response from your page after user input should occur in 100 milliseconds or less. Finally, for CLS, defined by how often elements shift around while your page is loading, should be 0.1 or less.

Page Experience & Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console

The user experience of your website can be measured with a variety of online tools that can offer both broad and specific feedback. If you are looking for an overview of how your site is doing, Google Search Console can help!

On the home screen of your Google Search Console account, on the left-hand side, is a tab called “Experience.” Under that tab should be “Page Experience” and “Core Web Vitals.”

Page Experience Tab on Google Search Console.

Clicking the “Page Experience” tab offers you an overview of how well your site is doing and breaks down how your site is being ranked. In “Page experience signals”, we can see that Google is not only looking at Core Web Vitals, but also at how well your site adapts over to mobile. The security of your site is also considered. Let’s look at what things we can learn about the Core Web Vitals of our sites.

Core Web Vitals Tab on Google Search Console.

Clicking on “Core Web Vitals” will bring you to the screen above. This report shows us how well your site is doing over time, dividing its findings between Desktop experience and Mobile experience. The graph focuses on your site’s ranking. Green notes pages that are good in comparison to Google’s ideal metrics. Yellow are pages that could use some work and red are pages that may need immediate attention.

Report Page of Mobile Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console.

Clicking on “Reports” will bring you to a more detailed look at what is looked at and what needs work. In the example above, we can see that issues marked in yellow and red are tagged with the that vital is being judged. This allows us to identify which URLs need work and in what aspects, offering us both direction and validation. As you fix pages marked as problematic in Google Search Console, you can see your site improve as those pages go from being ranked “Poor” to “Good.”

Improving the Experience of my Website

Using tools like Google Search Console can offer avenues for improvement, but if you want further help with your site, BCSE is always here for you! Carrie’s upcoming course “The Converting Website” will also dive deeper into improving your site experience. Join the waitlist today to stay up to date about the course’s release!

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How Google Sees Your Business

Google is one of the most popular search engines in the world, helping users find the answers to all sorts of inquiries. For businesses, Google is a powerful tool that can lead customers to your website. However, how do you know if customers are reaching your site via Google? Are these customers the audience you are desiring? Is the content Google highlights relevant information about your company and products? One way to find the answers to these questions is by using Google Search Console.

What is Google Search Console?

Discussed in module one of Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website,” Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster) is a search engine optimization (SEO) tool that focuses specifically on how Google finds, interprets, and shares your site to users. Google Search Console helps visualize the activities that take place on your website, as well as offer ways to compare certain metrics to see where you can improve your site’s searchability, presentation, and reach on Google.

Using Google Search Console

One of the main features Google Search Console offers is Performance Reports. A Performance Report is a visual graph that keeps track of four main metrics:

  • Impressions – The number of times your site appeared in a Google search result.
  • Clicks – The number of times users clicked on your site via a Google search result.
  • Average Click Through Rate (CTR) – The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click.
  • Average Position – The average position of your site in Google search results.

These graphed metrics help give you a snapshot of how your site is doing in terms of searchability and site traffic. For example, impressions can help you figure out if the keywords that Google is associating with your business are resulting in relevant search results. Clicks can help establish how well your site summary attracts possible customers, and Average CTR and Average Position help illustrate how well your site is competing with other possible businesses customers are presented.

Performance reports are also defined by dimensions, which are specific attributes of your data. Attributes such as country, page, device, and many others are presented in a table below the metrics graph, identifying the “who” and “where” of your site traffic.

With Google Search Console, you can further analyze just how the collected data can help evaluate your site by using the built-in filtering tool. This tool can be used to pick and choose which metrics you want to compare on the performance report graph, and can be pushed further to relate to specific dimension data collected. For example, you can compare the Average CTR of devices such as desktops and phones, helping you define just how well your site is presented on different platforms and if that impacts user interaction. Other filters, such as time, can also be applied as well, allowing you to visualize your desired data during specific dates. This single tool amongst the many Google Search Console has to offer can quickly help point out aspects of your sites that can be further optimized for Google’s search engine, helping you attract more customers!

Getting started with Google Search Console

Google Search Console can vary in difficulty when it comes to getting started. One of the first steps required is to add a property to Google Search Console. This property can either be a Domain Prefix or a URL Prefix. Once you choose one, you will be required to verify that this property is indeed yours.

Here are the seven of ways you can verify a property:

  • DNS Record
  • HTML File Upload
  • HTML Tag
  • Google Analytics
  • Google Tag Manager Container Snippet
  • Google Sites
  • Blogger

One of the most important methods on this list is DNS Records, for it is the only way to verify a Domain Prefix. Below, we will dive into how you would go about getting started with Google Search Console via a Domain Prefix.

1. First, you will need to create a property with Google Search Console here, where you will arrive on the screen below.

2. On the screen, you will be asked to add a Domain Prefix or a URL Prefix. Add your Domain Prefix under the highlighted “Domain” box and click “Continue.”

3. Next you will be asked to choose your method of verification. Here instructions will vary per domain provider. Click the drop-down menu next to “Any DNS Provider” and see if you DNS provider is listed. If so, click your provider for provider specific instructions, where you will most likely be required to log into your domain for verification. If your provider isn’t listed, follow the instructions under “Any DNS provider.” Once you have completed the instructions, click “Verify.”

Note that depending on your provider, the verification process may not be instant. If you are not verified immediately, check again in a few hours.

Can I get Further Guidance?

Carrie’s upcoming course “The Converting Website” will dive into further detail about Google Search Console as well as other useful tools and techniques for your business. Join the waitlist today to stay up to date about the course’s release!

This entry was posted in Ecommerce, SEO on by .

The Power of Google Analytics 4

A mobile device with Google Analytics open on screen, with overlaid text 'The Power of Google Analytics!'

One of the most stressful aspects of maintaining a website is determining if your website is working for your business. The experiences and retention of your customers on your website can sometimes be hard to calculate, leaving you unsure of what is successful and what needs adjusted. On top of that, while there are many tools and methods to quantify the effectiveness of your website, sorting through them all and determining which one works best for you can be overwhelming as well as discouraging.

How do I make my website work for me?

In her upcoming course, “The Converting Website”, BCS Engineering founder and principal engineer Carrie Saunders aims to help businesses approach the challenge of creating and quantifying a successful website. This five-week course will explore the tools and tactics to convert visitors into customers, module one of the course diving into the services you can use to evaluate and test your website.

What is Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is one of the tools discussed in module one of Carrie’s upcoming course. GA4 is an analytics service that helps you track the traffic engagement of your platform across both your sites and apps . The improved service offers more granularity than its predecessor, Universal Analytics, by not only noting when a customer was on your site, but also collecting data about what a customer does while there. The advancement of this tool has led it to be pushed as the default Google Analytics service by July 2023, when Universal Analytics will be fully replaced by GA4. Thus, the switch to GA4 is strongly encouraged.

The highlight of GA4 is its variety of reports. Visuals of data concerning where customers are coming from and what pages draw their interest are detailed on the home page of GA4. Other reporting options such as real-time reports illustrate the impact of changes to the website, such as the addition of media or a new product, in real-time, offering transparent feedback about the successfulness of your adjustments. Furthermore,  life cycle reporting, a report detailing how visitors convert to customers, and what those customers do once they have converted, are also featured. Overall, GA4 offers valuable data concerning how your site acquires, engages, monetizes, and retains customers, and is a powerful tool that can be started today!

Switching to GA4

In a few simple steps, you can get started with GA4.

If you are new to Google Analytics, you will need to make a Google Analytics account, creating a profile and your first property. After filling out the form, you will already be on your way to using Google Analytics 4.

For those who have been using Google Analytics in the past via Universal Analytics, the setup is just as simple.

1. Once logged into your GA account, go the “Properties” column, and click “GA4 upgrade Assistant.”

2. From there you will be reminded that you are currently using Universal Analytics and asked to switch. Click “Get Started” to create a Google Analytics 4 Property.

3. A window will pop up explaining what will happen next. Click “Create Property”.

4. Your property will now be GA4 enabled.

An important thing to note is that whether you are new to GA4 or are switching to GA4, your property will fall into a default tag of gtag.js, which may not work with your type of platform. To adjust the tag for your GA4 property, complete the following:

1. Click the gear titled “admin” in the lower left-hand corner.

2. Next, make sure you are on the right property by clicking  the down arrow under the property column. Once on the right property. Click “Data Streams.”

3. Under Data streams, click the website you desire to work with.

4. This will take you to Web Stream Details. Under “add-new on-page tag”, expand “Global Site Tag (gtag.js)”.

Depending on the platform your website is on, follow the instruction you find below and find your platform specific instructions by clicking the highlighted “these instructions.” This will take you to a list of providers and will offer you further support per provider.

Can I Get Further Guidance?

Carrie’s upcoming course “The Converting Website” will dive into further detail about GA4 as well as other useful tools and techniques for your business. Join the waitlist today to stay up to date about the course’s release!

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Holistic / Natural SEO

Our modules and the way we structure websites lend towards natural SEO and helps your site rank better.

At BCSE, we have always had the philosophy that natural, or holistic, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the way to go. Our modules and the way we structure websites lend towards natural SEO and helps your site rank better.

What is holistic / natural SEO?

Holistic / Natural SEO is simply improving all aspects of your website with the end user in mind. When you provide a great user experience, you will naturally check quite a few SEO boxes. Some of the areas to focus on are:

  • Clean, easy to read website
  • Proper use of headings
  • Quality writing content
  • Having a secure site and using https always
  • Fast website

How does a clean website help SEO?

A clean website not only makes it easy for your readers to focus and stay engaged, but it also boosts search engine rankings when the search engines see readers lingering, or staying longer on your website. When you have clean and focused content readers won’t bounce out of your site so fast. A confusing and hard to read website will lose a potential customer very quickly, and search engines recognize this.

How does proper use of headings help SEO?

Search engines need to know what is important. Using headings not only helps search engines see what you are emphasizing on the website, but also helps your potential customers skim the page to see if the content is relevant to them. Search engines recognize that headings make it easier for the consumer to read as well. So it will be looking for properly placed headings.

How does quality of writing help SEO?

Very similar to the above points, if your text is hard to read and follow, users will leave quickly. The goal is to not confuse or frustrate readers. When you write well, and have your writing flow, it builds trust and confidence. When you build trust, confidence and have well thought-out content, your readers will stay engaged and stay on your website longer. Again search engines look at how long customers say on pages and the longer they stay, the higher that page will rank.

Why is having a secure website important to SEO?

In the past several years, search engines have recognized that websites secured with an SSL certificate, provide higher quality content. By having an SSL certificate, search engines know that you as a business owner care more about your customers than those who do not secure the customer’s data.

Search engines also keep track of what websites have been reported to have spyware or other malicious content. When you keep your site secure with any security updates your software needs, then you are further protecting your SEO rankings. Search engines are all about customer experience and security.

How does having a fast website help with SEO?

For several years, Google and other search engines have recognized that a quality website also means a fast website. Consumers get frustrated if a website takes too long to load and leave pretty quickly. Search engines punish websites that are too slow or not consistently fast. We recommend using several tools to test your site to get different perspectives:

I think I need help with SEO, now what?

At BCSE, we have always taken a natural and holistic approach to SEO. We work with you to help enable you to learn how to write and populate your content in a way that is SEO friendly. We also will help from a structure standpoint, make sure your site is constructed in the back-end to be naturally SEO friendly. Contact Us today to see if we are good fit for your project!

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