How do you know if your website is really high quality, we've got the website checklist.

And we're starting right now, if you want to transform your website into a customer or lead generation machine,

Our top tips, tactics and secrets to get there best. Let's dive in. Okay, so this post, we're going to be talking all about how to make sure your website is of the highest quality possible. Now, we want to do this for two reasons, the first being to really appeal to your customers, that's the most important thing, right, we want to make sure that we're giving them a great experience. So they stick around longer and are more likely to convert into paying customers. Now the other side of this is all about Google. So basically, we want Google to know that your site is of high quality as well. And generally speaking, the more you can make it work for your customers, to where people are engaging, sticking around longer consuming your content, Google is going to pick up on all those signals. And the good news is Google is very transparent about all this stuff. We know what it takes to make a really high-quality website that pleases both your visitors and the search engines.

Number one on our list is use plenty of images and videos. So according to Search Metrics, the top ranked pages in any given search have roughly seven images in them. And that's no accident. So as we know, images, keep users more engaged. And they also make concepts easier to understand. Because most people come into your site, roughly 80% of them are going to be scanning your content rather than reading it. And images. And videos just make everything easier to grasp. And of course, the more your visitors understand your content, the longer that they're going to stick around to consume more and more of it. And video is even better. You know, most people would rather watch a video than read about the same topic, all things being equal. And a good video will actually keep people on your site longer, because it takes a little bit of time to watch the video. And that's a really strong signal to Google, that people are coming to your site, and then finding exactly what they want on your site, which they will reward you for that. And images and videos are actually great SEO opportunities as well, you can optimize the titles and the tags to really go hand in hand with SEO you already have with the text on your page.

Okay, so the next thing on our checklist is deep, relevant content. Google is really moving toward understanding overall topics and context, rather than just keywords on a page. They really want to see that you're covering a topic in depth enough to make it really relevant and authoritative to, to searchers, and they're gonna reward that deeper content with higher rankings. What we would rather see you do than stuffing your pages with keywords, is find a bunch of closely related keywords that Google might expect to be on a page covering your topic. And these words are actually really easy to find, you don't have to come up with them on your own, you can go to LSI graph.com. Follow the link, you're going to type in the keyword phrase that you want to rank for. And it's going to give you a whole list of other relevant related keywords that Google would expect to see in a page covering that topic. Now, of course, use your judgment and only use the ones that make sense for your page. And that you can write about in a in a really natural, readable way. And just by having all this deep, relevant content, visitors are going to be really wowed by your level of expertise. And they're much more likely to stick around longer and convert into an actual customer.

Now our next item goes hand in hand with the deep content. And that is longer content. So most top-ranking sites in the search engines have over 900 words on those pages. And that's actually going up now, Google likes to reward pages that have somewhere around 2000 Plus words on a page, because it's really hard to go too in depth into a topic without talking at a certain length about it. Try to shoot for 2000 words on your most important pages.

Next up, we are going discuss easy readability. Huge mistake I see a lot of businesses make over and over again, is they write to impress, rather than to engage and inform and sometimes it's not done on purpose. Sometimes businesses just know so much about their specific niche that they assume everyone else is equally as knowledgeable about that and it ends up going over people's heads. Just use simpler words and use shorter sentences and paragraphs, and it really helps to think about it this way. Just write the way you speak. Write very conversationally, it's going to be much more engaging for the wasn't on the other side of the screen who was actually reading your site, and it's going to help you get a better readability score as well. You may not have even known that Google uses a readability score, but they do, they can actually tell how hard or easy your site is to read. And they typically reward sites that are easier to read. How do you know if your site is easy to read or not, you're basically going to use the Flesch reading ease formula to create your web text. Follow this link , just come to this website, and you can paste in your, your text, and it'll tell you what your score is. And the higher the score, the easier it is to read.

You're going to want to shoot for a score around 80 or above.

Okay, next up, we have scannable web formatting.  Around 79 to 80% of people coming to your site, are only going to scan the page, they're really not going to read it. You need to format your webpages with that in mind, it makes pages easier to digest, and the concepts easier to grasp, which is really going to make people stick around longer and consume more of your content, which makes it more likely that they're going to convert, and Google can actually see within their own way, what the formatting is like. And they reward sites that are formatted more for the web, then if there was just a big wall of text, which nobody really wants to read.

And of course, we've got a few tips for you here.

• You're going to want to use headlines and sub headlines to break up content,
• use really short sentences and short paragraphs,
• as well as lists either bullet lists or numbered lists, to really break things out,
• use visuals when appropriate,
• and also use ITALIC and BOLD to emphasize the most important points on the page.

Next, you're gonna want to show your expertise. There's actually a leak to Google guidelines report that says high quality pages and websites need enough expertise to be authoritative and trustworthy on their topic. We know it's important to Google. But it's also really easy to see why this would be important to readers and your potential customers. Think about it, people only really want to read articles and content that they deemed to be from an authoritative source. And they certainly want to work with experts. How do you show your expertise? Well, there's several ways, you can use case studies, when appropriate. And you can use examples to illustrate your points. That always helps. And you can even link to other posts of your own or external posts to really add extra credibility and authority to your posts or pages.

Next, we have social media shares. Now Google does say that social media shares are not a direct ranking factor. But by people sharing your content, you'll get more views and more engagement, which Google will reward. It's a little indirect, but it still will help your site to be looked at as quality and authoritative. And the result of that is going to be higher visibility in searches. Here's the good news. If you've done everything else that we've covered, to make sure your pages are high quality, the shares should come naturally. But you're definitely going to want to make it easy on people who want to share it by including embedded share buttons on each page or post that you want to have shared.

Next up, we have clever linking. So I don't know if you know this, but nine out of 10 pages that are in the top spots in Google searches have at least one internal link pointing to it. So let me explain that, for instance, look at the deep end site, you know, we have a few links within the content of our pages that are linked to other pages that we want to rank well, by linking to these pages using specific keywords.

We're basically telling Google, that these pages are relevant to these keywords. And the cool thing is, this might be the easiest box to check on this entire checklist, because it's 100% in your control. And you could go and implement it right now if you wanted to and start seeing the results pretty fast.

Start thinking about where on your website, it might make sense to add in these links, you probably don't even have to add any new text, it's probably just a matter of turning certain words into links on your site. For instance, if you have a blog post, within that post, you might find some text, you can link to a service page, for instance, the more you can make kind of a spiderweb of your website and link pages to one another, the more Google is going to reward those pages, you should also consider linking to a few outside pages.

Basically, find where it would make sense on certain pages to link to other authoritative web pages. And yes, you might lose a few visitors this way to following those links.

But at the end of the day, you're creating a better user experience. And that's always going to win out in the end.

Which of these tactics gets you excited? which of these tactics do you think you want to use on your own site?

Or have you used any of these on your own site. If you want us to build and optimize your site, contact us