Website Checklist: 8 Must-Haves for a High Quality Website

Key Takeaways

how do you know if your website is really high-quality I'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 I'll show you all my best tips tactics and secrets to get there fast let's dive in hey guys a West McDowell here for the deep end and if you have not subscribed yet just go ahead and click Subscribe and the little bell icon next to it so you never miss another video you need to succeed online okay so today 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 so we know what it takes to make a really high-quality website that pleases both your visitors and the search engines so number one on our list is use plenty of images and videos so according to search metrics did 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 they're gonna 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'll 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 the SEO you already have with the text on your page okay so the next thing in our checklist is deep relevant content so Google is really moving toward understanding overall topics and context rather than just keywords on a page so they really want to see that you're covering a topic in-depth enough to make it really relevant and authoritative to two searchers and they're gonna reward that deeper content with higher rankings so what I would rather see you do then 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 and I will leave that link in the description below you're just gonna go there you're gonna type in the keyword phrase that you want to rank for and it's gonna 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 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 2,000 plus words on a page because it's really hard to go to in-depth into a topic without talking at a certain length about it so try to shoot for 2,000 words on your most important pages okay so the next up I want to talk about easy readability so huge mistake I see a lot of businesses make over and over again is they right to impress rather than to engage in 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 so 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 right very conversationally it's going to be much more engaging for the person on the other side of the screen who's actually reading your site and it's gonna 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 so how do you know if your site is easy to read or not you're basically gonna use the Flesch reading ease formula to create your web text and I'm gonna put this link in the description below just come to this website 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 so you're gonna want to shoot for something around 80 or above okay next up we have scannable web formatting so I don't know if you knew this but around 79 80 percent of people coming to your site are only going to scan the page they're really not going to read it so you really need to format your web pages with that in mind you know 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 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 I've got a few tips for you here so basically you're gonna want to use headlines and sub headlines to break up content you're gonna want to use really short sentences and short paragraphs as well as lists either a bullet lists or numbered lists to really break things use visuals when appropriate and also use italics and bold to emphasize the most important points on the page okay so 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 so 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 so how do you show your expertise well there's several ways you know 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 an external posts to really add extra credibility and authority to your posts or pages ok so next we have social media shares know 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 so 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 so here's the good news if you've done everything else that we've covered to make sure your pages are high quality the share 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 ok next up we have clever linking so I don't know if you know this but 9 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 insight you know we have a few links within the content of our pages that a link 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 use 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 results pretty fast so 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 that you can link to a service page for instance the more you can make kind of a spider web 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 so basically find what 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 gonna win out in the end okay so that's what I've got to say now I want to hear what you have to say so 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 and seeing anything happen from it I want to know in the comments below and if you have any questions about any of this of course we'll leave that in the comments below as well and I will get to all of them okay so if you're not subscribed yet just go ahead and click the circle icon over here to subscribe to the channel and if you haven't accessed my free mini-course how to guarantee website ROI it's real easy just click the box over in this direction and you'll get free instant access all right guy is a West McDowell here for the deep end and I'll see you in the next video