Opace would like to wish all of our customers a Happy New Year and many thanks for your business in 2015! Our last post provided 25 essential SEO and online marketing tools to consider for your business in 2016. In this article the focus is on our top four web design and SEO improvements that you can make during 2016 to get ahead of the competition.

Some web design and SEO ideas from Opace

1. An SEO audit

New Year is a great time for planning and seeking improvement. Why not resolve to improve your site’s SEO with an Opace SEO audit?

We’ll tick all the boxes when completing your SEO audit

An audit will be invaluable in increasing the natural ranking of your website; here are some of the areas covered in every audit:

•  User experience and responsive design check
• Page speed check
• Backlinks overview check (a more detailed backlink audit is available separately)
• Content strategy (duplicated content, regularity of content, etc.)
• Effective metadata use (H1/H2 and Titles usage)
• Sitemaps (Use of HTML and XML sitemaps)
• Valid HTML check
• Broken links analysis

2. A content refresh

Websites are of little value without their content. The information contained on a website is at the very heart of what the customer will see. Over recent years Google have changed their algorithm to prioritise content and elevate sites in the rankings which provide content which is high-quality, original and well-optimised. Typical issues that we’ve found business owners suffer from include:

• Grammatical errors or punctuation/spelling mistakes due to input from different writers or staff
• The content is too brief and needs to be expanded upon
• The content was written by a “subject matter expert” but needs to be written up properly by an English “Wordsmith”
• Text was “borrowed” and therefore duplication occurs across the website or even worse the content was plagiarised from other sites (either of which are likely to cause a Google Penalty)
• The content needs optimising for SEO:
  • Under-optimised – Content could be under-optimised. Natural keywords are not included at all and the content doesn’t cover the topics is should
  • Over-optimised – Content could be over-optimised. This causes excessive keyword density, awkward to read English and a probable Google penalty
• Changes to content are infrequent and the resource isn’t available to keep it up-to-date
• The content is simply inadequate, a content audit is needed to identify gaps in content and for the content to be subsequently produced

Do get in touch with us here at Opace if you believe your website is in need of a content refresh.

3. Infographic design and marketing

You’ll have heard of the expression “A picture paints a thousand words” well this is at the heart of an infographic. With an infographic, the subject/data/stats are researched and then a design brief is created in words, which is then expertly translated into a stunning visual design. Infographics can be any shape, but are most usually columnar long vertical format. Infographics are valuable from an SEO and content marketing perspective and are also appreciated by customers who will appreciate the use of imagery to convey a message. To find out more about our services, visit the following three pages:

• Infographic Design
• Infographic SEO
• Infographic Marketing

This section just wouldn’t be complete without featuring an infographic, so here’s a snippet from one we produce for Baker Goodchild:

4. A stunning new website design

Perhaps your current web design is tired or maintenance is difficult and a Content Management System (CMS) is needed? If so, Opace can help with a band spanking new website design, a great way to start the New Year? Opace work with cutting-edge open source content management solutions such as WordPress, Joomla and for eCommerce sites we specialise in Magento. Web design projects take significant amounts of planning, design and implementation, Opace can help you with all aspects of a web design project to ensure it’s a success.

2010 to 2015 transition of the Acorns website.

So why not get the New Year off to a great start and invest in some new web design and SEO strategies, guaranteed to deliver a great ROI for your business!

Image Credit: Leneen Brophy