SEO is a very broad and often very technical (sometimes even scary!) topic. We all know it’s important, but not all of us have developed strategies to approach our SEO issues.
When dealing with SEO at a larger scale, at MemberBoat we recommend hiring a professional. You wouldn’t try to prepare your company’s annual tax return by yourself, right? You’d go to a professional tax agent. In the same way, a knowledgeable SEO professional can help take your website to the next level.
However, there are a number of technical aspects you can fine tune by yourself. Continuing with the analogy above, if you keep your books tidy and consistent, it’ll be much easier (and cheaper) to prepare your annual tax return.
While working with professional associations, we’ve noticed a lot of them make similar mistakes with SEO on their websites. So we invited Sid Lal, Managing Director of Bruce Clay Australia, to our recent Membership MarTech Talk series event to discuss the SEO mistakes typical for professional associations.
Here’s what we found:
Table of Contents
SEO Mistake #1: Large and not web-optimised images
Including images on your web pages can help increase your page views as they make your content easier to read and more engaging. However, if the images are large and not optimised for the internet, they can have the opposite effect by slowing down your website.
Why is it important to optimise images before you upload them to the website?
Large images significantly reduce the load speed of your website, and page speed is a critical factor in ranking your site on search engines. Not only does high speed provide a better user experience, but it helps you lower your website bounce rate, and directly impacts your conversions.
Let’s have a look at its impact on some of the world’s largest organisations:
- Firefox found that a 2.2 second improvement in page speed resulted in a 15% increase in conversions.
- BBC reported that they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load.
- Amazon calculated that if it takes a single, extra second for one of their pages to load, they will lose $1.6 billion in sales.
Ever wondered why Google only has 10 search results on their first page? They figured that if they increase the number of results from 10 to slightly more, it takes 4/10ths of a second longer, meaning they lose 8 million extra searches that they could’ve delivered hence a loss in advertising revenue.
This demonstrates how much Google values website speed, and why you, too, should take a look at the speed of your website pages.
So, are you convinced that it’s worth spending some time optimising your images?
3 Tips to optimise your images for SEO
Larger-sized images can increase load time and directly impact your bounce rate, so ensure you compress them before uploading them to your website.
When you upload images to your website, be sure to change the name and add keywords – it’ll boost your content’s visibility in Google images.
Adding “ALT text”, a short written description of an image that’s displayed in place of the image, is important to your website’s accessibility. Not only do they explain images that fail to load and strengthen your SEO, but they aid your non-visual readers.
Applying these simple methods to your website’s images can thoroughly improve your overall user experience and rankings.
SEO Mistake #2: Technical URL structure
Google’s mission, as stated on their company information page, is “to organise all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Correspondingly, your website’s mission is to ensure you give this information to Google or any other search engine in as organised a format as possible. This includes your links.
Often, association management software will, by default, set up not so SEO-friendly links, such as mywebsite.com/event-4381464 or mywebsite.com/node/4113.
As a user, there’s no information that these URLs can give you. And it’s no different for search engines like Google – how can they possibly know what your page is about?
How do you solve this?
Re-organise your URL structures to make them more meaningful, for example, mywebsite.com/webinar/nameofyourwebinar or mywebsite.com/reports/nameofyourreport.
This will help improve your click through rates as users can see what your site is about, and can also increase your rankings because Google will be able to understand this information a lot better.
SEO Mistake #3: Deleting Old Pages
About to delete a page? Think again.
Some association pages are only relevant for a period of time. For example, annual conferences or short projects. So it’s not uncommon for pages to get deleted after a project is completed. However, deleting a webpage is not a smart decision SEO-wise.
Firstly, deleting a page will leave it with a dreaded 404 – page not found error. This is an issue not only because it leads to a poor user experience, but it impacts the ranking of your website as Google’s web crawler and others will hit the error 404 page.
Secondly, old web pages, especially popular ones, are well familiar to search engines and have a good reputation. Deleting them is like removing a valuable asset because quite often, other third party websites are linking to one of your pages.
This means that your pages are getting what is called “link juice”, a term for the value passed from one page to another. So, by deleting that page, you’re essentially deleting all your link juice that helps boost your rankings.
What’s the solution?
- Create a constant link for your annual events and projects and use it year after year. You can archive your previous year page with different links in the drafts of your website.
- Before deleting a page, think: what would be the closest match to this page and create a redirection
For example, you may have a page for an event that is now over and you’re not planning to repeat. All you have to do is redirect the link to a similar event or to the general events page!
Don’t delete pages from your website unless it’s absolutely necessary. Instead, update and improve your existing pages to keep them current.
SEO Mistake #4: Meaningless content
According to findings from a One Click Customer article, across numerous large organisations, WordPress has 500 million new posts being created every year, Medium, a specialist blog platform, has 7.5 million, and Google has 500 hours of video being uploaded every single minute.
So, think about just how much content is coming online, and why your content piece would rank above all the others.
It’s your responsibility to think outside the box and create fantastic content for your association.
When uploading content, ask yourself:
- What is it about my content that is going to make it stand out?
- How do I make it more useful for my members?
- Is my content unique and from a different perspective?
- Can I add any images, infographics or videos?
SEO Mistake #5: Placing content on subdomains or third party websites
Another common mistake we’ve noticed amongst many associations is that their valuable content is placed on third party platforms. These include subdomains or, for example, placing your content on websites such as EventBrite, awards platforms, or landing pages created within third party software.
Having valuable information sitting on a subdomain or a third party website means you’re directing traffic away from your own website.
If you must use third party applications for organising events or managing a project, try to place as much content on your website as possible, and only use third party software for transactions or functionality like data collection.
SEO Mistake #6: Hiding valuable SEO content behind the paywall
We often see associations hiding their valuable content and reports behind their member’s login section. Although they may be trying to protect their content and create extra value for their members, at the same time, SEO value is being buried in this member-only area.
Here are some of the approaches to make sure your valuable content gets seen by search engines, while still preserving its exclusivity for your members:
Rather than hiding your entire article or content piece in a member library, show a section of it so that users (and search engines) can get a taste of what your information is about.
Creating a separate article about a content piece in the member library may not only help your SEO, but also potentially grow your membership.
Depending on what your content is about, you can selectively choose some parts to be accessible to everyone and others parts not to be.
Our overall message is that SEO isn’t as scary or technical as it looks or sounds.
We’ve covered some examples of the issues your association may be facing with your website, and that are worth thinking about or trying to fix. With these small, easy-to-implement steps, you can dramatically improve your SEO for your website.
The Membership Tech Talk is a series of thirty-minute association industry catch-ups to discuss trending and emerging marketing technologies that can improve your members’ digital experience.
To register for future Membership MarTech Talk events, visit https://memberboat.com.au/membership-martech-talk/
To watch the full SEO Membership MarTech Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJjJPDquZ3k
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