You see a 50% decline in mobile users’ session duration, page visits, and increased bounce rates compared to desktop users. What happened? Well, the thing is, mobile optimization is a key aspect of overall website and blog optimization, and if you neglect it for long enough, you might just lose half of your users.

Let’s check the five best ways to fix that as quickly as possible.

1. Responsive Design Is a Must

Employing a responsive design ensures that your website works smoothly and looks nice across all platforms, including mobile ones and even tablets. This makes it simple for your mobile audience to read and navigate your site and read your content, since the design should instantly change to match the screen size of the device.

While you are creating content, you should keep in mind that, according to Oberlo, over 52% of worldwide internet users are on mobile devices, and just 47% come from desktops.

That means every single paragraph you write should fit on half a mobile screen. If it doesn’t, you are giving your mobile users a bad experience of reading walls of text.

2. How to Optimize Your Website for Mobile Search

Mobile-friendly design, mobile-focused keyword research, and on-page optimization tactics such as optimizing titles, headings, and meta descriptions all count as website and blog optimization and are easy changes for you to rank better in mobile searches.

Believe it or not, keyword optimization can vary per device. Readability, visibility, and usability of the mobile interface of your website on mobile are way more important for Google than people usually think.

That’s why you must ensure that your typefaces and font sizes are mobile-friendly by using those that are simple to read on a phone or other portable device. Be away from using tiny or elaborate typefaces that could be challenging to read on smaller displays.

For body content, choose a sans-serif font with a minimum font size of 16 pixels. Sans-serif fonts are simpler to read on smaller screens.

3. Optimize Media and Images for Mobile

Optimize your photos and media. Oversized images and media files might make it difficult for mobile viewers to access your blog. Convert everything to a .webp format and turn your icons to svgs. Compress photos and media assets to minimize their size without losing quality in order to optimize your content for mobile devices.

You can use this free online tool to convert your images to webp for a few seconds per image. This will hasten the loading of your blog on mobile devices. And that’s a big deal.

4. Simplify Everything for Mobile

Simplify the whole navigation of your website so your audience can stick around for longer. It’s a key feature of your non-desktop design, particularly for mobile readers. Use a simple, straightforward menu that is simple to access and browse on a mobile device to streamline your navigation.

To make it easier for people to find what they’re searching for, utilize dropdown menus, icons, and labels, and don’t add any useless sidebars or sections that have no function.

5. Use a CDN and Optimize Speed

Improve the speed at which your blog loads for mobile readers since a slow-loading site might result in high bounce rates and people never really coming back ever again.

Reduce HTTP requests, improve scripts and code, and utilize a content delivery network (CDN) to provide visitors’ material from the nearest server to increase the speed at which your blog loads. To hasten the loading of your site, you may also employ caching plugins.

CDN is amazing. It will not only allow you to instantly replace images on your website by replacing the images directly in the directory and overlapping the link, but it gives you full control of your website. There are practically no big websites around the world left that don’t use CDN.

The main reason is that it relies on several servers around the world and serves the closest for each user, which greatly optimizes website load-time, especially when loading heavy resources like images, graphs, or videos. While this is not a part of SEO blog post optimization, it is something to have in mind if your general website is growing or you plan to serve millions of users.

Never Miss an Opportunity

Having a successful website but not optimizing it for mobile is like having a product everyone wants but selling it only to men or only to women. Don’t cut the wings of your website by limiting its usability to desktop users only.

Make the leap and invest in mobile optimization. It’s definitely worth the time and effort. Resources are best spent when there’s a steady cash flow coming from your website. Have you done everything you can in terms of Ad optimization, subscriptions, and Adblock recovery? If not, make sure to check Publir’s solutions that solve all of that and more in a matter of minutes. 

The post 5 Best Ways for Mobile Optimization of Your Website first appeared on Publir.

Or good? Since if you’ve reached this far without metrics, imagine how much you will improve your website after you learn what we’re about to tell you. About 55% of websites use Google Analytics which means at least half of you need to start.

In order to improve the functionality of your blog website, you need to keep an eye on a number of key Google Analytics blog indicators. Here are some of the most crucial parameters to take into account:

What Are the Best Ways to Define Key Metrics?

Typically, in a perfect world, you want a visitor to land on your website to stay there forever, keep reading from article to article and come back the next day. Of course, this is hard to do on the best day, but there are more than a few metrics that tell us how close we are to achieving it.

• Sessions: This is the total number of visits made by users to your website. This measure provides you with an overall picture of the traffic to your website and may be used to spot patterns over time. There are several factors such as backlinks, guest posts, SEO, or paid promotion that can affect this number. It is extremely important to know what is the main driver of your traffic at all times.
• Pageviews: The number of pages that people have visited. You may use this indicator to determine which pages are the most popular and which would benefit from improvement. And if this number is low, it means your content is probably not suggesting relevant content in the appropriate places. You should experiment with that through A/B testing. 
• Bounce rate: The proportion of visitors to your website that only stay for one page. If consumers aren’t finding what they’re searching for, a high bounce rate may be a sign that your material has to be more relevant and high-quality.
• Time on site: This is the length of time visitors stay on your website on average. You may use this indicator to determine how engaged your audience is and where your content needs to be improved to boost engagement. This is extremely useful if you are writing blog posts. You can compare each topic title by click-through rates and how relevant the content inside is by seeing how much time people spend on the specific page.
• Exit rate: This is the proportion of visitors to your website that click away after seeing a given page. This measure can assist you in locating pages that may be driving visitors away from your website.
• Acquisition channels: These are the avenues, such as natural search, social media, or direct traffic, by which consumers reach your website. You may use this indicator to choose where to concentrate your marketing efforts in order to increase website traffic.

How to Choose the Right Analytics Tools?

Undoubtedly the most popular and free tool you can use is Google Analytics. Make sure you get familiar with GA4 since it becomes the new standard on July 1st, 2023. Using Google Analytics for blog traffic provides thorough information on user behavior, website analysis, and channels of acquisition. 

It includes a variety of reporting options and data visualization tools, as well as integration with a number of website platforms. You can do pretty much anything with it. And it’s free.

The second most popular option is Adobe Analytics which is a complete analytics product with strong reporting and data visualization capabilities, as well as cutting-edge technologies like machine learning and predictive analytics. Large, enterprise-level websites with intricate analytics requirements are best suited for it.

Another option is a real-time analytics platform called Clicky offers comprehensive information on website traffic, visitor activity, and engagement. It has a simple user interface, customizable dashboards, and tools like split testing and heat maps.

If you are running a straightforward content-oriented website, a simple google analytics blog setup is all you will ever need.

What Are the Best Metrics for Improving User Experience and Engagement?

Aside from all the metrics we mentioned at the beginning of the article, load speed and mobile friendliness are often neglected by blog owners and content-oriented website managers. Make sure you test every single way a user can visit and view your website. Check the amount of traffic you are getting from mobile users, Safari, and even tablets.

If you are losing users because you’ve forgotten to optimize something, your good intentions, and perfectly written content goes to the dumpster.

Get Started Right Away

Optimizing your website is an ongoing process. You don’t need to wait a couple of years for it to be “fully optimized,” and to be fair, there’s no such thing. The earlier you monetize your website, the more monetary resources you’ll have to spare for further optimization. Luckily, Publir offers a wide variety of solutions, from Adblock recovery to Ad Optimization and enabling paid subscriptions on your website.

The post How to Measure and Optimize Your Blog’s Performance With Google Analytics first appeared on Publir.

How to fix the Largest Contentful Paint issue?

Sometimes, when you go to a website, instead of seeing a well-designed homepage, you may get nothing but a blank screen. This can occur as a result of problems with the largest contentful paint element. Simply put, this indicates that if the website’s largest element isn’t entirely loaded, visitors will see nothing but a blank page. This not only degrades the user experience on your website but can also cause visitors to leave right away.

Slower server response times, render-blocking JavaScript and CSS, slower resource load times, and client-side rendering can all contribute to poor largest contentful paint. If your site’s JavaScript and CSS are render-blocking resources, it might result in a poor largest contentful paint.

There are certain steps to fix the largest contentful paint element issues:

• Server response times should be reduced

The most common cause of resources not loading quickly on websites is your hosting plan. A shared hosting package will not provide lightning-fast server response times for most online shops. A sluggish host server makes it impossible to have a fast, responsive website. Aside from hosting, improving your server to handle traffic spikes is a smart approach to minimize LCP element problems. The usage of third-party plugins and technologies might potentially slow down the server response time. It increases the number of resources your site needs to fully load web pages by adding to your code. One of the greatest strategies to keep your LCP scores low is to enable page caching on your website.

• Optimize your images to load quickly

To load any image rapidly without generating any LCP difficulties, make sure it is optimized. Images can be compressed to load faster for all sorts of visitors and internet connections. Individual demands and business objectives must be considered while determining the appropriate compressional ratio. Furthermore, when it comes to images, most website owners make the error of employing a single large image for all screen sizes. Large photos must be optimized so that no additional resources are consumed. After giving several image sizes of the same picture, let the browser determine which image size to use.

• CSS and Javascript components should be optimized

All critical CSS and JavaScript files must be rendered before your browser can load your webpage. If CSS and JavaScript files are not optimized inside your code, this will slow down page load times and result in a low LCP score. Minifying and compressing code is one of the greatest techniques to eliminate superfluous “junk” code from your website in order to minimize file size and enhance page loading rates. Another excellent technique to improve response times and page speed is to remove all non-essential CSS and only use important CSS resources. Once you’ve identified the key CSS resources above the fold, you may experiment with eliminating or decreasing any irrelevant CSS from the code.

• High-priority materials should be preloaded

One thing that can help you speed up page load times and decrease your website’s LCP score is pre-loading important resources. You may preload above-the-fold photos, videos, important CSS, and fonts on your website so that they can be utilized whenever they’re needed without causing a delay later. Reducing the file size of text files like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript will enhance your website’s LCP score. As text files are transmitted between the servers and the browser, it also improves loading times.

Why is LCP important for SEO?

Site speed is generally recognized as a ranking factor in the SEO market, but there are a number of reasons for this, and hence a variety of reasons why LCP will have an impact on SEO. We’ll explore five reasons why a decent LCP is vital for SEO and increasing the visibility of your websites to your target audience.

1. It is a measure created by Google

There are other search engines than Google, but because it is one of the most widely used, it is generally the one that businesses aim for first. Furthermore, when it comes to new features and algorithms for SEO, many other search engines like to follow Google’s lead, so it’s always a good idea to listen to the experts.

2. Rankings are influenced by site speed

The speed of a website is an essential aspect of its overall performance, and it is one of the signals that a search engine’s algorithm considers when ranking sites. Bounce rates are greater for sites that take longer to load. Many users will exit a website after three seconds if it has not loaded. Higher bounce rates might lead to lower conversion rates, which can have a detrimental influence on your SERP visibility.

3. Crawling is hampered by slow loading

You may gain a better knowledge of the load time of your web pages by using LCP reporting. This might reveal any areas that need to be improved in order to lower your LCP. This is important since poor page speeds restrict the number of pages a search engine can crawl at once, affecting your indexation. This will have a direct impact on how highly your site ranks in SERPs.

4. User experience is a key SEO ranking element

Page speed is crucial to visitors since it affects their experience on your site. Google has algorithms in place that seek to rank your web pages based on how enjoyable they are. It is an essential part of their algorithm to look at how delightful it is for people to browse your website. After all, they don’t want slow-loading, difficult-to-navigate web pages to appear at the top of their search results.

5. Visitors value content.

The LCP measure accomplishes something that no other metric does: it prioritizes content experience over all other aspects of user experience. Presenting relevant material that is valuable to the visitor has always been a big aspect of SEO and ranking high. This increases your domain authority and convinces the search engine that you’re a useful and reliable source that deserves to rank higher in the SERPs.

What is a good LCP score?

LCP evaluates rendering time, therefore the lower your score, the better, because your users will view the important material sooner. The 75th percentile of page loads, divided across mobile and desktop devices, is an excellent benchmark to measure to verify you’re reaching this objective for the majority of your consumers.

For a good score, LCP should be less than or equal to 2.5 seconds. In this situation, the page will obtain a green score and will pass the test. If your LCP is between 2.5 and 4.0 seconds, you’ll receive an orange grade since your score “needs improvement.” Assume the LCP is longer than 4 seconds. The score is then marked as “bad,” and you must rectify it as soon as possible.

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Final thoughts

Largest contentful paint is a metric that shows how well your website is performing overall. It is the most significant measure for determining your website’s page speed and response time. You may strive for a lower LCP score by going through the many methods we outlined to solve the most contentious paint element issues. 

However, if you fail to monitor LCP and solve issues, it is going to be a major blunder that will harm not only the usability of your site but also your ability to attract consumers in the first place. Moreover, if you will implement the techniques discussed in this post, it will surely increase your LCP scores, enhance user experience, and assist you in meeting your conversion targets.

The post Largest Contentful Paint: A Helpful Metric for Your Website first appeared on Publir.

Content and messaging are the backbone of any business, and without a constant supply of engaging and interesting content to the audience, prospective customers don’t know what a company stands for or what the company can do for them–which means the prospect won’t buy.. 

Evolution of Content Marketing – What has evolved?

With the advent of digital marketing in the past few decades, it might seem that it has overruled the content marketing domain; but believe it or not, content marketing is still a game-changer. And the demand for more versatile and engaging content has definitely risen. To cater to these demands, both content and content marketing has evolved significantly. 

How has Content Marketing changed over the years?

Now, to understand the evolution of content marketing, let’s understand how things have changed over the years. 

Going Digital – A Leap Of Faith 

Content in the earlier times was sold in the form of booklets, pamphlets, magazines, comics, and banners. Who isn’t aware of the popular Michelin Guide of the 1990s that made the brand a popular critic in the domain of eateries or the first G.I. Joe Comic Book of Hasbro and Marvel? Well, most of the brands during those days advertised their products in the form of magazines and print publications. But as the internet took over, marketing and content strategies have evolved to digital models.  This shift allows us to research and evaluate almost every product with just a few clicks and it has since then changed our lives forever.

Introduction of Google’s Game Changer Strategy – The ZMOT

Google conducted its highly popular landmark study in 2011 which changed the game of content and content marketing. This study is known as the Zero Moment Of Truth, or ZMOT, a revelation and mindfulness stage in a purchasing cycle where a buyer explores an item prior to purchasing it. The study gives an extraordinary perspective of content marketing’s evolution. In short, it infers that products and organizations are being discussed by consumers well past the organization’s own marketing efforts. And with savvy marketing strategies, an organization can help to shape those discussions–even if the organization isn’t the one starting or leading it. 

The study also highlighted the need for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and keywords, a prerequisite to bolstering a company’s online presence. All this led to the creation of more relatable and informative content by brands which proved to be extremely useful for the buyers.

The Rise Of Social Media

The credit of the ‘actual’ evolution of content and content marketing can be given to the rise of social media. Since social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter rose to fame, the demand for more resourceful, relatable, and creative content resulted in the production of videos, long-form content, podcasts, and blogs. It’s become incredibly easy for businesses and individuals to reach and influence people across the globe. 

The Need Of Video Content

By 2017, over 50% of consumers preferred to see a video over reading the same information in order to evaluate a product before buying it. Videos are highly engaging and they seem to be more intuitive than blogs or written posts, plus they’re more personal and showcase the business’s personality more than written content. 

What is the future of Content Marketing?

The future of content marketing is all the more promising and engaging. For their audience to have a more fruitful experience than they have now, brands need to look out for these trends, and include them in their content strategy. 

Video Content Is The Next Big Thing

Video content continues to grow and gain momentum, and they have become extremely popular now both short and long format. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and YouTube are good choices for video content, depending on the type of business. Live video is especially popular, though some recorded content may be easier to create and publish regularly.

Conversational Marketing Is Here To Stay

Advertisers understand that they can convert their customers​ quickly via conversational marketing. This involves creating a conversation around the topic, asking a question, inviting participation from the live or replay audience, etc. Marketers can also invite a conversation via static social media posts, in messenger apps, or in email marketing. Consumers want to be able to offer their opinions; conversational marketing is the way to allow that. 

Takeaway

While content marketing has changed drastically over the past 15 years or so, it will only keep evolving with time. Change is inevitable, and there will always be room for more upcoming trends and strategies that we will have to embrace in the future as dearly as we embraced the past.

As brands continue to evolve their content marketing, the main focus should always be their target audience and the messaging they want to convey. This way advertisers and brand owners could make custom content strategies, and ensure they reach their full potential while reaching out to their audience. To read more informative blogs, visit Publir today!

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