Your website should bring value to your users

The title seems obvious, but is often overlooked. We can get focused on other things that are indeed important, like speed, security and SEO, but at the end of the day it’s all about what kind of value your site brings to your users.

Headline, headlines, text headline, headline

The common issue we see is sites that focus on SEO to the point where the content on their site is a mess of repetitive words (like the headline above). It may help you rank a bit better in Google, but people will immediately leave when they come across text like that.

Taking it further, there was recently a thread on Reddit that dug into reasons that a particular site might not be ranking well. The site was related to Bitcoin, and Google’s Gary Illyes offered the following advice:

Ask yourself why would anyone go to this site instead of the thousands of others to read about Bitcoin? … Once you can see that the pages can be rendered just fine by search engines, this is your next thing to figure out.

This isn’t true in every case; sometimes you do need to focus on rendering, speed and other items. If those are a mess, it’s a problem. Once you reach a certain point, though, it becomes a case of diminishing returns. Instead of trying to make your site load 2% faster, spend some time producing great content that your users will love.

Originally published at https://www.mickmel.com on April 20, 2021.