Where you show up in Google search results is determined by an algorithm that evaluates many characteristics of your website. Those characteristics, or ranking factors — both positive and negative — affect how visible you will be in search results.
Google’s ranking algorithm is reported to contain more than 200 SEO ranking factors, each with its own weight or level of importance.
Nobody knows all of the Google ranking factors, but experience gives us a really good sense of which are the most important.
Categories of Google ranking factors
There are three groups of ranking factors that are important to understand.
Technical ranking factors tend to be mostly managed by your web designer. They have to do with your website’s level of performance and what I refer to as Google-friendliness. These are typically site-wide factors rather than factors relating to individual pages on your site.
On-page ranking factors are typically controlled by you and relate directly to the content of your web pages and keyword optimization.
Off-page ranking factors are things you have somewhat less control over because they’re not on your website. These typically relate to your authority or importance on the web, based largely on backlinks.
Here is what I considered to be the top 10 positive Google ranking factors today. This list isn’t in any kind of priority order for a couple of reasons. First, it would be pretentious to claim that I know which of these factors are more important than which others. Secondly, good SEO is a function of many small techniques that support each other. No one of them is critically essential to good rankings — it’s the sum total of all of them that matters.
Mobile phones now account for more than half of all searches done. As a result, it’s essential that your website be mobile-friendly. I typically recommend ensuring your website is “responsive” which means that its display varies depending upon the device connecting to your site. That ensures that the same information is available regardless of the platform your visitor may be using.
2) Security (SSL and HTTPS)
Whether or not your website is secure is a ranking factor at Google. Beyond that, many browsers will show a “Not Secure” warning in the address bar when someone arrives on your website. Some website plug-ins actually display a warning page instead of the page on your site, encouraging people not to visit your site. Many people mistake the “not secure” warning as meeting your website is dangerous or may load viruses on your computer. The result is a certain portion of the people trying to visit your site abandoning it, costing you business.
To be secure you need to arrange to have an SSL certificate and your URL needs to begin with HTTPS instead of the insecure HTTP.
High-quality content is essential. It has a big effect on whether people stay to read it or bounce away (which Google sees as a negative ranking factor. Readability is a critical part of quality content. Another is customer focus; it’s important to focus on what’s in it for your reader/customer. That means focusing on benefits to the customer rather than features of your product or service.
Keyword relevance is also essential here. Your page has to show search engines that it’s all about your target keywords. That means having your keywords and related words and phrases in your content enough to make sure Google easily understands what your page is all about. But avoid keyword stuffing as that detracts from the quality of your content.
5) Headings and meta tags
Having keywords in headings and sub-headings gives them some extra weight with search engines and helps readers navigate your content efficiently. For that to happen, they need to be coded within heading tags to search engines can tell they’re headings.
While meta tags are not visible on the page, two items in the HTML code of your page are very important: the page title and the description tag. The page title isn’t a heading on your page, but it acts as the headline for your listing in all search engines. So it’s a critical place to include your keywords. Google says keywords in your meta description tag don’t influence your ranking, but since this description often ends up in your search listings it has a direct impact on how likely a searcher is to click on your listing.
6) Image keyword optimization
Every image on your page provides two or three places to put your keyword phrases in front of the search engines without keyword stuffing your text content.
The image filename is most obvious. An image filename of img183572x6.jpg tells Google nothing. But one that’s got a keyword in it (like nj-real-estate-lawyer.jpg) can really help.
Alternate text is text describing the image for visually impaired visitors who have their computers read the page out loud. It’s a great place to show your keywords to Google.
And if an image acts as a clickable link to someplace else, a title attribute generates a little text box that pops up when the user hovers their mouse over the image. It’s meant to tell the user what’s at the other end of the link if they click it, and is another place you may be able to use a keyword.
7) URL structure
Your URL structure helps you in three ways.
It improves the user experience of your listings in Google:
Links can sometimes serve as their own clickable text of a link.
Here’s an example from Moz:
8) Schema code
Schema markup is a common short term for structured data, named after Schema.org, the website for structured data markup. It’s sometimes called structured data markup and it tells the search engines exactly what kind of information is on your website. It’s totally in the HTML code behind your website and doesn’t affect what visitors see on your site. If you’re a local service area business, it can be especially helpful to identify your location and service area for local searches.
You can easily check out your own schema code in this schema code validator. If it shows you don’t have schema code, it’s time to fix that.
Page and Domain Authority strongly impact your rankings. These are metrics developed by the folks at Moz that attempt to predict how well a given website will show up in search results. It’s based largely on the number and quality of other websites that link to you and is designed to correlate with Google’s internal PageRank scoring.
10) Local prominence
Prominence refers to how widely across the web you’re listed with a correct and consistent NAP (name, address, phone). It’s particularly important for small businesses to show up in local search results and in the Google Local 3-Pack. These listings are often called citations and citation management deserves ongoing attention from small local businesses. But don’t be misled by many of the common misconceptions about citations that are floating around.
Feel free to use our free tool to check on several dozen top citation sources to see how your own prominence looks.
Bottom Line
None of these are absolutely essential. But none of them can be ignored either. Where you rank is the result of all of these things (and more). Just do your best with as many of these as you can.
How’s your experience been with these issues? What other factors do you think deserve to be included? Start a discussion below.
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Visiting a website with slow loading times is frustrating. Sure, a page with flashy graphics, slick animations, and artsy design features might look nice, but if it’s functionally limited then what’s the point?
One of the hallmarks of a great web developer is the ability to hit that sweet spot between attractive layout design and adequate load speed optimization. After all, it’s a crucial component if you’re to keep potential customers on your webpage.
That said, being a web developer requires skills that most of us don’t possess, so it’s understandable for a website owner to struggle. If you’re happy with how your website looks, it may well be falling short of performance expectations — and that’s troubling given that nearly half of us won’t wait longer than 3 seconds for a shopping site to load up.
That’s just one of the big reasons why it’s vital for your site to load quickly. Below, we’ll delve more deeply into why having a speedy site can’t be anything less than a priority. Here we go.
First Impressions Are Crucial
As noted, our attention spans are minuscule when it comes to how long we’re willing to wait for a page to load. This fact becomes even more pertinent when you consider that your business has only 7 seconds to make a positive first impression. What are you going to do with that time? What does your website look like within the first few seconds?
When you’re setting up your first website, it’s tempting to load it up with high-res images and stack the UI with special effects and animations. After all, you want it to look slick and professional — but those additions come at a cost, holding back the performance and potentially turning your site into a sluggish mess. The foundation needs to be usability achieved through a combination of fast load speed and functional UI design.
Regardless of your site’s primary purpose (be it to sell, inform, or entertain), your audience will lose interest fast if your load times don’t match their expectations. And when that interest fades, it won’t come back. It’ll be replaced by interest in rival sites that meet or exceed those expectations. Can you really afford to let that happen?
You must focus on making good first impressions, then — and to do this, you need to think about all platforms through which your visitors may view your site. Being mobile-responsive hasn’t been optional for a long time. Use Google’s free mobile-friendly test to ensure you’re catering to mobile visitors, and generally make an effort to provide strong functionality regardless of how people choose to interact with your site.
If you can do this, your hard-earned traffic won’t go to waste. Leads will be impressed by your website and act upon that by sticking around and becoming positively inclined towards your brand. Start as you mean to go on.
Speed Affects Your Search Rankings
Whether you’re an SEO whizz-kid or you’re less familiar with how search engines dictate rankings (you can learn more here, so take a look), upping your page speed is a simple and effective way to get your website seen more frequently. Improving performance will help your page appear higher up in Google’s results pages (other search engines are available, though perhaps not consequential).
Why? For starters, Google actively penalizes any sites with slow load times because they provide a terrible page experience for users. Visitors simply don’t want to wait around, so you can expect your page to appear further down the results page if your website is a little sluggish. And if someone does stick around, they’ll be less likely to convert (more on this soon).
How can you fix this, then? One of the best ways to give your site a quick boost is to take a look at your hosting provider. If it’s been a while since you set up your page, it may be worth investing in an upgrade.
Many hosts have blisteringly fast response times, but we’d recommend choosing a host based on their individual features, as many providers specialize in different areas, making them more suited to different niches. For instance, if you’re running on WordPress, Cloudways can pair a free migration with a baked-in Cloudflare integration to deliver strong and secure performance throughout the world.
If you’re not looking for the fastest WordPress hosting, or even the most secure, you can find something less complicated. It’s important to do the research to find something that suits your exact needs. PC Magazine has a good roundup of current options that can give you an idea of the pros and cons of each provider, helping you make the right choice for your eCommerce site. However, it’s important to do your research! Use a comparison site to weigh-up the pros and cons of each provider to ensure you make the right choice.
Faster Load Speed Means Higher Conversion Rates
Run an eCommerce store? Ensuring your website loads quickly should be one of your highest priorities. A study from Google found that a speed increase of just 0.1 seconds can boost the number of shoppers adding items to their baskets by more than 9%. Staggeringly, a 100-millisecond delay can result in a 7% decrease in conversions. Take a look at these conversion rates based on load times sourced from recent research:
Page Load Time (in seconds)
Conversion Rate
2.4
1.9%
3.3
1.5%
4.2
1%
5.7+
0.6%
Of course, this is less of an issue if you’re not trying to sell anything. Given the stats though, we reckon that’s unlikely — online retail sales are set to grow 50% in the next 4 years, with the current market value of the industry recorded at $4.9 trillion. And if you’re not planning to ever sell any products through your site, you’ll still want to monetize it in some way to take advantage of the traffic. Doing otherwise is leaving money on the table.
In addition to following the aforementioned steps, you should keep an eye on your image sizes. Using image compression plugins (or sites such as TinyPNG or Squoosh) can help you avoid using more space than you need to, cutting back your required server resources and giving your website visitors better experiences.
If you’re using WordPress, a free plugin like W3 Total Cache can also help you to cache your web pages. This is one of the best ways to speed up your website, as caching stores copies of all the bulky files on your site. This reduces the load on the host’s servers when a user loads your page, ensuring that load times are minimal. [Editor’s note: another one we like is WP Rocket.]
Website load speed matters — hopefully we’ve been able to convince you of that! Find that balance between great design and optimized content, and we’re sure you’ll have no trouble keeping the attention of any visitors that come your way.
About the Author
Rodney Laws is an ecommerce expert with over a decade of experience in building online businesses. Check out his reviews on EcommercePlatforms.io and you’ll find practical tips that you can use to build the best online store for your business. Connect with him on Twitter @EcomPlatformsio.
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There’s a new algorithm change at Google scheduled for next May, and it promises to be a big one. Google calls it the Page Experience factor and we introduced it in this blog a few months ago. Much of what’s involved in page experience used to be referred to as user experience, or UX.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about page experience is that not only will it help you to rank better in search results, but it will also help retain visitors on your site. A good page experience encourages visitors to read more on your site and visit more pages. And that’s highly correlated with conversions of those visitors to paying customers.
Let’s look at seven specific things you can do to make sure you have a healthy page experience and can demonstrate that to Google.
1 — Mobile Friendly
More than half of all website visits are happening on cell phones. As a result, Google’s index of website content is looking only at mobile friendly content. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, it’s awkward to use on a phone and people are likely to abandon you and look up a competitor instead. For that reason and others, Google is reluctant to rank highly websites that aren’t mobile friendly. In general, I recommend a responsive site rather than having a separate site for mobile users that’s at all different from your desktop version.
2 — Core Web Vitals
One of the most important page experience factors is your page download experience, and core web vitals grade you on that. Google scores this based on three things:
Loading
How quickly the page displays in your browser or on a phone — in technical terms, “largest contentful paint” (LCP), or how long it takes before you have a full screen displayed. If your page displays a temporary splash screen or a loading indicator, that doesn’t count. This measures how long it takes before you have a meaningful screen. To be acceptable, this should be no more than 2.5 seconds.
Interactivity
First input delay (FID) measures how long it takes before it’s interactive (meaning responsive to your actions on the page). A page is not always usable immediately upon being displayed; for example, buttons may not work until additional code has been loaded. To be acceptable, this should be no more than 0.1 seconds.
Visual stability
This is measured as something called “cumulative layout shift” (CLS). In some websites, you may be ready to press a button when all of a sudden things move on the screen and that button is no longer where it used to be. Sometimes after the page loads, pop-ups may show up that interfere with using the page. Instability of objects on the screen is a negative experience factor. This is measured by the relative size of the unstable element and how much it moves. To be acceptable, this score should be no more than 0.1. Some of this is a function of your website itself, but some may also be a function of your web hosting company. For most of us, this is the technical stuff that we leave up to our web designer or web host. To check how your own website stands up to these, there are a number of tools you can use. Google offers six ways to check your core web vitals.
If you’re not a technical person, I suggest asking your web developer to let you know how you stack up. And if your site needs work, I encourage you to have them deal with it because this may be the single most important part of Google’s new page experience score.
3 — Readability
Poor readability is an important reason for users to abandon your page and look elsewhere for what they need. When someone finds your page in search results and immediately bounces back to the search results to choose something else, the search engines understand that to mean that your page was not a good match for that search. And it’s less likely to be shown for that search in the future.
A key measure of readability is the reading level, usually expressed as a grade level. Unless you’re writing a technical thesis, you don’t want your writing to be at a grade level 13 or higher. In general you should target a grade level of no higher than eighth grade. A quick and easy test for your web pages is available at WebFX.
Unfortunately, this is not usually something you can delegate to your web team. It requires your subject knowledge, and often the assistance of a professional copywriter can be invaluable. However, we can offer some specific readability suggestions here.
4 — Clarity
Beyond the reading level of your content, it also needs clarity. Is it easy for the reader to determine the point you’re trying to make? People typically scan content first to decide whether to read it carefully. A web page that’s set up for quick and easy scanning makes that easy.
The use of headings and subheadings can help a user quickly scan down the page to get to where they need to read carefully. Having short, punchy paragraphs, enough white space around it, and supportive images makes content easier to digest than long, dense paragraphs. You don’t want to have someone look at your page and conclude TL:DR — “too long, didn’t read”.
Avoid belaboring the point – don’t go off on tangents either. Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” Take the time to write with clarity.
5 — Intrusive Interstitials
You want to avoid these. But it’s not immediately obvious what they are. Interstitials are usually screens that pop up in between pages as someone navigates through your website. Sometimes they pop up before the home page is displayed. Often they’re ads, but sometimes they’re something helpful like an offer to chat with a live person.
Pop-ups are not necessarily bad if they’re small enough. The problem is intrusive interstitials that are so large that significant portions of the content are obliterated by them.
On a responsive website, pop-ups that aren’t intrusive in a desktop browser may be very intrusive on a phone. That’s something to keep in mind because Google’s index is based on the mobile version of your website.
6 — Safety
If your website gets hacked or contains malicious software, you can count on getting weeded out of Google’s search results. Make sure your website and your web host are safety conscious and have appropriate protective software in place.
If your website is designed in WordPress, I recommend the WordFence security plug-in to alert you whenever security updates are available for your website or any of the plug-ins it uses. Your web designer can make other recommendations about what’s appropriate for you.
7 — Security
Security has to do with encrypting data that travels between your website and the user’s computer or phone. A secure website has a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate. It’s easy to tell because if it does, the address of your website starts with https://instead of just http://.
Originally most websites didn’t bother with an SSL certificate unless they were collecting personal data like credit card information. That’s changed now, and all websites should be secure.
If your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate, when people look at it in Chrome they will see indicator that your site is “not secure”.
Some users may infer that means your website is dangerous; you can lose potential customers that way!
Now’s the time to get ready for Google’s Page Experience algorithm update.
As of this writing, we all have about five months to get our websites ready for this significant change to Google’s ranking factors. Don’t put it off.
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Google’s next big algorithm change for Page Experience is planned for launch next year. It’ll measure user enjoyment of web pages using both old and new ranking factors, grouped into a page experience score. Google explains it:
The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.
So what are these page experience factors?
I’ve broken them down into nine discrete thing that a small business owner needs to address on your website. Let’s hit them one at a time.
Your site needs to be responsive and mobile friendly
A responsive site is one that adapts to the device it’s showing up on. If you open up your site in a browser and change the width of the browser window, the display of the website should respond to that. If you make the browser window narrower, you shouldn’t see it cut off the right edge of paragraphs.
This is it really obvious on a phone. Your website should look different on a phone than it does on a desktop computer. But you don’t want to have a separate mobile-only website like some people did in the early days of the smart phone. You want the same information available on a phone that’s available on a computer, since Google is using a mobile-first index.
If your mobile site is abbreviated and has less content in an effort to more easily fit on a phone, that’s the version of your site Google will index and rank. You want one website that can display differently on a computer and a phone. That way the same information is available regardless of how a customer is looking at it.
Also in terms of being mobile-friendly, it’s important that tap targets, links, buttons and so forth, are large enough and far enough apart to make it easy to tap them. If they’re too close together, your fingers are likely to hit two at once and that provides a poor user experience. The size of your text also may need to be different on a phone so that it’s easy to read.
Page speed refers to how many seconds it takes for a page on your website to download into a user’s browser or phone. Google likes to see a web page that displays on your phone or in your computer within 2½ seconds. Fully displaying in 4 seconds is considered adequate, but any longer than that and Google considers it to offer a poor experience.
From a practical matter, we live in an age of impatience. You don’t want someone clicking on your listing in search results and drum their fingers while they’re waiting for to load. They may give up before it finishes loading and go back to the Google search results. They’re likely to click on another listing and that “bounce” tells Google that they didn’t like what they found on your site. Not only did you lose a potential customer, but it’s likely to hurt your rankings in the future.
Visual stability
All across the web they are calling this “cumulative layout shift” or CLS. Let your web designer worry about those terms, but don’t let this jargon intimidate you. What this refers to is things jumping around on your screen as a page loads. It can be very annoying, as you can see on the website Media Bias Fact Check. Google considers this a poor page experience and if it’s happening on your website, your rankings will suffer for it.
[Update March 2021] I’m sure it’s not because of us, but Media Bias Fact Check has corrected their visual stability issue so it’s no longer a good example.
Avoid 404 errors
When a user tries to go to a page that isn’t where they think it is, they get a 404 Page Not Found error. If there are links on your site that point incorrectly to content on you’re website, your shooting yourself in the foot. It’s a poor user experience if you send your users to pages that aren’t there. It’s important to scan your website and make sure you clear up any of those.
Beyond that, though, there may be malformed links on other websites or links that point to pages you have since eliminated or moved. Those 404 errors are pretty much unavoidable. But you can improve the user experience of them with a custom 404 page. Unlike the default 404 error your browser provides, if you have a custom 404 page it’s formatted just like your website so users know that they haven’t been completely lost. Many websites treat this with a little bit of humor and offer to help the misled user to find what they’re looking for via a search option or a link to your site map.
Is your website secure? Google is on a mission to improve security across the web. As a result it tends to give a ranking advantage to secure websites. If your website URL starts with HTTP:// then it’s not secure. Secure websites start with HTTPS:// and insecure websites are flagged when they show up in Chrome. Many people will see the “Not secure” indicator in the address bar of their browser and mistake it to mean that the site is dangerous. You certainly don’t want that for your own website.
Boy, that’s a mouthful. Intrusive interstitials are those annoying pop-ups that block most or all of the page content when you arrive on the page. You may have run into them when loading certain websites with an ad blocking plug-in in your browser. Very often they pop up to ask you to subscribe to a newsletter, and so forth. They provide an annoying user interface, and Google doesn’t like them for that very reason.
Not all pop-ups are bad; just those that are intrusive, blocking too much content.
Readability
The Internet expression TL:DR has become popular lately. It means “Too Long: Didn’t Read”. If your web page is too long or too dense and intimidating, people may leave before they digest what you’re trying to say. That doesn’t mean you need to have short pages with little content on them. On the contrary. But you can reduce the density of the page with effective implementation of images and white space.
You also want to avoid sounding pedantic because it takes too much effort on the part of your reader. The Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress has a very valuable feature that will assess the readability of your content and offer suggestions to make it more approachable.
Employ clear headings and subheadings
Clear headings and subheadings can go a long way toward making your material less intimidating. Users can scan the page to find the precise portion of the page they are most interested in. Odds are you scanned this page’s headings before deciding to read it. And by employing proper heading tags in the code of your page, you help Google more easily understand your page, and that can only help in your rankings.
Don’t forget CTAs
A CTA is a Call to Action and is critical in getting your users to take the action you want them to. If you’ve ever ordered a burger at a fast food joint, the cashier almost certainly asked you “do you want fries with that?” They sell a hell of a lot more fries because they ask.
So if you want someone to call you or to sign up for your newsletter, or to buy something, you need to ask them to do just that. The easiest CTAs to see are buttons, but you can also employ text-only calls to action if that fits your purposes better.
Page experience is important in so many ways
A good page experience will entice more people to read what you have to say. It will keep them engaged and on your page longer. That’ll reduce your bounce rate and increase your time-on-page, and thus will increase conversions as more people click on your calls to action.
Not only that, but Google will like your page better and rank it higher.
Get ready for Google’s upcoming Page Experience algorithm update by improving the user experience across your website now.
Facing challenges with your page experience? Start a discussion below.
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Page speed and bounce rate – a couple of definitions
Page speed: the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific web page.
Bounce rate: the percent of visits to a site that look at only one page.
How page speed and bounce rate are related
Impatience drives visitors to leave a web page that doesn’t display on their computer or phone as quickly as they want it to. That’s a bounce. The rule of thumb currently is that you begin to lose significant numbers of visitors when your page speed exceeds two seconds. Pingdom says:
… the average bounce rate for pages loading within 2 seconds is 9%. As soon as the page load time surpasses 3 seconds, the bounce rate soars, to 38% by the time it hits 5 seconds!
This graph illustrates the bad news. As page download time increases beyond 3 seconds, bounce rate increases dramatically.
If your goal is for visitors to take an action on your site, such as filling out an information form, contacting you, or buying something — then bounces represent lost customers.
But it’s actually worse than that.
Ranking factors on Google
It’s been well known and reported here that page speed is a ranking factor at Google. We began warning about it way back in 2009. All else being equal, a fast downloading page will outrank a slow page.
We’ve also pointed out that a high bounce rate is a negative ranking factor on Google as well.
Update June 2018:If your market is international, it may help to know what your page speed is overseas. I recommend a test at DotCom Tools that will test your page speed at over 20 international cities.
The frightening thing about all this is that these two negative ranking factors compound one another. It’s bad enough if you suffer a ranking penalty because your page is slow. But that slowness raises your bounce rate, resulting in a double-whammy to your ranking in Google search results.
Our recommendation is to work to make sure your pages all download within three seconds at the most. Two seconds is ideal, but three seconds is usually tolerable.
We always welcome your perspective. Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
We offer a free SEO review of your website, including page speed and many other factors. Call us and let’s set it up.
Prominence refers to how widely across the web you’re listed with a correct and consistent NAP (name, address, phone). It’s particularly important for small businesses to show up in local search results and in the Google Local 3-Pack. These listings are often called citations and citation management deserves ongoing attention from small local businesses. But don’t be misled by many of the common misconceptions about citations that are floating around.
More than half of all website visits are happening on cell phones. As a result, Google’s index of website content is looking only at mobile friendly content. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, it’s awkward to use on a phone and people are likely to abandon you and look up a competitor instead. For that reason and others, Google is reluctant to rank highly websites that aren’t mobile friendly. In general, I recommend 
Loading
Some of this is a function of your website itself, but some may also be a function of your web hosting company. For most of us, this is the technical stuff that we leave up to our web designer or web host. To check how your own website stands up to these, there are a number of tools you can use. 
A key measure of readability is the reading level, usually expressed as a grade level. Unless you’re writing a technical thesis, you don’t want your writing to be at a grade level 13 or higher. In general you should target a grade level of no higher than eighth grade. A quick and easy test for your web pages is available at 
Beyond the reading level of your content, it also needs clarity. Is it easy for the reader to determine the point you’re trying to make? People typically scan content first to decide whether to read it carefully. A web page that’s set up for quick and easy scanning makes that easy.
Pop-ups are not necessarily bad if they’re small enough. The problem is 
If your website gets hacked or contains malicious software, you can count on getting weeded out of Google’s search results. Make sure your website and your web host are safety conscious and have appropriate protective software in place.
If your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate, when people look at it in Chrome they will see indicator that your site is “not secure”.
This is it really obvious on a phone. Your website should look different on a phone than it does on a desktop computer. But you don’t want to have a separate mobile-only website like some people did in the early days of the smart phone. You want the same information available on a phone that’s available on a computer, since Google is using a 
When a user tries to go to a page that isn’t where they think it is, they get a 404 Page Not Found error. If there are links on your site that point incorrectly to content on you’re website, your shooting yourself in the foot. It’s a poor user experience if you send your users to pages that aren’t there. It’s important to scan your website and make sure you clear up any of those.
The Internet expression TL:DR has become popular lately. It means “Too Long: Didn’t Read”. If your web page is too long or too dense and intimidating, people may leave before they digest what you’re trying to say. That doesn’t mean you need to have short pages with little content on them. On the contrary. But you can reduce the density of the page with effective implementation of images and white space.
A CTA is a 
