What Do You Need for A High-Quality Website?
In should be no surprise that a high-quality website should provide relevant and useful content while maintaining a good user experience. However, there are a great number of factors that need to be addressed beyond that brief summarization.
You may think that sinking a fortune into a website is a guarantee that your website will be of a high-quality. Fortunately for you (and your wallet), that isn’t necessarily the case. You can create a high-quality website with very little investment on your part (as little as $250) as long as you spend the time and thought on it required for it to be so.
But quality is subjective, surely? Yes, as they say, one mans trash could be another man’s treasure. Though this might be true, there are a lot of indicators people and search engine’s use when determining if your website is high-quality.
If your website can answer “yes” to more than 90% of the following questions, then it will be considered a high-quality website by people and search engines.
What makes a high-quality website?
- Does the domain name represent the business’ name?
- Are the full postal address and phone number clearly stated?
- Can you speak to a real person from the business?
- Are names and photos of staff members present?
- Can you clearly see the history and objective of the company?
- Do they have links to a social media presence?
- Have they provided testimonials/reviews/case studies?
- Would you trust the business with your bank details?
- Are you likely to bookmark or share it?
- Does it appear to be professionally designed?
- Is the styling of the website consistent?
- Can you easily read the text?
- Does the text have no spelling/grammar errors?
- Have they shared high-quality images/videos?
- Do you find it easy to navigate?
- Have all broken pages/404s been taken care of?
- Is all the SEO above board and not manipulative?
- Is the website free from viruses/malware?
- Is the topic of the website clear?
- Does the content adequately cover this topic?
- Is any of the content written by a verifiable expert?
- Has there been an effort made to reduce duplicate content?
- Does the content appear to be trustworthy?
- Do the owners update the blog regularly?
- Do you find the content to be engaging/valuable?
- Would the content be at home in a book/journal?
- Is the website providing substantial value vs rivals?
- Does it have links from other high-quality websites?
- Does it reference any high-quality websites?
- Is there a balance between value and marketing?
- Is the amount of content sufficient for the number of ads?
- Can you clearly distinguish between ads and content?
- Is unnecessary registration/data collection avoided?
- Does the website provide a privacy policy?
- Does it load properly across multiple platforms?
- Do all the pages load in less than three seconds?
- Do visitors usually go to more than one page?
- And do they usually stay for more than one minute?
The effect the quality of your website has on the success of your SEO efforts is very high, so your website should answer “yes” to as many of these questions as possible. This will ensure that ranking higher in Google will be much easier.
In addition to the well-known algorithm Google maintains to push high-quality websites to the top of search results, there are smaller (Panda) updates that aim to reduce the rankings of low-quality websites.
Unfortunately, during monthly Panda updates, the rankings of low-quality websites will be pushed down even if they otherwise score highly on other algorithm aspects like optimisation and backlinks.
High-quality websites will convert visitors into customers at a rate of 100x compared to a low-quality website. This makes the economic benefits of investing in the quality of your website very beneficial if you’re willing to spend the time and money to get it right.
You may not be well-placed to judge the quality of your website since you’re too close so it can be good to seek an independent evaluation and monitor the data shown in your analytics account carefully and regularly.
