Is your search engine ranking falling? Worse, is it falling despite great levels of marketing effort? You’ve done plenty of search word optimization and keyword research. You have advertised on various websites, created back links, and followed all of the rules. Why is your search engine ranking still falling? The answer is actually fairly simple. If you have done everything within your power to boost ranking, followed all the rules, and still aren’t getting your desired results… you simply are not making the customer happy.

So if all your hard work isn’t, well, working, how do you make the customer happy? If you aren’t sure how to successfully accomplish this, just check out the following to see if anything mentioned could be improved.

1. Load Time

If a page takes too long to load you can pretty much guarantee your customers aren’t happy. An average load time is four seconds. Anything over that should be considered too long, while anything quicker than that should be considered fantastic. To improve your load time, utilize the following tips:

• Keep media to a minimum. Media includes graphics, images, videos, music, etc.

• Avoid a bunch of extras which don’t contribute anything useful. This includes pop-up advertisements, falling images, media which automatically plays, etc.

• Compress your content. This will place all of your files into a single smaller file. This can drastically improve your page load time.

2. Design

If your design isn’t user-friendly, unique, and attractive, you aren’t keeping your customers as happy as you could be. First and foremost, the design needs to be easy to navigate. To figure this out, ask a person unfamiliar with your website to find a few pages. If they can not find each page with ease, you need to rethink things. Your design should also be simple, attractive, and unique. Simple is always better because it makes navigation easier. Attractive designs will incorporate a relevant design void of overly bright colors and hard to read fonts. Having a unique design is always important because it sets you apart from the competition.

3. Mobile Friendly

If you don’t have a mobile friendly website, you are missing out on a lot of costumers. The vast majority of consumers are using their mobile devices to access the internet, even if it is only part of the time. If your website is not mobile friendly, you will miss out on all of those potential customers. Some websites have an option which allows you to easily transform your current website into a mobile friendly version. Another option is to create an entirely new site exclusively for use by mobile users.

4. Content

If your content isn’t informative, unique, and interesting, you are not going to make your customers happy. The content is extremely important since this is the main reason why people come to your site. It is also one of the primary reasons why people are directed to your site. Here are a few quick tips on creating quality content that will make your customers happy:

• Never copy content. Not only is this going to set you up as a ‘cookie cutter’ company, but you can also run into serious legal issues.

• Use images in your content. At least one decent sized image will help to boost the number of people actually reading your articles.

• Always proofread. Grammatical errors and typos can dissuade people from reading your content.

• Aim for at least 300 words. Search engines tend to favor content that is 300+ words long.

• Break your content up into easily read bites of information. A good rule of thumb is to include no more than five or six sentences in each paragraph.

• Add your own personal style to the things you write. This helps your customers to feel as though they “know” you.

5. Too Much Crap

This one is a biggie. If you have a ton of useless, irrelevant stuff all over your website, customers are going to be immediately turned off. Avoid falling objects, pop up ads, and needless media. Not only is this annoying, but it can slow down your page load times. This, as you read in number one, is also a big no-no. Clean up your site and get rid of anything that doesn’t belong. You’ll start seeing near immediate results.

If you want your website to succeed, the key is to keep the customers happy. After all, what’s a website without viewers? Avoid the five things mentioned here today if you really want your customers to keep coming back for more.