Real-Time Website Analysis NueMD.com #semrushchat

In the highly competitive digital marketing world, companies need to ensure that their online strategies help them to influence their customers’ decisions. During our latest SEMrush Chat, we analyzed and evaluated nuemd.com, which provides cloud-based practice management software, an electronic health record (EHR), and medical billing solutions, with our chat participants. Let’s look at some mistakes that might prevent online businesses from achieving their goals and thriving:

Q1: After the first glance, what is one thing you would definitely change on nuemd.com?

1. Provide a clear value proposition.

A great value proposition is a statement that provides a clear, succinct message about what your brand has to offer to your customers. It’s not a slogan or a positioning statement, but it determines whether or not people will want to learn more about your product or service or if they want to leave your site immediately after they land on it. QuickSprout provides three key things that a good value proposition explains to your audience:

• How your product or service solves problems.

• What benefits it provides.

• Why your customers should choose you over your competitors.

Our chat participants pointed out that at first glance, it was difficult to understand what exactly NueMD does. A clear, powerful value proposition is a must because it helps to make a strong first impression. “I would put the "Why NueMD?" section at the top. At first glance, I'm not sure what they do and their value proposition,” said Rachel Howe‏ - @R8chel_Marie.

To get inspiration, you can check out these seven unique value proposition examples.

2. Move the contact form lower.

A contact form is a fundamental element to many websites, especially in eCommerce. For some online brands, a contact form and its design are a primary way to convert a casual passing by site visitor into a paying customer. The position of a form on your webpage is one of the things that determine whether or not your site visitors will bother to provide you with their contact details. Placing a form before explaining to your audience the benefits of using your product or service is ineffective because people need to know more about your business before they can trust you and provide their personal information. “I will put the form down the bottom and the content first for the users,” suggested Saad AK‏ - @SaadAlikhan1994.

3. Add About Us and Pricing tabs to the top navigation.

Your website’s "About Us" page plays an important role in serving as an introduction. It contains useful and interesting information about your company, your brand, and your team, and gives a general idea of what your business is about. Another critical element of any eCommerce website is a pricing page since the price is a part of a customer’s buying decision. When analyzing NueMD, our chat participants noticed that both About Us and Pricing tabs are missing in the top navigation bar and should be added.

4. Optimize website’s speed.

This website has some speed issues. The faster your pages load, the better because your site’s speed is critical to user experience and conversions. To learn more, try these several ways to speed up your site.

5. Fix the navigation.

If your site visitors have trouble finding what they want on your site, they will probably leave it and never come back. Your site’s navigation affects conversions and user-friendliness, therefore, it has a big impact on the success or failure of your site. NueMD is difficult to understand and needs a clear, concise navigation that will be beneficial in terms of user experience and SEO.

Check out a few other answers in the following recap.

The site owners definitely have some work to do on this site. Now, let’s see what technical issues they should fix first.

Q2: Out of these issues we detected with the SEMrush Site Audit tool, which one should the company fix ASAP? Why?

1. Broken internal links.

Any link that is pointing to a webpage that no longer exists becomes a broken link. Broken links can hurt the usability of your site and devalue your SEO efforts because they restrict the flow of link equity throughout your site. That is why, as a site owner, your responsibility is to take the time to go through the architecture of your site to make sure that no existing pages still point to the page that is no longer there.

How to fix: If you moved a page or renamed a link, set up a 301 redirect to automatically send your site visitor from the old page to the new one, or remove the link if you can’t send them to another location on your site.

2. 4xx errors.

The group of HTTP status codes ranging from 400 to 499 represent client-side errors. These errors are the result of HTTP requests sent by a user client. Not only does a dead link give users a poor user experience, it also negatively affects your SEO because it can stop a search engine crawler in its track. The most common client error is 404 Not Found, which usually occurs when the page was deleted or the URL was renamed.

3. Duplicate content.

According to Google, “duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” In the simplest terms, duplicate content is content that appears on the web in more than one location, i.e., a unique website address. Although duplicate content is not a penalty, it can sometimes impact search engine rankings. Webpages compete with each other for these rankings. As a site owner, to avoid diluting the search results, you need to make sure that you don’t create content you already have on your site or have multiple URLs for the same content.

Yoast provides four actionable methods of solving the problem of duplicate content:

• Not creating it.

• Redirecting all duplicate content URLs to the proper canonical URLs.

• Adding the rel=”canonical” element to the duplicate page.

• Adding an HTML link from the duplicate page to the original content.

4. Missing ALT attributes.

The ALT attribute provides alternative information for an image if the image cannot be displayed. Anytime you use an image on your site, you should add an ALT tag to it to provide a clear alternative text of the image to users who can’t view it should they have a slow connection or use a screen reader. In addition to a better user experience, there are SEO reasons for using ALT tags as well. Search engine robots can’t read images without text. Besides, not providing alternative information for an image means you are missing out on a keyword opportunity.

When creating ALT tags for your images, keep in mind the following simple, yet still effective rules:

• Create descriptive ALT tags.

• Keep them concise.

• Use keywords in your tags.

• Write tags with the user in mind.

5. Links lead to HTTP pages for an HTTPS site.

According to the SEMrush Site Audit tool, there are many links on NueMD that lead to HTTP pages. All internal links, images, scripts, and other elements should point to HTTPS versions. It’s especially important if there are no redirects or HSTS implemented. In order to fix this, make sure that all pages on your site are accessible only through the HTTPS protocol.

Let’s sum up!

You can learn more about SEO issues in our recent study—"40 Technical SEO Mistakes."

Q3: Which SEO ideas should NueMD implement first to increase their online presence?

When analyzing NueMD, we used SEO ideas to find out which things the site owners can do in order to improve their rankings for certain pages of their site. Here’s what we got:

Our chat guests shared their opinions on what SEO ideas can help the brand to increase its visibility. Most of them recommended the site owners creating useful, optimized content that adds value to their audience, and the links will follow.

If you want your site visitors to click and engage with your copy, you need to use the right keywords that are relevant to your audience. Consider using long-tail keywords that are specific to your niche and less competitive. These terms are easier to rank and get traffic for, as opposed to broad keywords.

Some site owners underestimate the power of effective meta descriptions and often neglect them. However, if you are not investing enough efforts into creating good meta descriptions, you might be missing out on relevant website traffic that can bring you new leads and clients. Here are a few tips for creating successful meta descriptions:

• Write a legible, readable meta description.

• Use an action-oriented language.

• Include your most important keywords.

• Provide a solution to your users’ problem or benefits.

• Make your meta description specific and relevant.

• Consider using Schema markup.

• Keep your copy no longer than 140-160 characters.

• Do not duplicate meta descriptions.

In the time of content overload, it is a real challenge to attract people and make them listen to you. Focusing on creating more informative content can help you beat the competition. Any piece of content you produce should contain valuable and useful information. Consider creating long-form content in your content marketing campaigns, such as how-to guides, research, case studies, and success stories.

People won’t bother to read your content unless it somehow benefits them. Content is all about your audience. Matt Ambrose says that even the “About Us” page is not about you, but about your customers. Of course, your content needs to explain who you are, pinpoint your personal achievements, and explain your value proposition, but it should never dwell on that. To create content that provides real value to your potential clients, you need to know your audience well and provide answers to their questions.

There are multiple sources you can use to get examples of the questions your customers may ask:

• Social media networks.

• Comments on blogs in your niche.

• Quora.

• Google Autocomplete and the “People Also Ask” box.

• Google Trends.

• Tools like Answer The Public.

What are your thoughts on the topic? Which of the provided SEO ideas would you suggest the site owners implementing on their website?

Q4: What website features did you like and would suggest that NueMD utilize more?

Even though there is some work to do to improve this site, it definitely has its strengths. At the end of our analysis, we asked our chat participants to name effective site features that the company should further leverage:

• Blog

Blogging is a commitment to publish your blog posts on a regular basis and maintain consistency, so your readers know when to come back for new pieces of content, especially if it’s a business blog. Aside from the quality of your content, it’s also crucial how frequently you post and update your content. A great blog is about balancing the relationship between quality and frequency. The last post on the NueMD’s blog was published on February 3, 2017. In order to improve their blog and strengthen their content marketing efforts, they should create a blog schedule to provide content consistently and regularly.

• Customer Testimonials

Testimonials are a powerful tool and a great way to show your site visitors that other people have benefitted from your product or service. They can help your brand to establish trust and encourage casual site visitors to take action and become your paying customers. NueMD has a page with good customer testimonials that they should definitely further leverage. They currently utilize video testimonials, which are great, because they are far more engaging and convincing. Videos can keep your users on your site longer and improve your chances that they will make a purchase decision.

Accumulating customer reviews and comments from different sources (e.g., your site, blog comments, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) feeds your blog. The site owners can create relevant, unique pieces of content around these reviews.

• Brand Color Palette

The importance of your brand colors cannot be overestimated, as they have a powerful impact on how people perceive your company. Colors are a perfect way to convey the unique personality behind your brand. When picking a color for your brand, you need to have a basic understanding of the psychology of color. NueMD has done a good job choosing the right colors for their site. However, our chat participants pointed out that the site owners need to review their colors strategy a bit and change the color of some particular elements on the site.

• Call to action

Call-to-action buttons are one of the most important elements of any website. An effective CTA guides your users through your site and gets them to take a desired action, helping your business to reach its goals. Boring, generic CTAs, on the other hand, can cost you conversions. When creating CTAs for your site, you need to pay attention to the following criteria:

• Color. A CTA button should be designed in an eye-catching color that simultaneously contrasts with the rest of your page and adheres to your main brand color palette.

• Size. If buttons are too big, they can become a distraction. If it’s tiny, users may have trouble noticing it. You need to find the right balance.

• Copy. Don’t use phrases like “Buy Now” or “Click Here,” because they are too boring and poor. Be creative. Make sure that your CTA is unique and compelling, generates a sense of urgency, and communicates value.

• Placement. Placing your CTA button in the right spot is greatly important because it can influence your visitors’ behavior. Every button should be positioned only after you have clearly explained what you offer and how it helps your customers.

Finally, as our chat participants noticed, values of using NueMD’s services are articulated well and clearly. What they can do is move “Why NueMD?” closer to the top of the page, so that site visitors can see it as soon as they land on the site.

Which of the effective site features should be utilized more? We would love to hear your thoughts!

That is it for today!

Some of the more common mistakes we discussed in this chat recap appear on many other websites. We hope that the tips from this post will help you to figure out if you have the same issues and how to fix them to improve your site’s performance.

Many thanks to our chat guest for sharing their expertise and providing actionable recommendations for NueMD! Make sure to join us this Wednesday as we discuss "The Ultimate Guide To Online Reviews" with special guest, Thomas Ballantyne!