Improve SEO for Your Kajabi Site: Part 3 (Technical SEO)

Optimizing your SEO is a crucial part of any organic marketing strategy.  I mean, why not make it as easy as possible for prospective customers or clients to find you, right?

In this 5-Part Series, we'll be covering steps and strategies to set up SEO for your Kajabi Site.  

In Part 1, we discuss on-page SEO and how to set this up on your Kajabi site.

In Part 2, we will go through setting up your Sitemap on Google Search Console so that Google is directing traffic to your site.

In Part 3 (see below), we will share strategies for Technical SEO such as page speed and user experience.

In Part 4, we will dive into Off-Page SEO strategies such as Social Media strategies, backlinks, and more.

And, in Part 5 we will share Blog strategies to support SEO organic traffic to your site, and strategies to include in your blogs.

Part 3:  Improve your SEO for Your Kajabi by addressing Technical SEO Strategies

Technical SEO is a category of Search Engine Optimization that addresses key areas such as site security, user experience, and page load speed.

One of the most common areas you can improve on your Technical SEO is load speed. 

Impact of Page Speed 

More than half of people who surf the web use their mobile devices, i.e. smartphones and tablets. This percentage translates to millions of potential visitors to your website. The problem is that many of these people will quickly find their way out of your page when it takes longer than three seconds to load. Let us say five of 10 visitors will abandon your site because they cannot wait that long for it to show the content; it means that you are losing 50% of your chance of converting them into actual customers.  

Page loading time is an integral part of the overall user experience. You need to understand right now that site visitors care more about speed than anything. Even if you have a visually appealing landing page and attention-grabbing content, those things will not have that much impact if your site is slow to load the pages.  

 Overall, a slow loading page results in the following: 

• Low conversion rates 
• Bad user experience 
• Low rank in the search engine results 

JPEG vs PNG 

PNG has all the bells and whistles, i.e. visual quality, and improved backgrounds. But that is not the point of making your page load faster. You are compelled to choose JPEG since it allows you to save smaller file size. The fancy attributes of PNG images make them significantly larger than JPEG images. In other words, it will take longer for a page to load a PNG image compared to a JPEG file.  

If you need to include animation on your landing page, do away with GIFs because they usually are huge files. The best alternative is adding a short video on loop. I do this because it looks better.  

Image Resizing 

I have spent countless hours optimizing Kajabi pages, so believe me when I tell you that many of my clients make a ton of mistakes when it comes to uploading images for display. You will know that you have the wrong image size once you do the speed test. 

To have a better grasp of what I am talking about here, you first must learn about an image’s file size and dimensions. For example, 2MB is the image size, while 1920 x 1080 pixels are the dimensions. These two relate to each other – an image with a big file size will have large dimensions. Hence, an image with small dimensions will have a smaller file size.  

Now here is the tricky part. There is a difference between the dimensions of an image relevant to what is displayed on a webpage and that of the image’s intrinsic dimensions, i.e. 1920 x 1080 pixels. Sound too complicated? Do not worry, here is a more detailed explanation: 

You chose an image with a high resolution for your homepage. It has a size of over 2MB and a resolution of 2560 x 1440 (1440p). When someone visits your website using a computer screen with a resolution of 1920 x 1080, it means that the computer will download the over 2MB file but will only display it as 1920 x 1080. The computer screen can never show the image at 1440p because its display size is limited to 1080p.  

Another user visits your homepage, but this time using a smartphone with a display size of 320 x 180. But like the computer screen, the phone will have to download the over 2MB image file.  

The problem in both scenarios is that devices used to browse your website are forced to work harder to show the image. When a device is forced to work harder to show a webpage, it means that the page is likely slow to load.  

So, how do you fix this?  

The solution is a lot simpler than you probably think. You just have to use a 1920 x 1080 image for the computer/desktop screen version of your homepage, and a separate 320 x 180 image for the mobile or smartphone version. This is the most practical way of making sure that your page loads faster on any device.  

What I mean is, implement the amazing feature Kajabi offers in the Encore Page Builder to have elements of your pages display on Desktop only and/or Mobile Only.

And, it is a great rule of thumb to ALWAYS compress your images and videos prior to uploading them into Kajabi!  

You can do this with tools like tinypng.com or handbrake.fr

 Measuring Page Load Speed 

How can you know how your site scores for load speed?

If you followed the steps in Part 2 and set up your Google Search Console, you can log in and click on the "Core Web Vitals" from the menu.  Then, run your PageSpeed Insights to find out how you score with tips on areas that need improvement.

Relationship Between Page Design and Load Speed  

You probably have heard a thing or two about mobile responsiveness. It is a concept in web design where a site needs to adapt and respond based on the type and size of the screen it is displayed on. The term “mobile” refers to mobile devices which have a smaller screen than standard computers or laptops. In other words, your site can only be mobile responsive when it displays all the elements correctly on a small screen like a smartphone or tablet device.  

There are fundamental differences between a conventional desktop/laptop screen and a mobile phone. You must be familiar with these differences if you want to learn how to transform your website in a way that it becomes mobile responsive. Aside from the apparent size difference, a desktop screen is in landscape orientation, while a mobile phone is in portrait for the most part. Furthermore, a desktop screen suffers significant computing issues, while mobile phones do not suffer from it.  

Creating a mobile responsive site is not an exact science, but there are general rules you can follow. For instance, you should try to avoid using background images when creating a mobile version of your pages. Those images are likely large, which you already learned earlier to be impractical for load speed concerns.  

Most mobile phone screens have a maximum width of 400 pixels, while the images you use on your webpage are usually over 500 pixels. That alone is proof that creating a mobile version of your website makes a lot of sense.  

Do not get me wrong – I am not against making the most out of web design. It is just that you must commit to the balance between design and how quickly your page loads on a mobile device. An aesthetically pleasing landing page that takes forever to load has an adverse impact on your conversions.