5 Tips To Start Preparing Your Business Website For The New Year

5 Tips To Start Preparing Your Business Website For The New Year

by | Oct 18, 2023 | All Posts, The New Year

We’re saying goodbye to 2022 and looking ahead to a year that is going to bring more business, web traffic, and growth for your website. The new year provides an opportunity to build your brand and acquire new customers to keep your business flourishing all year long.

Are you ready to be one step ahead of the competition in 2019? Here are 5 tips to consider when preparing your business website for the new year.

1.) Review Your Site’s User Experience (UX)

Having a user-friendly site with optimal UX is essential for creating a positive online experience for your visitors. When a user is on your site, anything that conveys a message like an image, video, or product description can influence how they interact with your site. Are your visuals appealing? Is your site mobile responsive? UX has become increasingly vital to a site’s success because a visitors opinion of your business can be directly impacted by what they are experiencing on your site. These are a few factors that can change a negative UX to a positive one.

  • Increase your site speed
  • Update your website design
  • Make sure you have a readable font
  • Ensure your site is accessible for physically disabled and visually impaired

Reviewing user comments or common issues people can experience on your site will help determine your site’s functionality. Usability testing is also a method of evaluation that can help you identify more finite issues a user could be experiencing with your site. Tweaking site components for your visitors to have a favorable UX has the potential to grow your traffic in 2023.

2.) Protect Your Customers With Security SiteLock (SSL)

As a business website selling goods or products, keeping your customer’s information protected is of top importance. Installing an SSL certificate on your site lets customers or visitors know that any personal information they submit through your site is protected. An SSL certificate also helps enhance customer trust on your site, improve conversion rates, and increase your Google rankings.

If you plan to process any credit card or personal information through your site, you will need an SSL certificate in order to be Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI) compliant. Being PCI compliant is essential to help protect your site and the customers who are sharing their credit card information. Whether you are a small or large business, your goal should be to build and maintain a secure network for visitors.

There are several types of SSL certificates you can add to your site and Bluehost offers a great variety for our customers. An SSL certificate can appear as an image at the bottom of a webpage indicating the certificate, a padlock, or the words “SSL,” or “Security.”

3.) Increase Your Site Visibility With Relevant SEO keywords

Making your website search friendly in 2023 is an actionable goal that you can conquer with a little help from search engine optimization (SEO). SEO has become increasingly important to how a site ranks on a search engine because it can increase site awareness and drive traffic to your site. Keeping track of SEO on your site is an excellent way to generate traffic that is organic and free without depleting your wallet.

Creating quality content with natural keywords or phrases helps people to find your site via search engines. Developing a list of relevant keywords specific to the product or services you offer is the best way to ensure potential visitors land on your page versus a competitor. There are several SEO search tools that can you use to find the best and most relevant keywords to assist with traffic and conversions on your site. Relevant keywords are always changing so setting up a weekly or monthly schedule to review your words for SEO visibility is imperative to keep your site ranking high.

4.) Use A Staging Site To Test New Plugins Or Themes

The new year is the perfect time to update your theme or install new plugins on your site. A website refresh is a great way to introduce new products and services, but you want to ensure your existing site content is compatible with any new installs. Bluehost customers have the opportunity to test out their site before making any final changes that can affect their public site.

The AllinwebIT staging environment allows customers to test and see if any new themes and plugins will work on your site. A staging site allows you to make and save changes without your public site being affected. Once you’ve perfected your site in the staging environment you can publish it to your live site. You can use this opportunity to be creative and experiment with an updated design or install a plugin you’ve been itching to try without any worry it will cause your site to crash or malfunction.

5.) Identify The Best Social Media Platforms For Your Site

Social media has become an essential component of how brands market themselves to billions of users across each channel. Having a social media platform is vital for marketing and promoting your company, but not every social platform is best for your business. If you spent this past year scrambling to post on multiple platforms, now is the time to focus on what social media can best support your business.

Here are a few suggestions to find the best social media channels for your brand.

  • Write out your social media goals
  • Establish a publishing cadence and how you’ll identify whether you are successful or not.
  • Understand your industry
  • Doing your market research can help develop brand awareness and identify your target audience.
  • Know the purpose of each platform
    Each platform has different benefits that can strengthen your social media presence.
  • Go where your audience is
    Only use your time on social platforms where your customers frequent.

Once you are able to identify which social media accounts are helping to enhance your business goals you’ll be able to work on strengthening your online presence. You can invest your efforts into growing those accounts by creating a social media strategy that will engage conversation and make the best use of your ad dollars for marketing.

As we transition into the new year, preparing your business website for the new year can set you up for long-term success. Using the holiday to identify the strengths of your site can help you take the first step to make small tweaks or updates you need in 2023

5 Winning Ways to Optimize Your Online Store

5 Winning Ways to Optimize Your Online Store

by | Oct 17, 2023 | All Posts, Winning Ways

Business is booming in the world of eCommerce and just about anyone can set up an online storefront – even on the slimmest of shoestring budgets. Success depends on making sure potential customers can find your store and receive the best possible shopping experience when they visit. Paid publicity can help, but there are a number of things you can do to optimize your store for maximum visibility right on your website without spending a dime. Here’s a look at five low-cost ways to increase traffic to your website and boost customer engagement.

Optimize Your Store for Organic Search

Paid advertising and other kinds of marketing strategies can play an important part in promoting your new online shop, but it’s also essential to make a plan to rank high in organic searches by practicing search engine optimization – the natural way that people search for information or products online. These searches respond to keywords or questions submitted to search engines like Google or Bing and deliver the best matches to the searcher. Ranking high – on the first page of search results – is the goal of just about every online business, since nearly two-thirds of searchers never click to the second page of their search results.

Long-tail keywords aren’t the only criteria for ranking high or improving your online presence through search engine optimization. Google and other search engines operate on a mysterious algorithm system that also factors in many other features of a website when assigning rankings. These can include a site’s authority, which can be established by quality backlinks, or links back to the site by other reputable websites, and the quality of the user experience it offers visitors. That’s why Google’s recent algorithm changes heavily penalized spammy, keyword stuffed sites with low value to visitors.

Learning how to optimize your website for easy searching and engaging user experience can not only boost your search engine rankings but also establish your site as an authority in your niche and enhance your brand’s visibility. Additionally, you don’t need to be an expert in web design and development to make small but significant changes that will make your site more search friendly.

Include Quality Content – Everywhere

If you visited a brick and mortar store and found empty shelves, a vacant front window and no one available to serve you, you would probably turn around and leave. The same is true for your online store. Make sure that your product pages include a range of products, not just one or two, and that they’re packed with keyword rich descriptions of your products and organized in intuitive ways. Add featured content, testimonials, or reviews to a visually appealing homepage. Add a blog to your site and keep it updated with a mix of topical and evergreen content that is relevant to your customers’ interests and needs.

Since search engine crawlers regularly search sites for new, relevant content, having an active, interactive site that is updated on a regular basis shows visitors and search engines that your store is a thriving online concern.

Make Your Store Interactive

Search engines also consider factors such as “dwell time,” – the amount of time a visitor spends on your site and what they do there – in search rankings. Making sure your site is attractive and easy to navigate can encourage visitors to stick around, but you can also engage visitors by encouraging them to interact with your store and your brand. Adding features such as comments and live chat can encourage them to ask questions and express opinions. Consider showcasing customer content, such as sharing product photos, or running contests for things like naming new products. Beyond selling products, these kinds of strategies can build brand awareness and create a loyal tribe of supporters willing to share your content with others.

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

More than half of all online shopping now takes place from mobile devices, rather than desktop or laptop computers. For that reason, Google and other search engines now consider mobile responsiveness a key factor in higher search rankings. Consider installing a mobile-responsive theme for your WordPress site, or add a plugin to make an existing theme more mobile friendly. To improve the mobile experience, even more, eliminate intrusive “interstitial,” content such as large popups or overlays that block a user’s view of your pages.

Use Keywords Where It Counts

Although Google penalizes poor quality and keyword stuffed sites, it rewards sites that use keywords smartly. Incorporate keywords, especially “long tail,” keywords of four or more words, into key areas of your site, including page and post titles, headers, subheaders, and product descriptions. Don’t forget to add them to image alt text and site metadata, and set custom URLs for all pages, so that they include keywords rather than default strings of numbers.

Include Navigation Tools and Site Maps

Make sure navigation and user tools, such as your site’s menus, are up to date and point clearly to the relevant content – a key feature for making your site easier for visitors to navigate. Make sure that contact information and other essentials about your store and your products are easily visible. Submit a site map to Google, as well. A site map includes all the pages on your site, with their relevant keywords, and helps to ensure that all the pages on your site will be crawled for indexing. If you change or update content on the site, be sure to update your site map too, so that it stays current.

It’s never been easier to open your own online store, thanks to an array of free and paid tools for building your dream website and reaching potential customers from around the world. You can optimize your new storefront for maximum search visibility and user-friendliness from within your website using resources you already have – all for free, no development experience or digital marketing budget required.

Ready to build a website? Learn more about our web hosting options from our customer support experts at AllinwebIT today.