If you’re serious about your business, creating a professional business or ecommerce website is a good first step. However, simply having a website isn’t enough, especially in today’s continuously growing and evolving ecommerce markets. It’s also important to make sure that your site is well-optimized.
Whether you already have a business website or are just planning to set one up, here are a few things you’ll have to do to ensure that your business has the visibility, credibility, engagement, and conversions it needs to be competitive:
1.) Develop Your Brand Identity
Before you even think about improving your website, it’s first important to develop a cohesive brand identity. Having a unique but harmonious identity will set your business apart from the competition and will help make your site improvements more focused and effective.
While there is no definitive right or wrong way to develop your brand, you may want to deliberately choose an overall image that helps you meet your business’s goals.
After you’ve developed your brand identity, you can begin to create highly cohesive text, video, and graphic content to support it and your business objectives.
If you have the resources, you can leverage this content to do one of the most effective marketing techniques: content marketing. Content marketing involves the regular creation and sharing of useful and engaging content that helps your business achieve its objectives. These content assets can include product descriptions, blog articles, images, and videos. Some may even involve reviews and other types of user-generated content, which can be used to drive engagement and build credibility, ultimately earning customer loyalty and repeat business.
Some types of content could also be used to generate engagement on other marketing channels, particularly social media and email. By crafting the content in ways that appeal to major search engines (see #7), you can also ensure that your business website will be highly visible online.
3.) Make Sure It’s Mobile-Friendly
A majority of the world’s internet traffic is channeled through mobile devices. What’s more, in some ecommerce markets such as the Philippines, a majority of online purchases are done over mobile devices. This means that any business website redesign should also account for the mobile user experience.
Making sites mobile-friendly can be quite challenging for web designers and developers, as they have to anticipate web traffic coming from potentially hundreds of different types of devices and the resulting UX.
Despite the challenges of optimizing websites for mobile search, mobile friendliness should be prioritized because of the sheer number of users and potential customers who are likely to access your site through a mobile device.
4.) Optimize Your Site’s Load Speeds
According to multiple studies, site loading speeds have a major impact on website bounce rates. The slower your site loads, the fewer people who will finish a session. This is likely to lead to a drop-off in engagement and, consequently, reduce your conversions and potential revenue.
Additionally, site speed is used by Google as a ranking signal when assessing site quality. A slow website may ultimately be downgraded by Google and other search engines on their results pages, reducing your business’s visibility.
You can optimize your site’s speed in several ways. The most straightforward way is to use clean code for your website and use a hosting solution that’s designed for high traffic volumes. Another way to speed up load times is to use data compression and content assets that have low internet bandwidth requirements. You should also consider avoiding extremely high-quality videos and images. A small sacrifice in picture quality is usually more than acceptable, given that most of your visitors will probably access your site through a mobile device with a small screen.
5.) Choose Effective Web Designs and Layouts
Whether you’re working from a template or having a custom design built from scratch, it’s important to make sure that the layouts and designs you choose help your business reinforce its brand and meet its engagement and conversion objectives. Additionally, these should also be within the general expectations of your market.
6.) Avoid Clutter
For business websites, simpler is usually better. While a more adventurous design might work in a few instances, most people who visit a site want to be able to navigate it effectively. Websites that are easily navigated will tend to have better conversion rates, as it will be more obvious to users which actions they need to take.
7.) Keep It SEO-Friendly
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of developing and maintaining websites in a way that ensures better visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). In most ecommerce markets, Google is the most dominant search engine, which means that most business owners should concentrate on optimizations that help their site rank on Google’s SERPs.
If you are competing in a highly competitive ecommerce market, investing in SEO can help drive more potential customers to your website, allowing it to generate a steady revenue stream. At the very least, businesses should make sure their website adheres to best practices for on-page SEO.
Some areas of SEO are quite labor-intensive. For instance, link-building campaigns can take months of steady work before they deliver results. If your competitors also run an SEO campaign, you may have to run your competing link-building campaign indefinitely.
If you have trouble getting your business to show up on search engines even after doing on-page SEO, it may be time to hire a full-time SEO professional or seek the services of a qualified SEO agency.
Start Improving Your Business Website Today
These are just some of the things you can do to improve your website. Thankfully, you don’t need a lot of resources to implement most of these improvements. You’ll also find a number of digital marketing agencies in the Philippines that perform some or all of the improvements above.
By making these important updates to your business website, you can easily ensure that your business can cultivate the online presence it needs to compete in its niche.
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