5 Must-Have Features for Every Business Website

08/30/201709/07/2017 mwon

A staggering 46% of small businesses are operating without a website, but 24% plan to build one in the near future.

Today, every company needs a website that caters to your customers’ exact needs. Any prospect looking for information on your business, ethics, products, shipping process, and anything else they could possibly need to know before buying should be able to find it.

Which features must be on your website?

Social Media Integration

Social media is critical for every business. It allows you to market to existing and prospective customers, and reach a wider demographic. After all, 22 percent of the planet’s population is on Facebook, while over 50 million companies have Facebook Business Pages.

Beyond Facebook, 93 percent of Pinterest’s users plan or make purchases, and 88 percent of companies use Twitter as a marketing tool.

Add buttons to your website and enable visitors to check out your social pages with just a click. This helps to boost engagement and is invaluable as a fast customer-service tool.

Multiple Contact Channels

If customers go to your ‘contact us’ page only to find an email address or an international phone number (with expensive charges), they may well be put off. It appears unprofessional and suggests your business has little interest in receiving feedback.

Provide users with email addresses (one for product queries, one for complaints), local phone numbers, and live chat. This latter option is vital today, providing a free chance to exchange text-based messages with support agents in real-time.

High-End Security

Never take security for granted. For businesses handling online transactions, an SSL certificate will show customers that you take their safety seriously, and all critical details (credit card numbers, bank-account numbers etc.) are encrypted.

With an SSL certificate, a tiny green padlock will appear to the left of your HTTPS URL. Today’s online consumers are security-savvy, so invest in the best you can.

Clear, Logical Navigation

Make navigating your website as quick, simple, and logical as possible. Use clear names for pages in your tabs and site maps (About, Contact, FAQ etc.), and use calls to action to help visitors find the most important pages, such as specific product catalogs or live chat.

Imagine yourself as a customer visiting your website for the first time. Where would you want to go first? Would you be able to get their with your current design? Explore the site with this mindset and make note of any potential problems.

A Comprehensive FAQ

A variety of contact channels is key, as we mentioned above. However, add an FAQ to your website so visitors can help themselves before having to get in touch with your support team.

Again, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What would you want to know? List as many questions as you can think of, and then add any others being asked on a regular basis.

At Nett Solutions, we’re a leading Orange County digital marketing agency. If you want to know more about boosting engagement and maximizing your online performance, give us a call now.

3 New SEO Audit Checks for 2017 And Beyond

07/27/201709/07/2017 mwon

Regular SEO audits are essential for every website. This relates to all of the elements that are integral to your domain’s visibility, and a thorough audit may well improve your performance.

An SEO audit will let you examine why you may be struggling to achieve the SEO results you hope for. You can identify the weakest aspects of your campaign, giving you the information you need to formulate a new direction. You should aim to perform a full SEO audit in each quarter, or whenever you feel your progress has stalled.

If the time has come to run an SEO audit on your website, here are three new checks for 2017 – and beyond!

Run an Audit on your Internal Links

Your internal links help to establish your site’s architecture: you want to have relevant pages connected to each other, to help increase your ranking and ensure users can navigate your site in a logical way.

Wikipedia is testament to the power of good internal links, and helps explain how that site manages to retain such authority: practically each page on Wikipedia is packed with relevant, organic links to other pages right across the site.

If you haven’t performed an audit on your internal links, make sure you do this from now on.

Your keywords should be scattered across your site’s content organically, rather than clustered together. Your anchor text should use high-quality keywords, and pages linked together have to be related (directing a user to an irrelevant page may chase them away).

Your most important pages should always be within three clicks of your homepage, while any broken links have to be fixed (or replaced) immediately.

Check Indexing

When search engines index your website, they collate information on its relevancy and quality. Effective internal links are vital to help search engine crawlers navigate your site properly, to avoid missing any important pages.

Part of running an SEO audit on your site is deciding which of your pages are meant to be indexed and which should be left alone. Any pages lacking valuable content, such as your terms and conditions, should be excluded from the indexing project. Duplicate content needs to be left out of the indexing process, too.

You can tell crawlers to exclude a specific page by creating a ‘no index’ meta tag to said page’s HTML code.

Make Sure Your Site’s Mobile-Friendly

Every website has to be mobile-friendly today, given that Google has started indexing mobile domains rather than desktop ones. As a result, you need to make sure your website is optimized for mobiles as a priority.

You can use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test application to evaluate your site’s compatibility, and identify any major weaknesses. You should also track your mobile rankings, and consider switching to AMP(Accelerated Mobile Pages).

These are pared-down, lightweight pages designed to load within 8 seconds. These run without certain elements found in standard HTML, such as submission forms and JavaScript.

Want to know more about how an SEO audit can boost your online visibility? Get in touch with Nett Solutions – we’re an Orange County SEO agency ready and willing to help!

Reasons Why a Remarketing Campaign Might Not Be Driving Results

07/17/201708/01/2017 mwon

What is remarketing?

Let’s keep this simple. Remarketing is basically a way to continually target your customers after they leave your site, thanks to the power of data-gathering cookies.

When visitors leave your website or app without completing a transaction, your AdWord ads will feature on domains within the Google Display Network to re-engage said users. This minimizes the danger of losing their interest altogether.

While a remarketing campaign can play a powerful part in your online advertising, you may find it fails to drive traffic back to your website as soon as you would like.

Sounds familiar? Don’t panic!

A number of factors might be to blame. Let’s look at the usual suspects. (more…)

What Are Website Analytics Tools Good For?

09/16/2016 mwon

Website analytics tools are essential for monitoring your online performance. Without this data-tracking software in your arsenal, you stand to miss out on critical information. Every business looking to compete today has to maximize its online visibility and customer-engagement using the best tools available, and analytics data allows you to identify your strengths and weaknesses.

What benefits does analytics software offer? (more…)

Rankings Are Not A Good Marketing Goal – Here’s Why

06/24/2016 mwon

orange county search engine placement Once upon a time, not so long ago, rankings were the be-all and end-all of internet marketing. Businesses hiring a team of SEO consultants would expect their brand to appear on the top page of Google permanently, and some were willing to pay for this result regardless of the techniques employed.

This focus on visibility over credibility or ethics led to websites carrying hidden content, keyword-stuffed text (which was all but unreadable for users), and paid links from poor-quality sites. Since then, thankfully, search engines have clamped down on such behavior, rewarding domains which rely on solid content and smart techniques while penalizing those with black-hat methods.

Today, rankings and rankings alone are not a good marketing goal; there are more important things in a successful campaign. Here’s why. (more…)

5 Ways To Speed Up Your Site

05/19/201605/31/2016 mwon

Your website has many plates to spin at the same time.

First, the visuals must be attractive enough to grab visitors and keep them engaged. Your layout must be clear and well-structured enough to navigate with ease. Your content must be well-written, easy to scan, and appropriate for your target demographic.

However, one area you might not give enough consideration is speed. (more…)

Does A Page Title Matter Anymore?

04/17/201605/31/2016 mwon

are page titles still important? As search engines evolve, businesses may well struggle to keep their websites optimized for the latest algorithm.

Failing to update a site is a huge mistake, and the subsequent drop in rankings can cause setbacks for a brand – and putting it right costs time and resources. Most of the changes implemented by Google are designed to improve user-experience and help sites of the highest quality perform better, but falling behind can be hugely annoying (to say the least). Knowing how to stay in-line with the latest trends, though, is hard. (more…)