For any business, a great website is essential for your company’s success.
For starters, we help businesses with research to obtain a good domain name. Domain names are important for usability purposes, as well as for search engine optimization (SEO). It should be easy to spell and as short as possible. We do not use numbers or hyphens for our clients since they are harder for customers to remember. We also strive to use keywords as part of the domain name which helps with search engines and prospects as well.
Hosting Accounts
We assist our clients with choosing and setting up a hosting provider. Hosting services can cost anywhere between $2 to $100+ per month, depending on the kind of services and traffic that your website needs. We use hosting companies that offer a server interface like cPanel to access your server. Daily backup plans are installed and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.
It is important for your website to let people know who you are and what you do right away so they don’t feel confused when they visit your site. We like to utilize a homepage banner (also known as a “hero image”) and subsequent banners are visual representations of your services, and also use an introductory text statement near the top of the page to describes who you are and what you do.
Additionally, make sure both your main and footer navigation menus have “About Us” page links easily accessible so people can click them and read more about your business in depth.
Content management system
A content management system (CMS) is a software program or application that is used to create and manage digital content. A good CMS will help you maintain your site, and you don’t need much technical knowledge to use it. You should choose a CMS that is designed for your unique needs; different systems are used for different reasons, such as user-friendliness, extensibility, and budget.
WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS. It has a vast, active support community and many valuable plugins to extend the functionality of the site. We prefer the WordPress platform because of it’s flexibility and extensibility.
We maintain all websites with regularly scheduled maintenance and software updates as needed. Keeping your WordPress site secure is a key aspect of our services.
E-Commerce
If you plan on selling goods and/or services through your website, you will need the right technology to do so. We set up merchant processing and secure credit card processing
Here are some popular small business e-commerce platforms:
WooCommerce: WooCommerce is one of the world’s most popular e-commerce platforms—it can turn your WordPress website into an online store. Like WordPress, there are many plugins available, and it attaches to WordPress, which makes it extremely flexible. There are many free and premium themes pre-built for WooCommerce. WooCommerce also offers a very high amount of capabilities and scalability that small businesses need.
Engaging website content
Relevant content is the most important factor in the website. Customers are using your website codetermine if you can help them with your products and services. We ensure that your small business website clearly communicates your services.
Content best practices:
- Beautiful graphics, high-resolution images and easy-to-read fonts.
- Graphics are compressed and optimized for fast loading. If your website is slow, search engines like Google will penalize your ranking.
- Research the competition to see how they have designed and optimized their websites; implement similar components that will work for your small business website.
- Research your target audience to see what they want from your site and make it easy for them to accomplish it.
- Stay consistently on brand throughout your website design.
- Design an intuitive navigation system which allows users to get to the pages they need quickly.
- Publish easily accessible contact information.
- Incorporate obvious call-to-actions (especially “buy now” buttons).
- Create pages that are standard for small business websites, such as:
- Home
- About us
- Products/Services (with descriptions and visually appealing images)
- Sitemap (for SEO purposes)
- Management team
- Contact us
- Terms of use (the online contract governing how users can use your site)
- Privacy policy
- Additional pages relevant to your specific small business
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is a set of practices you apply to your website to ensure search engines index and rank your website appropriately and then show it to search engine users. Once your website is “crawled” by search engines, it competes with websites that have similar content. The better your website design and content is, the higher your site will show up on search engine result pages.
SEO typically includes the following practices:
- Keyword research and implementation
- Optimal website code
- Fast loading speed
- Being secure and having an SSL certificate installed; SSL is the standard security technology that ensures data passed between web servers and browsers remains private
- Having a mobile-friendly site
- Existence of high-quality backlinks (links on external websites with related content) that lead to your site
- Having positive reviews online (Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.)
- Using internal links throughout your site to keep people clicking and reading
- Using social media to link to your site (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.)
SEO is an extremely important ongoing process that can mean the difference between showing up on the first page of search engine results pages (resulting in large amounts of free traffic to your website) or page 300 (resulting in no traffic).
Quality content
Both content quantity and freshness are important to search engines, so it’s important to publish quality articles and/or blog posts on your site and on external sites that link to your site. If you want to rank highly in search engine results and encourage people to return to your site again and again, you will have to update your website with new and relevant content as frequently as possible.
In addition to static page content and articles, a great form of content to post on your website is testimonials. Asking for testimonials from your customers and then publishing them on your website is a great way to post fresh, high-quality content on your site that makes your small business more attractive.
Webmaster tools
We utilize data to help analyze site traffic and site performance by installing Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These tools can be used to track the following types of information:
- Daily, weekly, and monthly visitors to your site
- Number of views on each page of your site
- “Bounce rate”—the percentage of users who come to your site and leave after having only viewed one page (Google algorithms give higher rankings to websites that have a low bounce rate, on the theory that visitors are spending more time on the site and find it valuable.)
- Average time spent on site by visitors
- Crawl errors on your site (errors that the search engines found on your site in crawling its content)
- Broken links on the site
- Keywords that lead users to your site
- Backlinks to your site
- Web page download time
- Other information that can help you enhance your SEO
Website maintenance
A website shouldn’t be created and then allowed to grow stale. In order to have a successful website that ranks well in search engines and doesn’t get hacked, you need to make sure it is properly maintained.
Typical website maintenance plans:
- Webmaster Tools data at least once a month and have any vital errors emailed to you in real time.
- Use traffic data to learn more about your audience so you can better cater to them.
- Use performance data to optimize and fix warnings and errors.
- Make sure all software is always up to date.
- Run security scans so you know your website is clean of malware and hasn’t been hacked.
- Use “split testing” to see if certain variations of your website help performance; for example, if you are selling a product, you might have two versions of a particular landing page with different images and wording—the split testing allows you to see which version has a higher conversion rate.
- Continually publish quality content.
- Continue to check out your competition from time to time to see what they are doing with their online presence and see if what they’ve done can work for you as well.
- Make sure your website is backed up in multiple ways at least once a day and at least 10 days back.