The Importance Of Maintaining A Healthy Business Website

Your business website is the face of your company to millions of potential customers all over the world. Despite the importance of a website, there are plenty of business owners who do not invest the resources necessary to keep their website healthy and relevant. Aside from being the first impression your business makes to potential new clients, there are several other reasons why it is important to maintain your website.

Around The Clock Revenue

The ecommerce portion of your website should be available to your customers 24-hours a day. The convenience of an ecommerce section to your website is what attracts some customers to your business in the first place. Instead of having to spend time calling your sales department or trying to get in touch with their dedicated sales professional, your customers can just go online and place orders. When your website is not maintained properly, your revenue is significantly affected.

Customer Support

Your website is a place where customers can go to get answers to their questions, and submit product return forms to take care of product issues. When your website is not properly maintained, those functions suffer and the level of support you offer to your customers drops considerably. If you want to keep your customers happy, then you need to maintain your website to ensure the type of support your customers are used to.

SEO Ranking

The SEO criteria for major search engines changes quite frequently. One of the more important aspects of good SEO practices is to keep your website maintained and updated with new content. When you neglect your website, it will start to fall on the search result pages of all of the major search engines. The further your website falls in the search result pages, the more revenue-generating traffic you will lose.

Upgrading Is Easier

A healthy website owned by a proactive business professional gets updated more often than most people may realize. When a website is properly maintained, it is easier to upgrade portions of the website without disrupting business too much. But when a website has been neglected, upgrading any portion of it can take a very long time.

Security

Perhaps one of the most important reasons to maintain a healthy website is to maintain your website’s security. A website needs constant updates to protect client information, and to prevent hackers from disrupting the company’s servers. It seems like every month a new company is getting hacked and information is getting lost. One of the most effective ways to secure your website from hackers is to make sure that it is maintained properly, and that your security functions are checked constantly by an online security expert.

The truth is that any company website that is not maintained and updated by a professional digital marketing company is at risk of becoming vulnerable to hackers, and losing money for the website owner. If you want to get the most out of your website, then talk to a digital marketing company about a full evaluation of your site, and then sign up for a good ongoing maintenance program. A healthy website can bring your company revenue and opportunities. A poorly maintained website will bring your company misery.

Four Features Your E-Commerce Website Must Have

A good e-commerce website has features that benefit your company, and features that benefit your customers. When all of those features come together, you get a website that generates profit while bringing back repeat business. It is important for a website owner to understand what customers expect from an e-commerce website, and it is critical that the website owner know what features are going to help them to maximize the return on their e-commerce website.

If you plan to sell products on your website, then you need to hire a professional developer to create an e-commerce website that will benefit your business. Only an expert will be able to properly mix the features your customers are looking for with the elements you need to run a successful business.

A Good Shopping Cart

A good shopping cart is one of those features that benefits you and your customers. It benefits you because you can use a variety of remarketing tactics to keep customers updated on products that would be of interest to them, and it allows you to pursue customers who fill up a cart and then never go through the checkout process.

The shopping cart can be beneficial to your customers if it allows your customers to make changes to their orders before they check out, and if it shows your customers the accessories available for the products they have purchased. The key to a strong e-commerce website is a good shopping cart.

Real-Time Inventory Updates

There was a time when e-commerce websites found it difficult to maintain a real-time inventory for their customers, and that usually resulted in angry customers who did not bring repeat business. But these days, a professional web developer can put together a back end program that will allow you to maintain an updated inventory for your website, and generate the reports you will need to make good purchasing decisions.

Upsells

When a customer buys a product on a good e-commerce website, that customer is immediately given a list of other products customers have purchased after buying that particular product. Over the years, upsells on e-commerce websites have become as valuable to the customers as they have to the companies.

Customers appreciate being reminded about accessories and companion products they will need for the purchases they are making, which is why a robust upsell feature on your e-commerce website is critical for bringing customers back for repeat business.

Clearance Offers

Some e-commerce websites try to hide their clearance offers as an inconspicuous link at the bottom of the front page. If you want to create a dedicate base of repeat customers, then you need to make those clearance offers prominent and put them in a significant place on the front page of your website.

You have products that are coming to their end-of-life that you either need to sell, or be prepared to take a loss on them. When you have a dynamic and prominent clearance section on your e-commerce website, you will develop a market for your clearance products that will help you generate revenue on products that have otherwise come to the end of their retail lives.

An e-commerce website requires plenty of ways to interact with customers if it wants to be successful. When you hire a professional marketing company to develop your e-commerce website, you will get the basic elements you need to see a strong return on your company’s investment.

Three Reasons You Cannot Do Your Own SEO

As a professional Internet marketing firm, it is our job to get your website the kind of traffic that you need. Some people see what we do as marketing professionals and feel that they can get the same results on their own. But it takes years to become experts in SEO and Internet marketing, which is why SEO is definitely not something you should do on your own.

If you are considering a homemade SEO plan to improve your web traffic, then we propose that you just talk to one of our experts to get a professional opinion. We don’t use big words or complicated phrases to impress you because that would not be beneficial to your website or to our business. But we can explain to you, in detail, the three reasons why you should never attempt to do SEO on your own.

Bad SEO Means Bad Results

One of the most common and dangerous misconceptions about DIY SEO is that it cannot do any harm to just try it out and see how it goes. There is no faster way to damage your website’s status on the major search engines than to engage in bad SEO. The longer you use bad SEO practices, the more damage you will do and the longer it will take to repair.

What is bad SEO? Keyword stuffing and using purchased links are two sure ways to get a Google penalty that can take months to remove. But there are many other ways that dabbling in SEO on your own can damage your website’s online reputation and prevent you from getting the kind of traffic you need.

The Rules Change Constantly

Google has put in several algorithm updates since 2012 and there are more updates yet to come. Yahoo! and Bing are also altering the way that they address SEO content and that has a direct effect on your website.

The rules for good SEO content change on a regular basis. If you want to be able to create good SEO, then you need to stay up to date on all of those changes. As a professional Internet marketing firm, we make it our job to stay updated on every change and alter SEO policies accordingly. We know that good SEO practices this year could be banned next year and that is why you need to stay on top of everything to do with SEO.

You Need Resources

We have teams of marketing experts, website developers and content creators available to execute the perfect SEO program for your website. If you do not have access to those types of professional resources, then your SEO program will never give you the results you need. We can put together an SEO plan that will raise your web traffic, generate you more revenue and get your website right where it needs to be.

Internet marketing is a complex profession that takes many years to master. A professional marketing organization such as ours employs a wide variety of experts to make sure that every SEO program we put together is successful. Instead of taking chances and possibly being damaged by bad, DIY SEO tactics, you should give one of our experts a call today and let us put together an SEO plan that will work.

Five things you can do to maximize sales on your e-commerce site

Do you want to know the secret ingredient to making more online sales? It’s simple – KNOWLEDGE. The more information a customer has on your product, the easier it is to buy. In order to quench that thirst, it’s important to be able to provide them with lots of tools in order to make that decision making process move smoothly and quickly.

This week’s post will help you do just that. Here are the five knowledge-based tools every e-commerce site should have in order to make more sales online.

Reviews & Ratings

If you were to poll your average e-commerce shopper, this is almost always the #1 thing on their request list. Reviews and star ranking help make buying decisions easier, especially if your product is great. One of the reasons Amazon is as successful as it is, is due to their reviews, both positive and negative.

And that’s an important piece, too – not to reject negative reviews. Anyone who ever sees too many positive reviews will most likely become suspicious of a product. Remember that old saying ‘if it’s too good to be true it probably is?” That applies here. Negative reviews, even though they’ll make you a little nervous – help provide a more balanced, organic, honest view of your product and in many cases and actually ENHANCE your product’s chances of being sold. No one has a perfect product, so don’t worry about being all things to all people.

Size, Dimensions and everything in between

One of the downsides to shopping online is that you don’t always get to hold things in your hand and get an idea of their size in person. One time we ordered a coffee maker that was a lot smaller than we thought it would be. It’s not a bad thing per se – because it makes awesome coffee – but it’s always helpful to get an idea of how big something is or what it can look like when someone’s interacting with it or wearing it.

If you want a really great example of how to do something like this – go to Apple and look at their laptop section. They do a good job of vividly explaining the size and scale of their products, while giving you a visual representation of the size difference from model to model.

Pictures

Yes, pictures are worth a thousand words, but they can also significantly enhance a customer’s perception of what your product is or feels like. If you can provide a 360-view of a product, do it. If you can provide multiple photos in a slide show – do it. Give the customer as many different looks at your product as possible. We’ve heard customers complain about a lot of things – and not having enough pictures is almost always one that comes up. However, we’ve never heard them complain about there being too many pictures. Provide LOTS of visuals!

Living with the product

Here’s where the language piece comes into play. Remember how we mentioned the customers can’t feel or touch your product? Another way that can become an obstacle to a sale is that they can’t play with it and figure out where it’ll fit into their life and how they’ll actually live and exist with the product in their house on a day to day basis.

That’s why it’s important for you to express – and vividly at that – how the product is used, examples of what it can help a customer accomplish, where it can be stored, emptied, refilled, who can use it, etc. What’s the life of your product like and what is it like to have it as a roommate? Doing so helps to get the customer thinking of things and places in their life where that product will exist.

Practical language

If your product has a great new piece of technology or a complex feature that’ll be appealing to your customer – then that’s great. Just make sure you’re explaining what it does in a way that your customers can understand.

So for example – if you’re Apple and you’ve got an amazing new processor, don’t spend time explaining how the power of the processor goes from point A to point B on the mother board. Explain what it does for the customer. Tell them how it enables them to accomplish any task they want to or quickly and seamlessly switch from task to task. The technical stuff – it’s important, but it’s not necessarily relevant. Keep your language and descriptions benefit-rich and straight-forward. Not complex and difficult to understand!