Many businesses don’t know that steroids are actually legal in business.
You think I’m kidding?
Well actually I am kidding, but not entirely. There is one component on your business that should actually be on steroids.
Your website. Your website is arguably the most important conduit of information for your customers.
It needs to illustrate what you do and who you are in a simple format that is easy to comprehend.
That being said, your website needs to be easy to find too.
In summary, your website needs to be built for performance and optimised to suit your intended audience.
That is a difficult question to quantify into dollars, but a major factor to consider is that you own your website – think about that for a minute, it is YOUR asset.
When businesses pay to advertise or promote their business on the internet by utilising Google AdWords for instance, the gains and return on investment are attractive.
What isn’t attractive is when Google decides to change its strategy. When it does, they really don’t inform anybody. If you remember not long ago when you typed a keyword to search a topic in Google, the search results page had lots of paid advertising listed down the right hand side.
Literally overnight, Google changed strategy and stopped running advertising in this style – hardly noticeable unless you were an advertiser right?
Marketers coined this decision “The Right Side Wipeout”. Sure, Google continued to offer other ways to advertise in their space, but the negative impacts will create a ripple effect for some time.
Just the sheer facts that you own your website and have control over it should be virtues that support its value.
With millions of pages of information on the world wide web (www) it is easy to get lost, and optimising your website so that it is easy to find and easy to comprehend is paramount in such a competitive space.
It is beyond the scope of a blog to dig too deeply into the metrics, science and skills are needed to do this but here are some optimisation areas of opportunity that can perhaps enlighten your curiosities.
Website speed will definitely affect website performance and frustrate your audience. Specifics such as page size, page requests and page speed are all contributors.
Search engine optimisation is a commonly used term that is very complex and often misunderstood. We commonly see actual SEO businesses that get it wrong.
Why? Because SEO principles and strategies need to constantly evolve to match the constantly evolving nature of the internet. Education in this area needs to be perpetual. Specifics such as meta descriptions, page titles, headings and sitemaps are all areas that need to be managed to fully embrace true search engine optimisation.
With so much web browsing on devices other than a desktop compute, we need our websites to have a responsive design to cater to the different needs of each device. i.e. Your website needs to look and read well whether it is being displayed on a phone, tablet, PDA, desktop or laptop.
It is no good to perform a mountain of effort in ensuring that people can search and find your website on the internet and then the information that they really want to read is off the screen, not visible or is difficult to find once they are on your website.
The obvious assumption here is that we have to keep our website safe and secure. Transparent security gives your audience the confidence in your ability to conduct business and adds to your credibility.
Your business will be perceived as authentic. It is easy to see that on an ecommerce website that security is a critical aspect – for any website that buys or sells a good or service and involves transmission of funds and/or data, security is a wise investment. Security adds value.
This blog is written to be thought provoking and only really scratching the surface of the specifics relating to website performance and website optimisation strategies.
If you would like to get a personal consultation click the below link to get the ball rolling.