Building a Website with Business Growth in Mind
For the modern business, your website domain is a storefront, shop floor and cash register. This is where you’ll be directing traffic, presenting your services and carrying out transactions – needless to say, it’s important to get it right. Designworks shares a few tips to get things started.
Domain Names
In the year 2022, high-value URLs are in fierce competition, and for good reason – if you can snap up a desirable, relevant .com address, you’re likely to see higher traffic and better SEO rankings. This is also important for improving your ‘locate-ability’ with clients/customers who have heard about your company and are trying to find it online. Ideally, when deciding upon a company name, you should consider how well it translates to the online space and whether it links up well with a website domain.
Integrative Capabilities
When working with developers, it’s important to build a site that has flexibility in mind. Data is going to be key for your business, regardless of its purpose – therefore your site should have the ability to host Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Good engineers will have built functionality with the main programs (SAP, Net-suite, Oracle, Sage etc.), equipping the website with the ability to send and receive data. To help your developers, it’s important to start thinking early on about your data points and long-term, website-related OKRs.
Customer experience is going to be increasingly difficult to manage as your business expands. That’s why it’s so crucial to start off on the right foot when it comes to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Proficient software will help you to better understand customer satisfaction, track their behavior across your site and automate data entry, helping to take the onus off your sales reps. This is why your website must possess the integrative capabilities to handle a number of CRM functions, else you’ll miss out on crucial data and be forced to do much more of the legwork yourself.
Payment Methods
In 2021, e-commerce sales accounted for 14.1% of all retail sales worldwide. From a global perspective, e-commerce is growing exponentially, and businesses that fail to adapt to the buying habits of the consumer are likely to miss out. To stay competitive, you’ll need to find a payment system that works for you and your customers/clients that can integrate with your site/app. Using a bank balance API through a trustworthy third party to connect your app and their bank account ensures you don’t have to deal with credit card fees, and they can have peace of mind knowing their account information is secure.
SEO Rankings for your Website
Trying to gain exposure online is a daunting prospect for small businesses. There are companies with entire marketing teams dedicated to improving SEO ranking or running impression campaigns via social media. The key, then, is to work tactically and get the simple things right. Focus on your particular niche and single out a handful of specific keywords that relate to your company’s USP – then sprinkle these across your site in line with Google’s SEO advice. If you have a blog, be sure to make clever use of backlinks, and cover a range of topics that relate back to your own services.
Your website is often the first and only touch-point with customers, especially during a pandemic when footfall has decreased and consumers are migrating to the digital space. As you build a business, this is one area that requires and deserves your full attention.
For over 16 years, Design Works has served small businesses not only in the Portland metro area but worldwide. We’ve built a strong and reliable company offering web design, maintenance and security, SEO Online Stores and hosting, to hundreds of businesses. Learn more about our services at www.designworksnw.com
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