Showing posts with label Tips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tips. Show all posts

Monday, September 26, 2016

Important 10 Features of a Good Business Website

Essential Features Every Small Business Website Must Have - webtady
We know everybody it’s crucial to have a small business website and it’s an important asset for your company to compete with your competitor in marketplace. Your website represents your business strength and popularity in market. The success of your small business depends on your good website today.
Here are 10 Features that optimize your site to gather traffic to your site:
1. Clearly Visible Contact Information
Make sure your targeted visitor easily get your contact information and business location. Also build a page for all contact information and location that provides all of your important contact information, including phone number, email address, location with a map, and hours of operation. Then add a contact us button at the top to your small business website and add to footer also, and this contact us button will remain with all pages to your website.

At the end all of your contents add a link to Call today to set up your free consultation (for example), directing them to a contact form or directly to your email or phone.

2. Balanced and Accurate Content
Without good and unique content, your website is nothing. Always write the unique and accurate contents for your website. Many business owner people think that more content will do as long as it fills up their WebPages and its looks nice. The fact is nothing could be further from the truth. Your website should needs to be filled with actual information that people will find helpful so that they will convert into your business customers. Also, make sure that your consumers don’t collect wrong information about your business. Don’t copy and post others content to your website, use a program like Copyscape to check all of your content to make sure there is nothing copied.

Important one thing Your WebPages information’s should be easy to read and understand.

3. Calls to Action
Always make sure about add Call to Action for easy communication with your website visitor. A Call to Action should have in several pages and places in your website, both before the bottom and fold of homepage. It’s important to add your phone number and a hyperlink to your contact us page as a highlighted box. Make a website with attractive Call to Action.
When you put an email address or a phone number on the site, don’t upload this information as an image — the number or address should be able to be clicked on or copied right from the site in order to place the call or send an email conveniently and quickly. Nowadays most smart phones these days have the ability to do "Click to Call" options on the web, so make the process as easy as possible for users.

4. Mobile-Friendly Experience
At the end of 2012, nearly a quarter of Web traffic was from mobile and other smart devices. People will be looking at your website on their Personal computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. In this situation you must design your website with mobile and other smart device optimized. Most of the small business company making their websites as mobile responsive. It is important that your website is mobile-friendly or device responsive. There are two ways to do this. One is to create another website that would have a URL same to your website such as m.yourwebsite.com. These sites are created just for mobile devices and require a separate website, URL, host, domain, etc.

The most important thing, that is to make sure that your site is mobile friendly or device responsive because Google is now giving preference in ranking to sites that are device responsive.

5. Search Engine Optimization
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the most important thing for your website; SEO will help you to appear your website on top position search engine tools like google.com, yahoo.com, bing.com. Search engines have two main functions: crawling and indexing sites, and search engine providing a ranked list of websites based on their relevance to the search term and keywords. You can use Google webmaster tools to manage your SEO tools and research on your website visitors.

Note: Google is the most uses search engine tool, Support for International search engines including market leaders such as Baidu, Rambler, Yandex, AUM and Naver are critical path for a successful SEO program at an enterprise level.

6. User-Friendly Functionality
You have to know that, most of the users are not familiar with website and its functionality they don’t know too much. You have to make your website very easy and user friendly functionality. How long does it take for your page to load? It’s also an important thing to consider, people never wait for a long time if your takes long during loading time. Are all the links working and not broken? Is the formatting of your site up to date? Make sure that your all links is properly working or not, always up to date your site.

Using flash is may detract from your site’s effectiveness. Flash is not SEO friendly and takes long time to load it makes slow your website. Most of the smartphones does not support flash display, so by using it, you may be alienating some of your mobile visitors.

7. Social Media Integration

Social media is the most visited sites today; your business must have social media awareness. Social media is massive in today’s connected business environment. Consumers expect to be able to communicate with businesses through social like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and more. Social media is an excellent way to reach your customers to learn more about you, connect with other fans, and get the information they need in order to decide to do business with you. If you observe social media as a serious and productive marketing tool for your business and you factor in time in your work week to connect with people through social media channels, the presence of social media buttons on your site is an absolute must have.

You’ll want to make sure your social media buttons are visible on every page of your website, so factor in how big or small the icons should be and their location.

8. Blog
Blog is the most strategic business communication tool for small business website that can help you to reach your potential clients and consumers. It establishes you as a subject-matter expert that can provide free valuable content to your customers, building your fan base of followers/readers. It will help you bring more traffic to your small business website and possibly convert those visitors into buyers.

9. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Your visitors have lots of questions. They will contact with you via email or phone to know about their questions, if you answer all potential question on FAQ page then they will understand clearly. Questions often revolve around materials and ingredients used, shipping information, company history, sizing (for apparel brands) and cancellation or return policies etc. FAQ sections serve multiple purposes. First, it’s a demonstration that people are using your site regularly, which increases your visible authority. Second, if your users are even slightly interested in your business, they have an easy place to find volumes of common information.

10. Subscription Invitations
Something to hold in thoughts while you build a small business commercial enterprise website is that a newsletter is a fantastic way of producing repeat enterprise for a small enterprise, tell your clients about upcoming promotions, gives and new services. Sending out a newsletter allows you to present yourself as a professional in your industry whilst offering your customers with precious information. The frequency of your publication will depend of the amount of content you may create. News letters may be sent out daily, weekly, bi-weekly or maybe monthly. Newsletters assist set up steady verbal exchange between you and your customers, additionally on-line publication signups give you the opportunity to construct an opt-in email list.


Shared from webtady.com

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

10 free online marketing tools that every “hands-on” marketer should use


The best tools for understanding your online marketplace?

I find that on training courses, the tools I recommend to help marketers are always popular, especially the free tools... At a course I was asked for a list of “essential tools” for digital marketing, so here they are…
2017 update: I originally created this list in 2012 and thought it was due an update since the feed reader tools and keyword tools have changed.

We aim to review and compare tools for managing different digital activities on Smart Insights, so we have many of these tools covered in other posts, so I’ll link to these where relevant.
There's a diverse mix of free tools available, one of the enjoyable aspects of working in digital marketing today. I’ll start with the most widely used. Please let us know about the “essential free tools” you use in the comments. For many more tools suggestions - check out our free guide.


Download free resource – Essential Digital Marketing Tools 2017
To help highlight the range of great online marketing services available, this guide and the infographic accompanying it recommend the categories of tools you should consider and highlights the 150 most popular, most capable tools. It helps Web design services for small business companies.

  • 1. Reviewing the latest developments in your industry
There still isn’t a better alternative than Google Alerts for reviewing mentions of your brand name, competitor or sector names by entering keywords, so it’s widely used.
Although RSS isn’t “in vogue” as it was 5+ years ago, I still find there’s no substitute for using this as a listening post for developments in your industry. When I wrote the previous post I used Google Reader to categorise sites to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in digital. When Google withdrew this since there was no revenue in it (Boo!) I used Reeder as an offline client on my Macbook Air and iOS for a while. But now I recommend Feedly since it's the most popular so you can see by the 'voice of the crowd' which posts are most popular.  Similar to the feature in PostRank that Google also killed off. Although feed readers aren't in fashion they are the most efficient way to scan the latest news in different categories. So if you don't use them try Feedly out - our analytics shows it's one of the most common referrers to Smart Insights - do bookmark us!


  • 2. Managing social media updates
I’ve used Hootsuite for posting updates to social networks and reviewing what others are saying for nearly five years now after using Tweetdeck back in the day - Twitter killed that one off for general use. Hootsuite seems to be comfortably the most popular free tool for posting and reviewing social media updates, but many still don’t know it, it can be used as a personal social media management tool too. It enables you to quickly post to all the main social networks including Google+ company pages and review conversations and messages. I’ve trialled many paid tools, but none come close. The paid version is worthwhile IMO for adding campaign tracking and extra reports.


  • 3. Finding influencers
There is no single free tool that works well for this - please suggest alternatives. You can use reputation tools like Klout, Kred or Peerindex, but I find that the use of Twitter autofollow means that this often skews the results.

LinkedIn sector skills used to be the best source for finding business influencers because of grouping by narrower topics - but LinkedIn killed this - monetisation again. LinkedIn advanced search is probably the best replacement.

I'm interested to know alternatives readers use here - please share in the comments or on social!

  • 4. Understanding customer search behavior
With search still driving the majority of visits, leads and sales for most businesses online, I believe that even marketers who outsource their SEO need to understand different types of customer behavior when searching to help develop strategies for getting visibility AND creating content and messages to help meet consumer needs. Custom website Design Company can be a potential keyword.
When I first wrote this post I recommended the Google Keyword Tool, but now it's been renamed to the Google Keyword Planner, but is still an indispensable tool alongside the Google Webmaster Tools integration now that The Growth of Not Provided keywords means we can't use analytics reliably to find referring keywords.  The Google Keyword Planner (tutorial) is still indispensable for this - I don’t think I have ever done a client training or consulting project where I haven’t used it! It's harder to get to now it's integrated into Google AdWords, but it's still free if you don't invest in AdWords.

Google Insights for search has now been folded into Google Trends essential for understanding seasonal search behavior trends in different countries.
Ubersuggest is also useful for summarizing the Suggest/Auto complete behavior in different countries to check you’re covering the main behaviors.

As I was researching this post for 2015 I noticed a new 'Tool on the Block' for keyword analysis - check out KeywordTool.io. It's like UberSuggest, but with better formatting - I often use this to show how local consumer behavior differs, for example I was giving a training workshop to a Shredders manufacturer - quite a different term en France par example: Cheap website design service for small business
  • 5. Competitor site benchmarking
It used to be that Google AdPlanner was unbeatable for comparing audience size and dimension. That's been folded into AdWords as the Campaign Planner and now limited to media sites, but still useful for finding size and quality of audience for partner and media sites and don't forget about the related Google Placement Targeting Tool useful for remarketing and research.
Today, my 'go to' tool for benchmarking is Similar Web, a freemium tool launched in 2013 and offering free stats on all sites including referrers. Here's how Smart Insights looks:


Chris Soames has a post here on the main sites for competitor benchmarking. You will probably have to fall back on Alexa or Compete today which don’t tend to give realistic estimates outside of the US. I have also have an in-depth post recommending many other online competitor benchmarking tools.

  • 6. Off-page backlink analysis for SEO
Lots of tools in this category, see our comparison of 6 best backlink analysis tools.
Of these, Majestic and Moz Open Site Explorer have to be the “must use” tools. I think for non-SEOs, the Backlink History is great for basic benchmarking of competitor success in gaining backlinks although link quality isn’t shown. It should use the tools for your Ecommerce website Design Company.


  • 7. On-page markup analysis for SEO
Hubspots Site, now Marketing Grader for reviewing on-page for SEO is often mentioned as a useful tool by people on courses.
For reviewing on-page markup like headings and also mobile screen resizing I find Chris Pederick's Web Developer Toolbar for Chrome and Firefox essential. The Moz Toolbar is better from an SEO POV. Here's an example of the overlay to show our 'semantic markup':


  • 8. Understanding overall online marketing effectiveness
I believe that Google Analytics or an equivalent is essential for all who work in marketing to master at some level.
To help here, we have many articles of advice you can access from our Google Analytics hub. The most popular is on using Google Analytics for social media marketing.

If you know all these tools, try the Google Agency Toolkit where they group all their tools together.
Looking for a more comprehensive range of tools? See this excellent directory from Razor Social collated by Ian Cleary for a bigger selection of online marketing tools and services where you can select by category.
I hope this compilation is useful, what do you find most useful of the digital marketing tools we have covered here and other tools we don't?


Shared from: www.smartinsights.com
Written by : Dave Chaffey