Future-Proof Your Business: 8 Ways to Enhance Your Website
Are you concerned about your company’s financial future? If so, it’s time to leverage cost-effective strategies that can spur significant business growth, even in uncertain times. Many entrepreneurs find that digital marketing fits the bill, and improving your website should be an integral part of your digital marketing strategy.
If you need guidance on producing new media assets for your website and social media channels, STLL Studios is here for you! Furthermore, these tips will show you how to manage communications with freelance web design professionals, earn a degree in software development, and apply various improvements to your website, from accelerating loading speeds to launching a blog.
Communicating With Professionals
Perhaps you’re already quite skilled in web design, search engine optimization, content marketing, and other practical talents that you need to apply to develop an attractive, functional website. In this case, you might tackle your redesign project on your own. But if these are not your areas of expertise, you’ll likely need to work with freelance professionals in these fields to enhance your website.
When you’re working with freelancers, communicating clearly is of the utmost importance to stay on track with your project progress. For example, if you have certain ideas in mind for a logo, you’ll need to send your graphic designer relevant images or mock-ups. If you know what changes you want to make to your site layout, you can send your web designer sketches that illustrate your vision. Providing freelancers with documents like this can help prevent miscommunication.
If you’re sending Microsoft Word documents or PowerPoint presentations back and forth, be aware that the formatting may not show up exactly the same on every computer. Therefore, it’s best to use PDFs to send this information instead because this medium will preserve the format of your original document. To convert documents to PDFs, just drag and drop your files into a conversion tool.
Deepen Your IT Knowledge
While hiring freelance professionals is often the easiest way to move forward with a website redesign project, you may be interested in deepening your own knowledge of software, information technology, and digital infrastructure. You could enroll in a boot camp covering these topics, or you could take your journey further by earning a degree in IT, computer science, software development, or a related field.
Consider enrolling in a convenient online program that allows you to study while working. In a program like this, you’ll learn all about programming, scripting, new developments in the field, and best practices within different digital systems. To earn an online software development degree, make sure to search for accredited programs!
Accelerate Your Website’s Loading Speed
Have you ever visited a website that took a long time to load? Perhaps you had to visit that specific website to carry out a particular task, so you simply waited out the long loading time. But what if you could go to a different website to get the information you needed? Chances are, you clicked away and visited another site.
Slow page loading speeds can discourage site visitors from staying on the page or returning to your site in the future. Consumers expect web pages to load quickly, and if your website loads slowly, you could easily lose out on business to your competitors. To improve your site’s loading speed, Circle S Studio recommends optimizing any images and videos that appear on your site by sizing them correctly and compressing them when possible, installing a caching page plugin, and even upgrading your web hosting package, especially if your traffic has grown substantially since launching your site.
Simplify Navigation
Maybe you’ve visited a website that was difficult to navigate. You might have been looking for a particular business’s contact information, seeking information about a specific product or service, or simply trying to find the company’s “About” page. But after clicking through several links that looked like they might direct you to the right page, you still haven’t found what you’re looking for.
Dealing with a situation like this can be very discouraging. If your own company’s website is difficult to navigate, your customers will have a negative experience. However, it can be tough to figure out how to improve your site’s navigation from your customer’s point of view - after all, you know how to access every page!
To ensure that your site’s navigation is intuitive for visitors, Net Guru recommends designating pages in relevant categories, limiting the number of menu options and ensuring that they accurately reflect each of these categories, adding “Back to Top” buttons at the end of long pages, adding a search bar, and using a contrasting color scheme to visually differentiate your content. Test your website on mobile to ensure that it’s easily navigable on a smartphone, too.
Search Engine Optimization
To maximize the true growth potential of your business website, you need to focus on your approach to search engine optimization or SEO. Use keyword research tools to identify the terms that your target audience is searching for, and then start optimizing for on-page and off-page SEO.
When it comes to optimizing for on-page SEO, you’ll need to incorporate keywords into your headlines, subheadings, URL slugs for different pages, meta tags, and webpage body copy. They should also be included in your images’ alt-text. For off-page SEO, you’ll need to begin targeting well-known websites in your niche to earn backlinks. You may want to reach out to entrepreneurs and content markets in your industry about guest posting opportunities.
Basic SEO principles are fairly straightforward, and you certainly don’t need to be an expert to implement these best practices on your website. However, if you’re having trouble figuring out your SEO strategy, you may want to invest in hiring a strategist.
Start an Educational Blog
Content marketing is a powerful way to increase your site’s traffic. Today, content marketing is booming - it’s an easy, affordable way to enhance your company’s reputation as a leading institution in your field. In-depth, long-form blog content that incorporates the right keywords can improve your SEO strategy, but most importantly, you’ll be able to educate your customers when they visit your site.
If you don’t have a company blog on your website yet, take some time to brainstorm topics that your audience might be interested in. Your keyword research should give you some inspiration! You’ll also want to read your competitors’ blogs to gain more insights. If you don’t personally have the time to write long-form blog content, you may want to hire a full-time content marketing specialist, connect with a marketing agency that provides writing services, or hire freelance writers to contribute content.
Invest in New Media Assets
When it comes to enhancing your website’s content offerings, you can go beyond blogging and consider hosting other media assets, like a video podcast. Today, lots of individuals, organizations, and businesses have podcasts! This is an easy way to connect with your audience and share information about upcoming events, products, and services, and more! Furthermore, you can invite leaders and forward-thinking professionals in your sector on your podcast for interviews, making podcasting a great way to expand your personal network.
While many people think of podcasts as an audio medium, you can take things one step further by producing video podcasts. With this visual format, you can easily share your podcast content across social media platforms, drive better engagement, capture your listeners’ attention for longer periods of time, and even become a more skilled public speaker!
If you don’t know how to produce professional videos, a marketing agency like STLL Studio can help. With support from a reputable agency, you can develop video podcast episodes that truly resonate with your audience.
Promote Your Email Newsletter
You might assume that your business website and email newsletter are two separate entities - but these mediums are inherently entwined. You can use your website to boost subscriptions to your email newsletter, and in turn, your email newsletter should direct customers back to your website.
Your website should include a clear email newsletter sign-up form. You can also include a free download that will appear in the subscriber’s inbox when they fill out this form. This could be an e-book, a discount code, or another basic digital asset. When you launch a new product or run a promotion on your website, make sure to send out an email newsletter to let your customers know!
If it’s been a while since you updated your company website, now is the time to invest in these improvements. Most digital marketing initiatives, including a website redesign project, can pave the way for significant audience and revenue growth at a relatively low cost. Updating your website can help secure your company’s financial future, even if the economy is shaky. With these tips, you’ll be ready to share documents with freelance professionals, learn more about IT, and address many potential issues that could be holding back your website’s growth potential.
Ready to invest in video marketing for your business? Turn to STLL Studios! Fill out the contact form on our website today to tell us about your project.
