Digital Journal

Businesses typically review their online presence every three years — which includes a website upgrade, but this is often leaving it too late, especially when you factor in the time it takes to review, restructure and then redesign your site — adding an additional six months to the timeline.

Websites today are valuable assets allowing businesses to sell their products or services online, drive in-store sales or enhance business to business relations. Although most businesses understand the importance of having a website, they often forget the importance of keeping their site content, marketing and design current.

Realistically your site should be reviewed annually assessing; site structure, reviewing content and design, checking search engine rankings, and reviewing the competition. This review process will give you a good indication as to whether your site needs a few tweaks, or a major overhaul. When reviewing ask yourself the following four questions:

Is your website using responsive design?

Having a mobile friendly (or responsive) website not only gives your audience a better online viewing experience, but it also helps you get found on the search engines. While Google have stated that responsive design is only a small ranking factor in their search algorithm it’s one factor that should not be overlooked. If you current site is not mobile friendly, this is a no-brainer, you definitely need a website upgrade.

Can you easily login into your site and make changes to the content?

Updating your website content should be easy, long gone are the days of calling your web designer to make change or two to your company bio. If you’re not using a Content Management System (CMS) you’re missing out on so many features. I could dedicate an entire article to the topic alone, instead I’ll give you this tidbit: WordPress is a CMS platform being used by over 20 per cent of websites worldwide. That’s over 74 million websites using a CMS!”

Are you selling online?

If you’re using WordPress there are a number of eCommerce options available that will allow you to accept online payments. You don’t have to be selling physical products either. Think: monthly subscriptions, conferences or meetings, donations, the possibilities are endless.

Is your site connected to social media?

It’s one thing to be on social media, but another to ensure your social media platforms and your website are interconnected. Having icons link to your social media pages is just a starting point, your site should have the ability to automatically distribute content to your Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as your email subscribers at the click of a button.

If “no” was the resounding the answer to the questions above, then it’s a clear sign your website upgrade is long overdue. Still unsure? Contact Peaks Media for a website review.

You’ve likely received that golden nugget promise email, the one that guarantees to get you the number one position on a Google search. And it may have piqued your interest. As we all know, if you want to be found on the search engines, being on the second page isn’t the ideal position.

The problem is, if anyone is promising you a number one position, it’s probably because you’re already number one for a keyword or phrase such as your own business name — which should be a given unless you have a lot of competition from businesses with similar names.

Optimisation is not as simple as adding a few keywords to the backend of your website and submitting it to the search engines. There are a lot of factors that go into becoming “number one on Google”. It takes a lot of research, a lot of quality content, as well as a variety of factors being implemented into the backend of your site. We also recommend ensuring your Search Engine Foundations are set first.

If you’re serious about optimising your site you need to be serious about the amount of work involved and the time it takes to reach your goal.

It’s also important to understand that you won’t always be found at the top for every search phrase. Look at Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as a marketing project rather than “something that you should do”. If you don’t have a budget for it or you don’t think it’s worth budgeting for, then maybe SEO is not for you. If you have a three or five page site that hasn’t been updated in years, you’re already not taking your online marketing very seriously — so why then would you expect the search engines to take you seriously?

If you’ve decided that it’s worth your while and you’re ready to allocate some time and a budget to competing with those at the top, here are a few other things to consider before taking the SEO plunge.

1. Are you interested in adding Social Media to your regular online marketing to-do-list? Links on your social media accounts that drive traffic to your website play a role in Google’s search engine ranking algorithm.

2. Can you confidently write a quality 350 to 500 word article that focuses on a particular topic. Bear in mind that SEO is not a one-off thing, so this would need to be done on a regular basis. If you can’t personally write this, or don’t want to, are you willing to pay someone to prepare this content for you?

3. Do you have the knowledge to analyse where you currently rank compared to your competitors? Google is constantly changing the way its algorithm works; if you’re not constantly keeping up-to-date with the changes, your site can’t evolve with the algorithm.

4. Are you looking for immediate results? SEO takes time and patience, and you won’t see results overnight. It’s also not a “do it then leave it” process — like a website itself, SEO is a continually evolving puzzle that needs continual input.

5. Are you willing to take the time to view your Search Engine Console and Google Analytics, to check your 404 errors, and create the necessary 301 Redirects?

Getting to number one is no easy feat, and if you’re not willing to put the time and effort into ranking well organically, then perhaps a better option would be to spend your advertising dollar on a Google AdWords campaign.

Content marketing for your website:

When referring to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the iconic phrase “Content is King” (born from a paper written by Bill Gates) seems to ring true, but there’s more involved in optimization than simply adding content to your site in order to boost your website Search Engine Rank.

Search engines aren’t just seeking websites stuffed full of keywords, they’re looking for a combination of a keyword or phrase used in several places on each individual website page. Three of the most important locations where your keyword or phrase should be appear are; the title of the page, the description of the page and most importantly, the words should be used several times throughout the webpage’s content.

The writing on the page, rather than in the words placed in the background code that runs the page, are more important to search engines. This doesn’t mean page rank is based simply on keywords stuffed into a page of content that makes no sense. Search engines use social data to check how valuable the information is when formulating where your website listing shows up on a page of search engine results.

There are tons of different factors that go into ranking well, but the biggest is high-quality content.

All traffic that flows to your website counts in the search engine algorithm, which is why it’s important to make your website content count.

Content that’s shared via social media, whether it be a link to your website generated by a Tweet, a Google+ or Facebook post, or even your LinkedIn status update, all count toward your page ranking.

Writing killer content requires some care and attention. To encourage others to share your website content, it needs to contain information that’s valuable to the website search, not just written to get hits on your site. Keeping a user on your site is far more important than just getting them there. There’s no point in having someone arrive at your store only to find out you don’t offer what they came for, even though that’s how it was advertised. So, it’s important to concentrate on words and phrases that are relevant to your target audience.

The objective of a hit to your website from a search engine result is to engage the visitors enough to have them stay on your site and browse around, rather than arrive and leave seconds later.

If you’re not the best writer, or simply don’t have time to be writing blog posts that will assist in increasing your website ranking, then consider using a professional. Content writing is one part of the SEO algorithm that is worth paying attention to, but if it’s not done correctly it could do more harm than good to your search results.

Focus on what keywords will attract the most relevant traffic to your site and you’ll be one step closer to having killer content that will see an increase in your website traffic.

You have a logo, a business website, and a social media presence. You need to keep them fresh and interactive and incorporate them into your ongoing sales and marketing plan. Online presence equals brand awareness and is becoming more important every day, says R. Kay Green, RKG Marketing CEO and President. It’s not enough to just be online. Your online presence has to be authentic, relatable, and highly recognizable to stand out from the competition. Even a small business needs a big online presence today.

Optimize Your Website and Your Social Media

Green recommends optimizing your business website so it performs well in search engines and shows up prominently in searches. Danielle Cormier, writing for Constant Contact, says social SEO (search engine optimization) is important so your business social media presence shows up in searches, too. For effective optimization, be very descriptive in profiles, “about” and “information” sections, and categories, and include website links to your social media platforms on your website. Keep all information online current and up-to-date, especially phone numbers and locations.

Cormier says to avoid some common optimization mistakes, like not customizing your Facebook URL or uploading images to your social channels with odd file names that sabotage your SEO ranking. Read up on SEO optimization or hire someone to review your website and social media presence to make sure you are getting the most out of them.

Social Media Marketing

If your website is an introduction of your business to the online world, social media is a friendly conversation with your audience. Don’t let your social media channels go silent or you’ll miss out on major opportunities to engage and interact with customers and prospective customers.

In addition to engagement, social media is an ideal channel to extend your marketing message from your initial customer base to everyone in their networks and beyond. Green recommends marketing on social media with quality content, press release marketing, videos, and blogs. Effective social media marketing practices including contests, likes, photos, and updates, such as those seen on Drivetime’s Facebook page, to get attention and create engagement.

Cormier reminds marketers to be sure to add social share buttons to content to make it shareable. People will want to share quality content so make it easy for them. She also highly recommends using Google by creating a Google+ business page and a Google+ local listing and keep the information up to date.

Cross Promotion

Cross promotion expands your brand exponentially by leveraging your different social media followers who may be active on more than one platform. For example, sharing an outstanding Pinterest post to Facebook, or sharing a Facebook post to Twitter, not only shares that content to various audiences, but it also garners more shares, likes, and comments than if it was only on one platform.

Cynthia Sanchez of Oh So Pinteresting advises businesses to use more than one social media platform to give customers, visitors, and readers a choice of how to interact with your business online. She recommends making plans to post and cross promote on any social media you are on for the best results. Experiment with postings and pay attention to the results, focusing on what gets the most likes, comments, and shares.

For small business owners, a website opens the door to an enormous market of potential customers. But it can also expose you to hacks, viruses and unwanted infiltrations if you don’t have the right website security.

The Threat

If your website is hacked or invaded by a virus, your entire business could be in jeopardy. Not only could use lose productivity and revenue, but your business’ reputation and brand could be tarnished, depending on the severity of the breach. This takes a toll on your IT department as well, as it must find the breach, find a way to resolve the issue and then update the company’s firewalls and online regulations.

Not only would your business’ infrastructure be compromised, your employees’ as well as your customers’ digital platforms could be affected. The breach could affect a business’ entire BYOD system, making every device a carrier of the virus, and it all can start from your website.

It used to be that hackers and viruses made their way into a business’ infrastructure through emails carrying malicious code. Nowadays, websites are the targets, with as many as 30,000 websites unknowingly passing malicious code onto online visitors daily, Forbes reported. Small business websites are prime targets for a number of reasons, notes Executionists.com:

• Small businesses on shared servers offers additional points of access for hackers.
• Hackers know small businesses may have limited IT departments, where hardware and software aren’t updated as often as bigger companies.
• A small business’ website version and plug-ins may not be up-to-date
• Many small businesses don’t have strong internal security measures, thus passwords and secured accesses are more vulnerable
• Common, open-source frameworks are what small business websites are usually built on. These frameworks share weaknesses that hackers know, and because they are so popular, hackers have a bevy of sites to target

Build a Better Defense

If you’re a small business, budgeting for more security for your website is always cumbersome. But one solution to better protect your website is to rely on a hosted web service, not just a hosting provider, to be your security blanket. Services like WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and CopyPress can help a small business with administrative tasks for web-related security.

Additional steps should be taken, starting with strengthening your administrative access passcodes. It’s also vital to train your employees on basic security principles and establish security guidelines with them and, if your business offers a BYOD system, be sure your employees’ devices are equipped with software security, as well. Enable the business’ operating system’s firewall and make sure employees working from home and accessing the company’s network have enabled firewalls on their systems, as well.

Another important step is to have backup security for important data from your website. This should be backed up on a regular basis, either through offsite storage or in the cloud. Also, ensure your Wi-Fi network for the workplace is secure, encrypted and hidden. You can hide your Wi-Fi network by setting up a wireless access point or router so it doesn’t broadcast the network name, or SSID (Service Set Identifier). Setting a protected password for router access is a must and it is a good idea to change passwords every three months. Adding multi-factor authentication to your security system that asks for more information than just a password would step up your security, as well.

Your new website has been designed, content and images have been added and it’s now online for the world to view.

At this point you may think the occasional update or addition of some new content is all that needs to be done to keep your site maintained. The reality is, once your site goes live regular work is required to help prevent site outages.

Some of the key factors essential to maintaining a healthy website are maintenance, backups, website monitoring and security.

Maintenance

Website maintenance is often confused with website updates, such as making text or design changes. Website Care however deals with the technical aspects of a website such as updating plugins, themes, and core site files.

Many companies opt out of site maintenance plans figuring they’ll make the updates themselves. The reality is, they don’t. This may be due to lack of know-how, a misunderstanding of the importance of keeping the site up-to-date, lack of time, or a fear that something may break after running an update.

While they are all good reasons for an inexperienced user to not perform updates, not doing so can lead to a site being hacked or your site going offline.

Backups

How much is your website worth to your business, and what would it cost to rebuild? Adding up the costs involved for initial site design, hours spent creating content, sourcing images and time spent updating your site since it’s been live, will give you a good idea of the value of your site.

Having a backup of your website is insurance that your site can be quickly restored should a web disaster strike. While your host may keep daily site backups, they do not guarantee them. It’s up to the site owner to ensure they have a copy of their website stored off site.

Website Monitoring

Often businesses don’t notice their site is down until they have problems receiving email, or someone calls to inform them of the site outage.

If your site is regularly monitored, your web master will be alerted as soon as the site goes down, allowing them to easily narrow down what caused the outage and quickly resolve the issue.

Security

“I’m not a big corporation, why would someone want to hack my site?”

This is a sentiment many small business owners have, believing that as they don’t have any sensitive information on their site they’re not a target for hackers.

In reality hackers aren’t always interested in stealing credit card or personal information, sometimes they do it simply because they can.

Making changes to your default backend website settings can prevent the most basic types of hacks. If you don’t have the technical know-how to get your site back up and running again, the cost of hiring someone to dig around and find the underlying issue will usually outweigh the cost of monthly maintenance.

If keeping your site online is important to your business, it’s best to leave site maintenance to the experts, allowing you to focus on business without worrying about the technical aspects of your site.