1. First things first: Your Website Goals

One of the first things in creating your website strategy is to determine the goals you want to achieve with your site- what, why, and how will your site visitors convert to potential buyers?

Perhaps you want to generate leads or boost traffic to meet your sales goals. Whatever the reason, these goals need to be the gist of your website strategy. With them in mind, you can make more informed decisions about user experience, web pages, and conversion paths needed to achieve them.

Your visitors might find different pathways to accomplish the same goal. However, putting some effort into each of these will give you a lot of data on how to create your website strategy to support each journey.

Because we all access the homepage when searching for a website or online store, your homepages are critical in accomplishing your goals and are a great place to start planning. You can make an idea of how the perfect homepage should look like by researching other eCommerce platforms, hiring a trustworthy website development NYC agency or by:

• Discussing with industry experts or making a purchase. Depending on the nature of your online business, the “Bottom of the funnel” action may vary. Your main goal is to make it easy for your audience to navigate your homepage.
• Grouping products and services. With that said, you will want to make sure your products or services are the first things someone sees when accessing your homepage.
• Price is also important. Price is one major topic potential buyers are looking for when making a purchase. Make sure they can easily navigate your homepage for this information.

2. Convince them: Tell people a story

Now it’s time to think about the content that goes on those website pages. This will depend on the purpose of each page at hand, but besides that, your pages should follow the same narrative.

That doesn’t mean you should not focus on specific pages or customer journeys, it means you should focus on the overall story and value of your brand. With that in mind, the hero of a page should always:

• Say what you offer
• How it can solve a problem
• Tell people where and how to get it

3. Have a Social Media Presence

Being active on social media is a must in this day and age. There are now more than 3.2 billion people on social media globally, which means social media is a key tool for reaching your intended audience.

Linking your website to your social and vice versa for better visibility instils trust in your customers and potential customers. Even so, having a social media presence is a great way to strengthen your credibility and reputation and showcase your brand.

4. Produce Content (A lot of It)

The more content you share, the more chances you have to improve your online presence. Is your audience spending a lot of time on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, or Amazon? If so, make sure you prioritise these platforms and start brainstorming content that fits every medium.

For instance, on Instagram, you will come up with caption and photo ideas – whereas, on YouTube, you will come up with video ideas.

5. Target Popular Keywords Through Blog Posts

One of the most critical pages of your site (homepage, pricing, about, products/service, contact) are somewhat limited in terms of optimising for keywords other than your location and service. This gives you little to no room for texts that can appeal to your audience.
With a business blog, each content you publish can dive deep into a relevant keyword and be individually adjusted to rank for that keyword, helping you reach the uppermost Google results. More first-page rank doesn’t just mean a stronger web presence but also more traffic to your perfectly optimised website and greater credibility.
In fact, online businesses that blog posts get 55% more website reach than businesses that don’t. Even better, this allows you to prove your expertise in the industry and let your brand identity shine through – both of which are critical for your online presence.

6. Personalise Your Brand

 Your website success also depends on how people identify with your brand. One practice that many businesses use to build an online presence is to personify their brand.

By personalising your brand, you will be able to appeal to your target demographic while staying true to your values and mission. Having something to relate with helps consumers connect to your brand and makes them want to engage with you, whether by signing up for email newsletters or social media.

7. Use Relevant Visuals

You may be creating the best content or the most engaging social media stories. Still, in today’s fast-paced times – text isn’t enough to satisfy the audience who craves to consume content faster. That’s where visuals come in! They enable faster communication of information and help improve the level of engagement.
It’s no secret that we process visuals 60,000 times faster, but it’s a reason visual marketing should be your top-of-mind priority. So make sure you include relevant visuals in your social media posts and website content to enhance credibility.

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Progressive Web Apps

One of the elements that are currently gaining the most prominence is progressive web applications (PWA), by improving the user experience and making navigation more comfortable and simple.

PWA’s act like mobile applications, but the reality is that they are a website. Thus, several studies have shown that the conversion rate increases on these platforms, by making it easier for individuals to use them.

The reasons for its success are due to the combination of the advantages that websites provide with the benefits that we find in mobile applications, resulting in a faster site, adapted to any type of device, more complete and that consumes less energy. amount of resources.

Speech Recognition

Users show a greater tendency to carry out their searches by voice, as they can access what they need in less time. For this reason, and given the growth of loudspeakers and intelligent assistants, websites must implement the appropriate solutions so that their brand appears in response to a spoken query. All the big companies are working on technologies based on speech synthesis because of the potential that this innovation can offer to brands and electronic commerce.

Chatbot

Another of the trends that we observe more and more regularly on websites lies in the incorporation of a chatbot, to answer user questions and resolve their doubts. Thanks to this technology, we ensure that the user has a more interactive and receptive experience, preventing them from leaving the page if they do not find what they want or if there is an obstacle to meeting their expectations. In this way, our brand will offer personalized customer service at all times, making the individual satisfied with the business and consequently achieving their loyalty.

Cloud Computing

The most remarkable fact regarding cloud computing is the possibility it offers to replace traditional servers, allowing a large volume of data to be stored and avoiding any overload or loss of data.

All of this will transform the current approach to web development by reducing web development costs while strengthening the entire web architecture. Likewise, this contribution can allow the creation of integrated tools that will improve the performance of the page.

Increased security

Finally, to know all the trends of web development in the future, we should not forget to mention the relevance that the increase in security has reached. Any web page must provide users with confidence since the platform can collect a lot of data from individuals, especially if they make a purchase or a transaction.

For this reason, to prevent being attacked or hacked, the sites are equipping themselves with SSL certificates, double confirmation processes by message and password protection systems, or HTTPS protocols, among others, to give the maximum possible guarantee. As has been observed throughout the article, times are moving forward and we must have the ability to adapt to the new needs of the digital world, to offer users what they require, and provide efficient and quality websites.

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4 Website Maintenance and Housekeeping Strategies

Website management shouldn’t be a chore. Let us help you breeze through this task and prepare your site for more efficiency.

Check and Improve Your Website Speeds

No one likes to wait, especially your customers. According to a study, waiting three seconds for a website to load is unacceptable for customers. Make them wait longer, and you will lose potential customers.

The first item in your site maintenance list is to find out and adjust your site loading speeds. Many free and useful tools are available online, for instance PageSpeed Insights from Google. These tools can quickly scan your website speed and produce recommendations as to what is causing the problem.

The most common reason for delayed website speeds  are the following:

• Slow web hosting – web hosting is a service that helps you take your website online. Some web hosting services are better and faster than others.
• Messed up coding – websites are created through the use of codes. Messy coding significantly affects site performance and speeds.
• Caching problems – caching affects delivery times. You must optimize your backend and frontend databases to improve loading times and enhance functions.
• Non-optimized image sizes – the ideal file size for a desktop website should not be more than 200 kb. A full-screen image must only be from 1500 to 25000 pixels wide. Larger files will load more slowly and affect the site’s speed.

When you know why your site is loading slowly, fix the issue at once – as explained by Pranjal Bora here at Digital Authority Partners! Remember, even if you have stellar content, you will have no one to appreciate it if your visitors don’t wait for your website to load.

Adapt Reliable SEO Practices

SEO, or search engine optimization, uses various strategies to help your website rank higher on search pages. Your website needs SEO so it can reach your customers online.

Like other marketing tactics, new and better SEO trends are available this 2022. Here are some of them.

• Use precise keywords and key phrases – your customers find your business by using keywords and key phrases. The key is to use the same, or almost the same, keywords that your customers are likely to use when searching, considering their location and their needs.
• If you have a beauty salon business and you want to use accurate keywords and phrases to rank higher, you can’t just use the words “beauty salon” or “hairstylist.” Include your location, such as “beauty salon in New York”, or some highlights of your services like “home service hairstylist in NYC.” These key phrases are just some of the ways to dominate your niche and control searches online.
• Post updated, useful, and long content – Google considers user experience a factor in ranking sites. The more your visitors are engaged with your content, the more they are likely to browse your site, check your products and services, and share your content as well.
• It would be best if you created useful fresh content for your audience. Long content with significant information and well-thought subheadings is the best for SEO. Also, post regular content to keep your audience continuously engaged.
• Monitor your site traffic – use Google Analytics to track website traffic. This tool can tell you your engagement, the performance of your posts, and other factors that define site performance.
• Improve your link-building tactics – links connect websites. If a website links to your site, you have a backlink. A site that has more backlinks will rank higher in search engine pages. It would help if you established backlinking relationships with these valuable sites by proposing your content. Another way to enhance SEO is to use internal links and remove dead or inactive links.
• Prepare your GMB listing – your Google My Business listing is your free Google listing, the first thing that your customers see when they find your business online. Fortify your GMB listing by updating your business information, asking customers for reviews, and uploading quality photos of your business.

Enhance Your Mobile Website

Mobile phones are no longer used for calls and texts. More and more smartphone users shop using their devices because it’s more convenient and safer than shopping in person. You must never overlook this lasting trend and do your best to optimize your website for mobile use.

• Optimize your website for mobile use by reviewing your content. Large images, embedded video content, and other issues should be fixed at once.
• Create a mobile website with a responsive design.
• Use versatile website-building tools like WordPress. This tool can make mobile-friendly websites.
• Produce content that’s best for mobile devices. Choose attention-grabbing headlines, short but meaningful content, and exciting image and video descriptions.

CTAs Update

Don’t miss an opportunity to engage and convert your visitors. Update your call to action messages on your website. Make sure that you’re clear on what you want your visitors to do by creating straightforward CTAs.

• Use the correct CTAs according to your campaign. You may ask your audience to buy, subscribe, visit, call, contact, get your offers, etc.
• Include CTA buttons to instantly take customers to the service or product they want to buy.
• Ensure that all your business contact information on your site is up to date. The updated info must reflect on all your websites and social media sites.

Final Words

New year, new digital marketing goals! Maintaining your website may be a tedious task. It requires careful planning, the use of the right resources and tools, and knowledge of the latest trends. Perform website housekeeping regularly to ensure your site is working well and ranking higher through SEO.

The post Maintenance and Housekeeping Tips to Prepare Your Website for 2022 appeared first on Web Updates Daily.

What is SSL, and why should you care?

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and it is a cryptographic protocol that ensures a secure connection between two applications. The best way to think about an SSL certificate is like an umbrella: just because it’s not raining doesn’t mean you don’t need your SSL certificate. When there are threats outside, even if they aren’t happening right now, you still take precautions if something wrong happens later. Google gives its users free access to SSL certificates through their Certificate Manager, which can be used on any domain (including subdomains). But we recommend hosting WordPress under a separate bucket as only one certificate per domain/subdomain will work with this service.

Why switch to SSL/HTTPS?

There are several considerations on why you should switch over to SSL/HTTPS for your website or blog, but the two most important ones are security and SEO. When someone visits your website, their browser will connect with your server and exchange information in a secure handshake. This handshake ensures that all communication between the browser and the server is private and cannot be read by anyone else.

How to set up a WordPress blog on AWS

Although SSL certificates are free, you need an SSL certificate (or key and cert) downloaded to your server to use them. Luckily for us, Amazon provides a tutorial guide that explains how to download the SSL certificate directly from their Certificate Manager. You can choose which domain/subdomain you want this SSL certificate applied to; we will be applying it only to our primary bucket, so all subdomains automatically gain this protection as well. As we mentioned before, you can use s3 buckets for storage to host your website, but you will need to install a WordPress plugin called SSL InMotion.

Once the SSL certificate is installed on our server, we can set up our WordPress blog. The first step is to create an IAM user with Administrator Access. This allows us to give our WordPress blog its permissions and separate it from our main account. We then need to create an SSL-enabled bucket to store all of our website’s static files (images, CSS, js, etc.)

As one classification detail, s3 is designed with durability in mind enabling back-up that fills into multiple locations, thereby creating an additional layer of security to guard against any single point failure; s5 leans more towards performance and availability over durability.

Why it’s essential to switch your blog over to SSL

Now that we have our SSL certificate in hand, the next step is to configure WordPress on our server. The process of switching your blog over to SSL can be a little daunting, but there are plenty of resources available online (like this one) which can walk you through the entire process. In addition, many hosts now offer free SSL certificates as part of their service, so if you’re not feeling up for doing it yourself, reach out to your hosting provider, and they should be able to help you out.
Switching your blog over to SSL ensures the safety of visitors browsing any page within your site by encrypting information transmitted between users’ browsers and web servers with Transport Layer Security or TSL protocol. This means that any data (including passwords) entered on your website will be encrypted and hidden from potential attackers. Not only is this important for the security of your blog, but it’s also been confirmed by Google that using SSL will give you a ranking boost in their Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).

Also Read: Trends In Data Storage For 2022

What are the benefits of using SSL for your website/blog?

Besides the ranking boost that Google has confirmed, there are several other reasons you should consider using SSL for your website or blog. First and foremost, SSL provides a layer of security that can protect both you and your visitors from attacks. Secondly, SSL is required to use certain features on many popular websites (such as online shopping). Finally, encrypting all transmitted data helps keep your site compliant with current privacy laws such as GDPR.

Does my site need SSL, or does it automatically have SSL with an HTPPS connection?

If you’re not sure whether or not your site needs SSL, Amazon provides a handy tool that you can use to check SSL compatibility. Suppose your site is SSL compatible (i.e., it’s hosted on AWS). In that case, all you need to do is install an SSL certificate and enable SSL in WordPress settings. If not, there are alternative options available for SSL-free hosting, including self-signed certificates or purchasing SSL from a third-party provider.

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What Are Web Heat Maps?

When we talk about web heat maps, we refer to tools that show us the navigation mode of users on our site, observe how they behave and how they interact with the page. In this way, they offer us high-quality information such as which are the areas where they stop their gaze the longest, in which places they show a greater propensity to click, which sites they hover over or where they have decided to leave the page Web.

What Are The Benefits Of Web Heat Maps?

Now that we know how web heat maps work, it is time to find out the benefits they can bring to your website. We present them below!

Optimize Web Design

Web heat maps will be ideal for a fully optimized design, allowing us to capture users’ attention and guide them during their navigation to get them to carry out the action we want. If we know the places where individuals fix their eyes with greater intensity, there we will place our star products, the most relevant information about the company, the communication of offers, or any other element that we consider is important for the user to discover.

Allows You To Correct Faults

In many cases, certain websites receive a high volume of traffic and, however, the sales made are much lower than what you would expect. To identify what is preventing or hindering the conversion, we can use web heat maps. Thanks to its functionalities, it is possible to detect if our website offers errors in the buttons to add the products to the cart, finalize the purchase, or verify certain data.

Improves User Experience

The user experience of a website has a very significant influence on achieving the site’s goals. It will depend on this factor: individuals become customers, buy again from our brand, and, finally, their loyalty.

Web heat maps allow us to improve the user experience since, by knowing which is the most appropriate design based on our target audience’s behavior, we can organize the information efficiently so that anyone can fulfill the intention they were pursuing. When accessing the site.

Also Read: What Is Symmetric Fiber And its Role In Internet Speed

Increase The Number Of Conversions

Finally, it should be noted that as a result of all the information provided by the web heat maps, we will be able to increase the number of conversions of our brand on the Internet.

This fact occurs because we can offer the user exactly what they want in their first contact with the web. We can place calls to action in the places where it is observed that Internet users click the most and, thus, easily direct individuals to making a purchase.

As has been observed throughout the article, web heat maps will allow us to improve the design of the site, placing the most relevant information in those sections where users pay the most attention. This will enhance the user experience, increasing the possibility that individuals will end up converting.

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