The Importance of Regularly Scheduled Website Maintenance and How It Can Boost Your Business
Quarterly maintenance and updates are important, that much we know- or have been told. But why is keeping your online presence clean and optimized important? In a growing digital world it is not enough to “just have an online presence” anymore. Having an optimized site that is accessible across multiple platforms, user-friendly, and overall nice to look at, will help you achieve your business goals and customer satisfaction by:
-Boosting SEO rankings and overall driving more traffic to your site.
-Preventing hackers that look for outdated software and plugins from gaining access to your site.
-Ensuring brand consistency and awareness to customers and prospects with a site that expresses your business’s brand, mission, and vision.
-Improving user experience and return rate to your site by providing customers and prospects current and informative content and user friendly experience.
The Importance of Website Maintenance and Your Consumer
A study by Adobe, The State of Content: Expectations on the Rise, links why optimizing your online presence is important to your consumer and how damaging a lack of maintenance to your website can be to your business.
– 39% will stop engaging with your content if images won’t load
– 39% will stop engaging if content takes too long to load
– 38% will stop engaging if content is unattractive in its layout or imagery
– 66% of consumers would prefer to view something beautifully designed
– More than 7 in 10 consumers (73%) say content “must display well” in order for them to continue engagement
To learn more, check out the rest of the adobe report by clicking here.
So, Why Is Website Maintenance Important?
In a nutshell, regularly scheduled maintenance and updates prevents major maintenance issues that can be damaging to your business, brand, and customer experience. A well maintained website gives your business and brand credibility and your consumers confidence in your products and services.
Getting a consumer excited enough about your product or service to spark them to talk more about it to others- it’s the most important and promising challenge in marketing. Just a casual conversation, while engaging, doesn’t necessarily generate on-going engagement. The challenge for brands is to organize user-generated content that actually accomplishes valuable goals for a brand. It’s not starting a conversation- it’s framing it.
User-generated content allows the consumer to become more involved in the marketing and sales process for a product or service. Starbucks started utilizing user-generated content early in the game through their “My Starbucks Idea,” which allowed customers to send their best coffee or tea idea to Starbucks because they recognized the disconnect with their current offering. Also, in 2014, Starbucks launched a contest featuring their signature white cup where they asked consumers to decorate and submit a picture of their artwork on the cup by posting a picture on social media with the hashtag #WhiteCupContest. In just a few weeks, thousands of customers submitted their artwork to Starbucks. This initiative engaged customers, gained Starbucks publicity, and showed that Starbucks once again was listening closely to the opinions and ideas of their consumer.
Simply putting a contest on your Facebook page isn’t going to generate on-going engagement. So what should companies do to turn a promotion or contest into consumer engagement?
First, reward consumers with recognition when they positively promote or advocate for your brand. These folks don’t “owe it to you” to be engaged with your brand. Earn their business! As you monitor your social channels and you see someone post a picture or content saying how great your company did— engage! Reach out to them and thank them for their feedback, ask to use their content on your page, and encourage them to complete reviews or rankings to have their voice heard by more people.
When running a promotion, don’t just think that once the award is given, the marketing benefit stops. Ask consumers who submitted entries if you can use their content in an on-going manner. Utilizing videos and photos generated by consumers engages new customers and encourages repeat customers by endearing the brand to the public.
Finally, harness user-generated content to create advocates for your brand. “There are stories about your brand that are being shared every day. Harnessing UGC enables you to engage and share the narratives through the voices of your most passionate brand advocates” (Wright, 2017). By engaging with consumers about the content that they create, you can generate more passion and excitement for your brand from them, their friends, and your general consumer audience.
Next time you see someone post an Instagram selfie with your product or see someone post a picture of a great job your company did, don’t simply settle for the double tap to show your appreciation. Engage with your audience, earn their continued business, and utilize their content to reach new audiences.
Many years ago, Royal Highnies set out on a quest to create the perfect boxer short. Today, Royal Highnies produces luxury undergarments and loungewear for the whole family. Their products are sold by boutique retailers both online and in brick and mortar stores.
The Situation:
Digital marketing provides an opportunity for smaller companies, like Royal Highnies, to compete against larger, more established brands in the crowded retail apparel space. However, capturing buyers’ attention online can require a hefty marketing spend.
For the 2017 holiday season, Royal Highnies wanted to boost the success of its online advertising campaigns and sell more underwear that’s fun to wear. That’s where Spectruss came in.
The Spectruss Solution:
Our plan started with research. We took the time to understand the exact target markets Royal Highnies needed to reach, then developed a plan around keywords and platforms that would put Royal Highnies in front of its desired customers – and convince them to make a purchase.
After defining their markets and doing rigorous keyword research, we developed a digital marketing plan that included:
Creative email campaigns
Shopping ad campaigns
Display ads
Social media ad campaigns
Fresh graphics
The campaign incorporated new creative materials and approaches. Each piece of the plan was designed to better reach Royal Highnies’ target markets and convert prospects into customers. We also maintained a rigorous schedule of reviewing campaign results and, in response, making small adjustments to continually improve the success of the campaign.
The last two months of the year can be a great time to sit-back, relax and enjoy the holiday season.
However, if you own a web-business and are focused on increasing leads and revenue from your site, it’s a great time to work on search engine optimization.
If you have a hard time brainstorming ideas, it’s always a good idea to check out Google Trends.
2. Optimize for Mobile Search
As you can see in the chart above, mobile traffic (specifically from smartphones) is where the vast majority of growth is. It would be highly ignorant to ignore this traffic source during one of the busiest shopping seasons of the year.
According to Google, 3 out of 4 consumers are more likely to visit a store if their local search results were helpful.
If you only have time to do one-thing for SEO, I would highly recommend you focus on site load times. Bounce-rate is a HUGE factor in search-engine optimization.
Google has indicated site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. In addition, a slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your indexation.
Page speed is also important to user experience. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Longer load times have also been shown to negatively affect conversions.
Most websites stand to shave a few milliseconds off load time by implementing some quick fixes:
Minifying scripts
Optimizing images
Gzip compression
Cache optimization
4. Improve The Copywriting On Your Site
SEO copywriting is all about creating useful, compelling, and valuable content, which targets specific keywords so that other people will gladly promote it on social media platforms.
This increases the authority and relevance of your content and improves its ranking in Google for the selected keywords.
One of the most helpful things you can do to attract people to your content is create an engaging headline. Use the tool below to generate some ideas.
If you need actual writing help for SEO I highly recommend the CopyBlogger’s blog. It’s an extensive blog that is full of exhaustive resources on copywriting.
Ask
My wife and I love olive oil – yea, I know it’s a little wierd. A local olive oil store asked us for advice on how he could get his current customers to buy more.
I told him to solely focus on getting his customers on his email list so he could be communicating with his customers about any exciting new products and announcement he had.
My wife told him to start keeping track of all the interesting recipe’s he was using for olive oil and to give recipe recommendations with all the olive oils.
The absolute crazy thing is this guy actually implemented both ideas and sold his store for millions of dollars! The point is, ask your customers (people who are already spending money with you) what they want and give it to them!
You might be wondering what this has to do with SEO. Actually a lot. Did you know that the Frequently Asked Questions section is one of the highest ranking pages on a lot of websites? This is because people post millions of questions to google everyday. If your site answers these questions you will rank higher.
Measure
Here are some reports you should be looking for to stay on-track of your SEO duties and the results of this work:
A report on the three top-performing keywords, including search volume, target pages, and dwell time.
A report on the top-performing holiday-specific keywords.
A report on the percentage of mobile traffic vs. desktop traffic for the year-to-date.
A report on the top-performing content pages for their closest competitor.
A report on traffic increases since July.
Summary
Instead of just coasting into the holiday season with eggnog and in-laws, accelerate your business. At Spectruss, we provide a lot of the services listed above for all of our customers.
If you need help implementing any of these ideas let us know! We would be glad to help.
Are you finding it tough to rank for any kind of keyword in google?
Search engine algorithms are constantly being updated and more companies are building out their online presence. This means that it’s going to continue to get harder to rank.
However, at Spectruss we have found some basic SEO tactics can cover about 80% of the heavy lifting when it comes to SEO strategy.
Here are some quick strategies to rank fast on search engines:
Research User Intent
The best general strategy is to go after long-tail ranking terms.
For instance, at Spectruss we are not a general web agency.
Note, that when it says competition is “High” that just means there is a lot of demand for people buying those ads.
Don’t just write for things you think are interesting. You need to produce content that people are actively searching for in your business.
For instance, if you owned an outdoor apparel store you wouldn’t want to just rank for ski equipment or gloves.
The terms—”ski equipment” and “gloves”—aren’t very descriptive. You might not be able to get a focused understanding of what the user is searching for.
But the long-tail keywords are valuable. Someone searching for “men’s red Burton Gore-Tex ski gloves” is looking for a specific product.
With a few additional variables, you can create and deliver precisely the kind of content the user is seeking:
Buy men’s red Burton ski gloves
Compare men’s red Burton ski gloves
Research men’s red Burton ski gloves
men’s red Burton ski gloves features
men’s red Burton ski gloves accessories
If you can figure out the long-tail intent—and it’s not that difficult—you can masterfully craft content that will match that intent. As a result, your content will quickly rise to the first page.
Craft A Unique Headline
According to The Science Post, 90% of people don’t read past the headline.
This means you need to really nail the headline so you can grab attention
There are tons of good copywriting books on just writing headlines.
However, I have two strategies for writing copy that have never let me down.
Strategy 1: Use Google Ads
Major companies invest millions of dollars in google ads constantly testing different headlines and which ones get the most clicks. You can benefit from this research and simply copy the headlines they are using in their ads.
I always do this when writing for e-commerce companies and the results have never let me down. Direct-response copywriting is a time-tested technique that is extremely compelling to website owners wanting to make a positive ROI without a significant investment.
Strategy 2: Steal from Amazon
One of my weird hobbies is reading Amazon reviews. It’s truly fascinating for several reasons. However, for writing headlines and creating content it’s a gold-mine that very few people utilize.
In Amazon reviews you see EXACTLY what the buyer was wanting IN THEIR OWN WORDS. If they are disappointed they tell you exactly why they were disappointed IN THEIR OWN WORDS. It’s really a copywriters dream.
The most significant thing you can steal is the most up-voted reviews.
Strategy 3: Use Formulas
I also like using formulas which always seem to do well.
The most basic formula I use is this:
[End result they want] + [Time period] + [Address the objections]
Examples:
[How to make amazing sushi] + [In 10 minutes] + [For under 5 bucks]
[Make a website] + [By tonight] + [With zero experience]
[Grow your email list] + [This month] + [Without paying for advertising]
You can also reverse these around and be more direct with this formula:
[Take this action] + [Specific Time Period] + [End Result]
Examples:
[Consult with me] + [For 1 hour] + [And I’ll improve your SEO Ranking]
[Talk to just 3 of your customers] + [For 5 minutes] + [To laser-target your sales pitch]
[Put this liquid in your cast iron skillet] + [Wait 1 hour] + [And you’ll never have to clean it again]
Produce A lot of Content
Produce, Produce, Produce
Articles that rank high in Google typically have over 2,000 words and have internal and external links as well as pictures and videos.
If you want to consistently rank high in Google you have to be dedicated to produce very high-quality content on a consistent basis.
Summary
I’m obviously not going to tell you that you will rank number 1 in Google for a term like “credit cards.” However, I can tell you that you can rank for very specific terms that your customers care about.
If you want a more in-depth analysis of your site and how you can ultimately get more traffic to your site contact us at Spectruss by phone or email.
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
The important part about content marketing is that you want to create something of value for your ideal customer. This piece of content cannot be just some ebook or blog post using generic content. This content needs to be so amazing that it get’s shared within the audience that you are trying to attract.
After you develop content for your site, you now need a marketing plan to promote the content. Use the checklists below to get some ideas on how to promote your content.
Content Marketing Plan
Once you have organized your content for sharing and optimized your headline to grab attention, you need to focus on marketing your content.
Here are some questions to ask:
Are you going to promote this content to your email list?
Are you going to syndicate this content to other sites?
Can you submit this content to any online forums?
Does the content mention other individuals and companies so they can promote the content?
Have you used social media meta tags?
Can you make slides outlining the content and put on SlideShare?
When do you plan on publishing the content?
What is a “content upgrade” you can offer so people can give you their email and get something of value?
Are you talking and promoting other people’s content?
Social Promotion
Social media is extremely important in sharing your content.
You want to produce content that not only gets viewed but also gets shared across social media. It will take time to figure out exactly what type of content will get shared on the different types of social media platforms
Here are a few questions to consider.
Are you connecting on Twitter with your audience?
Are you using sub-reddits to add value and build a following?
Are you active in Facebook Groups that are relative to your company?
Are you active in LinkedIn Groups that are relative to your company?
Do you mention other experts when sharing on social media?
Are you scheduling your social media posts to when your audience is online? (Hint: this is REALLY important)
Promotional Tools
If you really want to leverage content marketing and are not prepared to work full-time, you need to leverage tools so you can be productive and efficient with promoting your content.
Here are a few resources you can use:
Use a tool like Buzzsumo to see what type of content is getting shared the most on social media that is relative to your subject matter.
Use a sharing tool like Snip.ly to add traffic back to your site no matter whose content you are sharing.
Use a tool like Paper.li if you are interested in curating an internet style newspaper that is relative to your audience.
Use Click to Tweet so your audience can easily share your content on twitter.
Use Buffer to schedule your content promotion on social media sites.
Outreach
The best part about content marketing is you control who talks about your brand. Well, you at least control the start of the conversation.
Below are some action points after you publish your content?
Remarket to past visitors.
Reach-out to traditional journalist who publish content within your niche.
Curate content from other and republish on your domain.
Reach out to people who share content similar to yours.
Summary
Hopefully these checklists will help you produce more engaging content with your audience. Content marketing can easily become overwhelming. The most important thing to remember is to take action.
Don’t try and implement everything at once. If you attempt this nothing will actually get done. Just focus on implementing one thing on the checklist.
If you need help creating content or want to talk about different ways you can attract more customers to your business, contact us at Spectruss by phone or email.
It’s easy to get inundated with social media and after 4 hours lie to yourself that you have actually been working.
This is why I prefer to spend my time on LinkedIn.
Instead of getting sucked into other “social” networks, Linked-In was built for business.
The best part is that B2B marketers all report significantly higher conversion rates with Linked-In versus other social networks.
Here are the Steps To Get More Leads from Linked-In:
1. Set-Up Your Company Page To Be A Lead Generation Page
ApploeOne is doing a lot of great things with their Linked-In profile.
They have invested in the design and copyrighting so the image and content tells the reader what the company does in a very short time-period. If your employees are connected on LinkedIn you will generate a significant amount of traffic if they are active on the platform.
2. Use Advanced Search
The key here is to get as targeted as you can. Most salespeople have geographic parameters. However, there are other parameters that can help.
For instance, I am active in a Commercial Bankers Group.
I wanted to know who in this group specializes in Commercial Real Estate and is based in the United States.
You can see that there are 5,240 people who are involved in commercial real estate and also in this group. LinkedIn allows you to save three advanced searches before they want you to pay to be a premium member.
3. Start A Linked-In Group
I am a moderator in several Linked-In Groups which also gives me a big advantage when contacting prospects.
From my experience most people set-up Linked-In Groups wrong. For instance, let’s say you sell automation technology for manufacturing companies in the Mid-West. Most salespeople and marketers would set-up a Linked-In Group Titled: Automation Technologies Group.
I would set-up a group called:
MidWest Manufacturing Association Group
or
Midwest Manufacturing CEO Group
I would be highly selective in who I let in the group. I would also send out a mass email and mass physical letter head announcing the group.
After a couple of months of filling the group with valuable information would I start to selectively prospect to members of the group.
The best part about groups and your actual connections is you can export this list to an excel file and get the names, company data and emails from the members of the people in this group. This is great when you need to do an email blast or do a mass mailing.
You can also do email blast to members of your group from LinkedIn which has some very obvious advantages to you as a marketer and salesperson.
4. Publish Content
You can’t just sign-up for LinkedIn and expect money to fall from the sky. You also have to publish updates and even write articles to increase engagement.
Michaela Alexis is the prototypical LinkedIn Connector. She wrote a detailed story on how she landed her dream job in 2 weeks using Linked-In. This story has been read by over 140K people and been shared over 1,000 times!
She started off like most people with no significant following. However, by publishing interesting content she now has over 27K followers!
This proves you can create a brand here on Linked-In!
5. Connect and Follow Influencers
Like any social network you need to see what is getting shared by the most popular people. This shows what types of content people are interested in.
Below are some influencers to follow if you are interested in there areas of expertise.
If you are interested in Content Production and Social Media Marketing
Michaela Alexis
We mentioned her background in the section above so I want repeat her background. I’m very impressed with how she routinely produces amazing content.
James Altucher is about as unconventional as LinkedIn Influencer’s come. He’s a successful entrepreneur, chess master, venture capitalist, and author of many books including, The Power of No. Altucher looks for the most painful and embarrassing situations in his life, then writes about them.
Gretchen Rubin is the author of several books, but she’s best known for her New York Times bestselling book, The Happiness Project. She’s emerged as one of the most influential speakers and writers on the topics of habits and happiness. In addition, she’s a prolific writer on LinkedIn, publishing several Pulse articles a week. If you’re striving to feel better at work or home, Rubin is a must-follow.
I highly recommend you start engaging on Linked-In to build a following and leads for your company. If you have any questions feel free to call or email us.
There are 80 million millennials in the United States with annual buying power of $200 million. Millennials purchasing power will only increase in the next decade and this is why advertisers are obsessed with targeting this group. For perspective, Demographers and researchers typically use the early 1980s as starting birth years and use the mid-1990s to the early 2000s as final birth years for the Millennial Generation.
The only problems with this is the fact that Millennials are repulsed by advertising. This is why they gladly pay for Netflix, Spotify and Tivo so they don’t have to deal with the interruptions.
New Media vs Traditional Media
33% of millennials rely mostly on blogs before they make a purchase, compared to fewer than 3% for TV news, magazines and books.
Social media
62% of millennials say that if a brand engages with them on social networks, they are more likely to become a loyal customer. They expect brands to not only be on social networks, but to engage them. This obviously takes more labor from companies to be able to maintain social networking feeds, but it’s worth it if you want to reach millennials.
With this powerful demographic data you would think small business owners would be focused on selling to this market. However, a study by Manta found only 15% of small business owners are actually marketing to millennials.
Interupting behavior with advertising and product/service listing sites are completely inauthentic and millennials give these sources zero credibility. ,
Millennials want e-books, blog posts, videos, and other how-to information – and that’s inbound marketing. This demographic wants authentic content generated by the company versus generic advertising targeting the mass market. Think Dollar Shave Club versus Bic Razors.
Content marketing is currently the buzz word for marketers. However, its important to point out that content marketing has been around (and very successful) for several years:
1895: John Deere introduces The Furrow, a free publication with tons of farming tips and techniques to help farmers become more profitable. Today, it’s available in more than 40 countries and in 12 different languages.
1900: Michelin Tires released a 400-page auto maintenance guide with everyday drivers in mind, and also included travel tips. 35,000 copies were distributed free of charge before the company started selling the manual for a profit.
1904: Jell-O circulated free copies of its own cookbook, highlighting creative ways to use the unique product. In 2 years, the company saw sales increase to over $1 million annually.
1966: Nike released a 19-page booklet titled Jogging. It was filled with advice on enjoying running as a recreational activity, including posture and striking tips. This brought running, as a sport, to America, and it never once mentioned a Nike shoe.
Source: HubSpot
Summary
We think marketing to millennials is the next big thing to change shopping habits and we think now is the time to start implementing these ideas.
June 15th, for many a day of work, a day of living and breathing the realities of being a marginalized cog in the wheels of industry. No one expected June 15th to be the day the machine took a stand, the day the revolt…the uprising of Promobot would begin. It all began in a small town in Eastern Russia as these things typically do. While FUBAR may not be the right term, it isn’t a stretch to say that in the world of gate security someone dropped the ball.
Promobot is a robot designed to be a marketing statement of sorts. This robot takes on the form of a character – the “Promobot” character if you will. From there as it works in stores, its main designation is to attract a customer stream by not just standing out but also by running through a number of automated tasks that will ultimately improve the experience of a customer. It’s both a full time employee and marketer!
A Clever Concept with Big Results
While there is no definitive proof this was a fabrication, the manufacturers of Promobot used their star to create a viral hit. The premise? Simple enough, Promobot escapes their lab by running through the office and out the door where he was met with a security gate that had accidentally been left open. It was shortly thereafter that the robots battery had died leaving him stranded in the road. This caused a small traffic incident that prompted the police to arrive and remove him from the road. Coincidentally a DSLR camera happened to be perched and did a fantastic job of catching the final moments of the revolution in stunning HD quality.
It’s a fantastic ruse (most likely) setup by the company itself to create the viral sensation. Within two days of the video hitting the internet it had gained an audience of over 420,000 and counting. There is a terrific lesson to be learned here. It’s easy to be caught up in our business and work taking it very seriously. It’s easy to forget that human beings loved to be entertained and perhaps the best way to entertain human beings is by giving them something super funny to talk about.
A Lesson Learned For Us All
Marketing as it is does not have to be cut and dry, it does not always have to represent your brand and business to the highest degree of seriousness. It simply needs to get people to take a second look, showing a bit of personality is a great way to do that. I think for a lot of people when coming up with a plan to market their business we run down the normal checklists of social media, sharp web content, nice print designs if needed and everything is branded. While this works great to establish an identity, often times it does little to capture attention.
Simply put, when working on your next plan to get your business name out, maybe think outside the box. Consider an approach to humor your audience, to give them a treat, a breakaway from their normal day to witness something delightful and then leverage that to create a subtle but impactful way to bring it back to your business.
After helping build hundreds of websites we came up with the top 9 things to do before launching your website. Most of these things are not obvious and we hope you find the list helpful.
1. Back-Up Solution
It’s not a question of “if” but “when” your website is going to be temporarily down. If multibillion dollar sites like Netflix and Instagram can go down, your site can also go down.
It’s crazy how many people invest $50k to $100K in their site yet do not invest in any kind of a backup solution.
The easiest solution I have found is directly backing up the cPanel onto your hardrive. Follow these instructions:
Log into your cPanel control panel.
Click on the “Backup” icon.
Select “Generate / Download a Full Backup”.
Select “Home Directory” in “Backup Destination” and enter your email address, before clicking the “Generate Backup” button.
You’ll receive an email when the backup is ready.
The major risk with this backup solution of-course is if your hard drive goes bad, so does your backup. This is why I also recommend cloud backup solutions like Amazon S3 and Dropbox.
Dropbox of-course wasn’t meant for this but there is a wordpress app that makes this backup fairly easy. Whatever option you chose understand it’s not the hosting company’s responsibility to backup your site – it’s the site owner’s responsibility.
2. The 404 Page
Every website will have a 404 Page – which is simply a page that will show up if you use a wrong link.
Here is an example of a typical 404 Page:
The problem with this is that it doesn’t offer any guidance on what to do next besides go to the homepage or go back.
Unfortunately, most web users just quit when they get to this page instead of trying to figure out your website.
This is why you need an optimized 404 page or at least one that’s fun!
Here are some interesting 404 Pages that we like at Spectruss:
3. Email Integration
Whether your site is designed for direct sales, leads, or simply to provide information. You need to be collecting information about the people going to your site and wanting more information.
Most people put their email opt-in on the sidebar as an afterthought. However, you can easily put multiple form fields in multiple places on your site, without it affecting the design and flow of your site.
Before you launch you need to test the email integration with your email service provider.
What does “integration” mean exactly? You simply want to make-sure that when someone enters their email information that your email service provider collects the information and then sends them whatever information they asked for.
4. Hosting
Deciding on a domain name and which host you use is arguably the most important decision you will make when launching a website.
Did you know Mark Zuckerburg couldn’t afford facebook.com – even after raising million in VC funding? He instead launch with thefacebook.com.
Instead of trying to get the perfect .com domain name try and get a domain name that accurately tells what your brand represents. Our client Tech Town did a great job with this. You can see more of our client case-studies here: https://spectruss.com/case-studies/ The obvious reason hosting is critical is that it determines your website’s reliability. The vast majority of new website’s launch with shared hosting options from cheaper hosting companies.
This works fine for very low traffic sites. However, if you plan to have any significant traffic to your site and have a lot of heavy data usage from large files – you will need to choose a host with a dedicated server(s) for your site.
5. SiteSpeed
– browser caching/ compression /
Obviously your host is critically important to the reliability and speed of your site. However, you are responsible for organizing your website for speed.
At Spectruss, all of our customer’s websites are audited on a regular basis for browser caching and data compression to make sure the site’s are loading as fast as possible. A quick tip is to remove code comments and unused code for optimization. Google recommends YUI Compressor for JavaScript.
We also see a large opportunity in browser cashing at Spectruss. Browsers cashe a lof of data so that when a visitor comes back to your site, the browser doesn’t have to reload the entire page. You can set an expiration date set for your cache, then set when the date “expires” so you can ensure your visitors are always looking at up-to-date information. You can learn more about increasing your site’s speed by contacting us at Spectruss or testing it for yourself here: https://developers.google.com/speed/
6. Analytics
It’s amazing how many people spend $50K-$100K on their site – and then they don’t look at the analytics that their site produces.
This is equivalent to openeing up a retail store and not paying attention to how many people come in the front door every day. What is worse – is that because you aren’t tracking how many people are coming into the store you don’t know what your conversion rate is for how many people are buying.
Google Analytics is a free resource that can give you a ton of valuable information.
We recommend installing this and some basic dashboards to keep up with your site’s performance.
The most valuable information I have found in Google Analytics is to see what type of content get’s shared the most. This is the content that your customer care so much about they are wanting to share it with their followers.
7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
There have been entire books written about Search Engine Optimization – so obviously we can’t cover everything here.
Before you launch a site there is not much you can do for SEO – however you can’t have some things in-place to ensure success later on.
The first thing to do when launch a site is put a “coming soon” page up. It takes a long time to build a site, and this is away to start engaging with potential followers early. Google Webmasters even recommend this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9JvBLjLrUI The next thing we recommend is when coding your site make sure each page has a meta description. Meta descriptions are a part of the HTML code that provides a short explanation of what each web page does. This snippet of code is what search engines display in search results.
8. Check Your Links
We see a lot of problems when sites are moved from a staging server to a live server. The problem is when the absolute links are not changed to the live links and relative URLs are used instead of the absolute URLs.
This is easily fixed with a 301 redirect. Google actually recommends this method as you don’t lose any SEO value for doing this. Additionally, all the SEO value that was placed on the link that was moved get’s transferred to the redirected link.
Before you launch your site you won’t to make sure that your site can easily be shared across social media. An important factor to keep in-mind is to be open to change with social media. You will hear a lot of absolutes like: “you have to be on Facebook” or “Twitter works for everybody.” However, you don’t know what social medium your users will use until you launch.
It’s important to be open to change and experiment with all of them.
Before your site launches build all of your social media links into your site to see which medium your users like to share your content.
BONUS: Sitemaps
After redesigning a site you should always re-submit the new site-map to Google, Bing and Yahoo.
This is a major problem we see all the time at Spectruss. A site get’s redesigned and the new site’s architecture isn’t submitted to Google and Bing. Yes, I said Bing.
