Examples of wordmark logo types

Examples of monogram or lettermark logo types

Examples of symbol or pictorial logo types

Examples of combination logo types we’re sure triggers instant recall with you

Examples of brands that use emblem logo types

Examples of iconic businesses that use abstract logo types to design their brands

Examples of companies that use mascot logo types for their brands

Last Updated on August 25, 2023

The post The 7 Main Logo Types And How To Use Them For Your Brand appeared first on Workroom.

It’s the perfect website builder platform for entrepreneurs and small business owners who are better off allocating their time to running the day-to-day activities of their business rather than fussing over their websites.

Even website professionals prefer WordPress because it makes their jobs easier. The designs are customizable, there are thousands of plugins to choose from, and software programs are constantly updated.

That said, WordPress isn’t a plug ‘n’ play website where once it’s live, you can leave it on its own. Like every other digital technology innovation, you need to create and implement website maintenance procedures.

What Is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance involves a series of procedures that need to be undertaken on a regular basis in order to keep your website performing at optimal levels and your assets protected from threats of cyber-attacks.

A comprehensive website maintenance plan must cover the areas of content management, site security, data protection, tracking of analytics, and plugin updates and upgrades.

Lucky for you we’ve created this ultimate WordPress maintenance checklist as your go-to reference guide in case you experience issues with your WordPress website.

The Importance Of Website Maintenance For Small Businesses And Entrepreneurs Using WordPress

The website assumes multiple key functions for your business. It builds your brand, manages select areas of responsibility of the business, generates leads, converts interest into sales, renders customer support services, and provides contact information for your website visitors.

Conducting website maintenance procedures regularly will ensure your customers of using a top-performing website that delivers results, meets expectations and leaves a satisfying online experience.

The Role Of Website Maintenance In Maintaining And Improving The Performance Of A WordPress Website

A website that shuts down due to technical issues will prevent it from carrying out the above-mentioned functions. You can potentially lose business opportunities, damage your brand, and tarnish your reputation in the industry.

Likewise, if you’re selling products online, an eCommerce website becomes a virtual store where your customers can buy your items or avail of your services. Thus, your website becomes a treasure trove of valuable assets, namely the personal information your customers gave you in strict confidence.

A website that gets hacked will lose more than just foregone income for the days it shut down. If your customers’ confidential information gets stolen, you can potentially face a class action lawsuit for negligence.

In fact, 60% of small businesses close down six months after getting hacked.

For good.

Can you imagine putting in 10 years of hard work and sacrifice growing your online business and having all of it taken away in 6 months because of 1 incident?

The Ultimate WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist

To avoid being part of the 60%, you must implement the procedures outlined in our ultimate WordPress website maintenance checklist.

Step-by-Step Guide To Maintaining And Updating Your WordPress Website

WordPress has maintained its dominance as the premier CMS platform because it makes it easy for users to manage their content. Using WordPress is one thing, but maintaining and updating it is another.

It starts out as a reminder that a plugin needs an update. Then another. Before you know it, WordPress is informing you about your theme being outdated. Just as you thought you’d earned a badge as a WordPress expert, the software now needs to be updated.

And what happens if you didn’t update a plugin correctly? We haven’t touched on 2 important areas of website maintenance – backing up your assets and upgrading its security features.

Sounds like a lot of work, right? Don’t hit the panic button. No need to go to a WordPress forum.

We created this guide to maintaining and updating your WordPress website for you to have a better understanding of the steps involved in website maintenance.

Tips For Identifying And Addressing Common Issues And Problems

You might wake up one morning with a smile on your face and the wafting of freshly brewed coffee in the air.

“It’s gonna be a great day” 

The mood can quickly turn sour when your website appears as a white screen or with words such as “Internal Server Error” or “Oops! That page can’t be found”.

Chances are the first thing you’ll assume you’re a victim of hacking. Before images of dollar bills getting flushed down the toilet or of a class action lawsuit enter your mind, these are just 2 of the common issues and problems of having a WordPress website.

Here are our tips on how to identify 3 common issues and problems with a WordPress website and how to address them.

1. Internal Server Error

Probable Causes and Fixes:

• The .htaccess file which is responsible for how your WP website communicates with its server has a problem. To fix the problem, disable the file by going to your website’s root directory. The file is usually listed as public_html. All you have to do is to rename the file to disable it. For example, you can rename the file as .htaccess_closed.
• Your website has insufficient memory. WordPress was developed using the PHP programming language. You’ll have to increase the allocation of PHP memory to your website for it to function properly.  Contact your current web host service provider and negotiate for an upgrade in the hosting package.

2. 404 Error

Probable Causes and Fixes:

• The server couldn’t find the page most likely because the page has broken links or the URL changed.  If this happens, you need to check the URL or page and redirect it to the correct page. You may also follow the steps we outlined for disabling the .htaccess file which might be erroneously redirecting your URL as the file can also be responsible for your website’s hyperlink structure.

3. Connection Timed-Out Error

Probable Causes and Fixes:

• Your server cannot load your website either because you don’t have enough PHP memory resources or you entered into a shared hosting arrangement. Simply contact your web host service provider and inquire about upgrading your current hosting package.

Resources And Tools For Streamlining The Maintenance Process

If you want to gain a better understanding and feel of the website maintenance process, here’s a list of resources and tools you can use to make the effort manageable.

1. Code Editors

For adding snippets and performing a variety of maintenance tasks.

• Notepad ++
• Sublime (for Mac)
• Brackets
• Atom
• Bluefish

2. Database Management

These tools are used to fix issues caused by wrong plugin installations and customization activities. You can also use the tools listed below to update site security and back up your assets.

• Updraft Plus
• VaultPress
• BackWPup
• WPBuffs
• SiteCare

3. Speed Testing

Use these tools to keep track of your website’s speed. A slow-loading web page can lead to incidents of site abandonment and can affect your reputation and search ranking.

• GooglePageSpeed Insights
• GTMetrix
• Pingdom Website Speed Test

4. 404 Scanners

If you’ve been actively posting content, you’ll eventually have broken links. When a site user sees a “404 Error”, he’ll have an unfavorable impression of your business. Identify broken links on your website with the following tools.

• Broken Link Checker
• W3C Link Checker
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider

5. Update Rollback Plugins

These tools help you identify the plugins that could be the cause of your website problems.

• WP Rollback
• Rollback Update Failure
• WP Downgrade

6. Anti-Spam Plugins

Do you have a lot of spam comments posted on your website? These spam comments aren’t harmless and can get your website compromised with malware. Use any of these Spam plugins to control the influx of spam comments.

• Askimet Spam Protection
• WordFence Security
• WP Cerber Security, Anti-spam, and Malware Scan

The best way to streamline the process is to hire a reputable agency that offers website maintenance services. A full-scale agency has the talent, experience, and tools needed to carry out these maintenance tasks successfully.

Contracting the services of an agency will save you time and money, and reduce the risk of undertaking costly mistakes that might render your website inoperational for an extended period of time.

Content Management

According to a study, people spend seven hours per day on the Internet. That’s approximately 39% of their waking hours. People regularly search for information that answers their questions, fulfills their needs, or addresses their concerns.

To find information, people visit various websites and read their content. As more businesses set up websites on the Internet, the competition for content becomes tighter.

How can you create or curate content in WordPress that gets the attention of your target audience?

Tips For Creating And Curating Effective Content In WordPress

Creating and curating content are two different activities. Creating content means developing original content; one that’s fresh and unique about a particular subject matter.

To curate content means to search for content on the Internet that’s relevant and useful to your audience. As a content curator, you’re like a museum curator who’s constantly looking for the best pieces to display in a gallery.

Having high-quality content; whether original or curated, is important because it drives traffic, builds your brand, enhances your reputation, and as assets, content can increase the value of your website.

The keyword in the previous paragraph is “high-quality”. How do you know what to write about or which articles to curate and how can you assure your site users of their quality?

1. Review your website analytics and use the data to create an audience profile. Find out which types of content are frequently read and have a good level of engagement. Identify the characteristics of your site user to have a better idea of their demographics and online behavior.
2. Create a topics list based on your evaluation of your website analytics.
3. For original content, make sure it is:

• Optimized for search engines.
• Well-researched and linked to reputable resources.
• Written in simple and easy-to-understand language.
• Use high-quality images; preferably ones that are proprietary to your business.
• Free of mistakes in spelling and grammar.
• Passed a plagiarism-checking software like Copyscape.

4. For curated content, make sure it is:

• Relevant for your audience.
• Sourced from an authentic, reliable, and reputable website.
• Content and shared information are all updated.

5. Uploading content on a WordPress website is easy. Simply follow the steps below:

• Login to your WordPress dashboard and click “Posts”.
• Click “Add New” to see the “Add New Post” page.
• Simply copy your content from the source file and paste it
• Finally, all you need to do is click “Publish”

6. The best way to curate content is to use software plugins such as Feedzy, BuzzSumo, and MyCurator Content Curation. These plugins work by automatically creating RSS feed blocks on the pages you want to post curated content on. Once the curated content is found, an image of the article will appear on the page which can be clicked on by the site user.

When curating content, make sure the source is mentioned and properly cited on the page.

While curating content is a good strategy for providing valuable, high-quality information on your website, Google might not reward you with a boost in search rankings.

Google prefers original content on websites. Curating content can be viewed as a “stop-gap” measure in case the well of ideas has dried up.

Best Practices For Organizing And Managing Your Content In WordPress

If site users feel like a migraine coming on whenever they try to look for content on your website, they’ll abandon the search.

There are serious repercussions to giving website visitors a poor User Experience:

• Its Bounce Rate will be higher and Google might penalize your website in the search rankings.
• The experience can put your brand in a negative light.
• Website traffic will be affected and consequently, the opportunities to generate sales.

Organizing your content is a great idea because it will make it easier for your users to find what they’re looking for. The same goes for you. By categorizing your content, you can keep track of the topics you’ve written and the images and videos you’ve used.

WordPress has a built-in categories and tags system that allows you to organize the content that’s available on your website. The categories tool helps you create groups for your posts.

For example, you can categorize blogs under “Business”, “Entrepreneurship”, “Health and Fitness”, “Technology”, and “Lifestyle”.

The tags tool requires you to become more specific about the topic under a category.

For example, the Business category could have the following tags, “Startups”, “Human Resources”, “Leadership”, and “Real Estate Investment”.

As we mentioned at the start of the article, one of WordPress’s biggest advantages over other CMS platforms is the availability of plugins that you can use to manage different functions of your website.

There are WordPress plugins that will help you organize and manage your content on the website.

• WordPress Real Media Library – A plugin that functions as a file manager and allows you to manage files such as documents, images, and videos.
• Post Types Order – This plugin features a drag-and-drop interface that enables you to sort posts and post-type objects.
• Chronological Posts – This allows you to arrange posts in chronological order.

You can also create a section on the page titled, “Related Articles” where you give site users a listing of previous posts that might be relevant to their search.

Strategies For Regularly Updating And Refreshing Your Website’s Content

An overlooked advantage of online content is that you can reuse it – and still, realize benefits.

For example, you created a blog post about the “10 Health Benefits Of Apple Cider Vinegar” last year. Over the last 365 days, researchers might have uncovered five more health benefits of Apple Cider Vinegar.

With this newfound knowledge, you should re-post your blog to read “15 Health Benefits Of Apple Cider Vinegar” and update the information including statistics and other numbers.

This year-old blog post will generate new views and levels of engagement and potentially drive more unique visitors to your website.

Regularly updating and refreshing your content has other benefits for your website:

• Boost up the search rankings.
• Widen your audience demographic.
• Squeeze out the maximum potential of your content.
• An efficient way of creating “new” content for your website.

Here are 5 tips on how to update and refresh your website content:

1. Categorize your content as:

• Evergreen – Content that remains valuable regardless of the time period. Examples would be FAQs, How-tos, Ultimate Guides, Checklists, and Tips.
• Time-Relevant – Content that presents information covering a specific time period. For example, statistics, trends, and industry reports.
• High Engagement – The most popular pieces of content with your readers. Simply update the information and publish again for the enjoyment of your audience.

2. Present your old content in a new format. For example, pick a popular time-relevant post and turn it into an infographic.
3. Repurpose a popular blog piece into a series of email marketing newsletters.
4. Create a “sequel” to a popular post. If your previous blog “Awesome Ways To Use WD-40 At Home” generated a ton of engagement, make a sequel titled “Awesome Ways To Use WD-40 At Home Part 2”.
5. Run an SEO audit on your posts and remove old and broken links, refresh with the latest high-ranking keywords, and update all figures and numbers.

Think of your website as your physical office or brick-and-mortar store. You want to make sure potential customers feel welcome and find the experience fun, convenient, and memorable.

Security And Maintenance

You probably installed CCTVs and security alarms for your physical office or store. In some cases, business owners who keep valuables in their stores hire security personnel 24/7 to make sure the items are safe.

The challenge of keeping thieves out of your website is greater because cyber-attacks happen daily. According to cyber-security data, 1 hacking attempt happens every 39 seconds.

The Importance Of Website Security In WordPress

Because WordPress is the most popular website platform in the world, these hackers are very familiar with how the system works. You have to be one step ahead of these criminals to make sure they can’t break into your WordPress website.

10 Tips For Protecting Your Website From Hackers And Other Threats

You don’t know where they’re coming from and when they’ll attack. The cyber thieves could be from another country and they could attack while you’re asleep.

When it comes to protecting your website from hackers and other threats, you need to take different approaches.

1. Make sure you’re using the latest version of the WordPress website.
2. Conduct a technical audit. Update the plugins and themes to their latest versions and delete the ones you no longer use.
3. Limit website access to only people you know and 100% trust.
4. Website administrators should use unique and complex passwords and require them to frequently change passwords.
5. Get a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate for your website.
6. Include Dual Factor Authentication (DFA) or Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) security features.
7. Regularly back up your WordPress website.
8. Always update your security protocols including anti-malware, anti-virus, and firewall software. Among the best WordPress security plugins are WordFence, BulletProof Security, and Sucuri Security.
9. Restrict the number of login attempts.
10. Monitor website activity.

Fortifying website security should always remain a top priority for small business owners ad entrepreneurs.

Best Practices For Maintaining The Infrastructure And Functionality Of Your WordPress Website

At the heart of the WordPress website, CMS is its infrastructure or site architecture. Its infrastructure is composed of core files and folders that store various scripts and documents that are responsible for the functionality of your WordPress website.

It’s important to maintain the infrastructure of your website to keep it running at optimal levels and put you on course to achieving your goals.

1. Choose managed web hosting services that offer high uptime, professional technical support, regular updates, and comprehensive site security protocols.
2. Be selective about the plugins you want to install. Set a standard by considering plugins that have a minimum rating of 4 stars. Prioritize plugins that are developed by reputable tech companies.
3. Emphasize website responsiveness by constantly working to improve site speed, mobile optimization, and UX.
4. Keep your site security protocols frequently updated.
5. Frequently clean up your database by using a tool such as WP-Optimize which removes junk files.

Your WordPress website can become a money-making machine for your business. It’s important that you keep this machine’s engine humming nicely and its functional features performing smoothly.

Analytics And Tracking

WordPress websites provide you access to real-time data to help you plan and create strategies to keep your business on the path toward success.

The Importance Of Tracking The Performance Of Your WordPress Website

Do you want to know how your website is performing? Are you preparing your digital marketing budget for next year?

With WordPress plugins that offer website analytics, you can track the performance of your data and map out strategies that will allow it to keep growing.

1. Have access to hard data to create an audience profile that you can use as a reference for your content marketing strategy.
2. Find out where your traffic is coming from. What kind of mobile devices are they using? Are they coming from social media or online directories? Which browser is popularly used to access your website? These types of information will help you improve site optimization.
3. Streamline your marketing budget by identifying which strategies or processes are recording the highest ROI.
4. Identify weak areas on your website and learn the best ways to keep your visitors longer on your pages.
5. Improve your site’s sales conversion rate by tracking the effectiveness of your CTAs.

There’s no guesswork when it comes to WordPress because you have empirical data to support your courses of action.

Using Tools And Resources To Track Your Website’s Traffic And Engagement In WordPress

WordPress has hundreds of plugins available to manage different functions of your website. Here are some of the best tools and resources you can use to track your website’s traffic and levels of engagement.

1. MonsterInsights – A Google Analytics plugin that gives you all of the advanced features of Google Analytics including reports on audience demographics, online behavior, and content performance.
2. Site Kit by Google – Integrate this plugin with Google Search Console to improve SEO, monitor inflows of passive income from Google AdSense, and track web page speed.
3. ExactMetrics – A plugin that measures the performance of your posts and gives you its findings in report form.
4. Yoast SEO – This plugin lets you run a performance audit on your WordPress website so you can identify areas that are hindering your SEO strategies and affecting UX.
5. Visitor Traffic Real-Time Statistics – Learn where your site traffic is coming from and get valuable insights into users’ onsite behaviors.

6 Tips For Analyzing And Interpreting Your Website’s Data In WordPress

Analyzing and interpreting your website data in WordPress isn’t as complicated as you might think. You don’t need to be an IT graduate or a tech wizard to find out how your website is performing.

All you need to do is to follow our tips below:

2. Keep the process simple by choosing metrics that are relevant to your business goals. For example, if you’re focused on building your brand, you might want to focus on metrics such as Bounce Rate, Page Views, and Returning Visitors.
3. Use the data to come up with courses of action. Then, beta test these courses of action to see which ones might work and improve site performance.
4. Come up with multiple goals. If you’re focused on improving website traffic, it might be a good idea to use the data and find ways to increase its conversion rate.
5. Try and understand the context of the data. Sure, numbers don’t lie. But there might be underlying factors that have skewed the results of the data. For example, a sudden change in the ranking factors of Google’s algorithm. Conversely, don’t chalk it up as a win just because analytics show an increase in traffic. Where is the traffic coming from? If the increase in traffic came from a region that normally doesn’t visit your website, these visits might be hacking attempts.
6. Ask for help. Yes, analyzing and interpreting data isn’t as hard as you think. But it won’t hurt to ask the opinion of an experienced IT professional or web developer. Asking for help from someone who knows better than you is always a win-win situation.

WordPress Updates And Upgrades

WordPress updates and upgrades for its plugins are frequently available to make it possible for you to improve the functionality of your website and give it a fresh makeover.

The Importance Of Regularly Updating And Upgrading Your WordPress Website

Once you receive a notification or reminder from WordPress that a new version of a plugin or a template is available, you must update the software right away.

Here is a short list of reasons why you should regularly update and upgrade your WordPress website:

1. Old versions of plugins as well as plugins that are rarely used can be used by hackers to infiltrate your website.
2. Old versions of plugins may no longer work properly and hinder the functionality of your website.
3. The new versions usually have new features that can improve the overall functionality and performance of your website.
4. Your customers might be getting bored with the look of your website. For example, the  WordPress plugin Career Portfolio can present your career achievements including projects done for your clients, current work, and your team in an elegant manner.

When it comes to your website, the saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” doesn’t apply. Instead, remember what the ancient Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus said in the year 1500:

“Prevention is better than cure.”

5 Tips For Identifying When Updates And Upgrades Are Necessary For WordPress

When your WordPress website is up and running, updating and upgrading its programs and features must remain on the maintenance checklist.

Things can always go wrong. There are factors beyond your control that can affect the functionality of your website. Always remember that the website is a business investment.

For your website investment to pay dividends, it must perform at an optimal level every day.

The best way to protect your investment is to implement updates and upgrades whenever they’re available.

1. If the latest versions of plugins, templates, and WordPress versions are available, the notifications will appear on your Dashboard.
2. Being mindful of your website’s performance is a good way of identifying if an update or upgrade of a program is necessary. For example, if you’ve noticed that the page loading speed is slowing down, you might want to verify the actual page loading speed before upgrading the plugin.
3. Reach out to your customers.  Ask your customers about their experiences on your website. You can run a survey through an email newsletter or via social media. Collect the data and review the results. Address the issues and problems that were popularly reported by your customers.
4. Visit the websites of your competitors and do a comparison. Come up with a checklist and mark the ones where your competitor has an edge over yours.
5. Listen to your customers. Sometimes you don’t have to reach out to your customers. They will reach out to you if they’re experiencing problems with your website.

Verify these complaints and if correct, resolve them right away by updating or upgrading the plugin.

Remember that technology is never perfect. There will always be bugs and kinks to iron out when it comes to software. Also, innovation will continue to evolve and design programs that enable technology to become more efficient.

To thrive on the Internet, you must always be updated on the latest technological innovations.

Best Practices For Implementing Updates And Upgrades Smoothly And Effectively In WordPress

If you haven’t run an update or upgrade on your WordPress website, we’ve got you covered. Simply follow our list of best practices for implementing WordPress updates and upgrades and you’ll be fine.

1. Before anything else, run a backup of your website. You can do this by installing a WordPress backup plugin like Updraft Plus, VaultPress, or Backup Buddy.

2. To upgrade to the latest WordPress version:

• Login to your Admin account.
• Go to Dashboard > Updates
• If a new version of WordPress is available, click “Update Now”.
• Wait for the update to be completed.

3. To check if the update was successful, log out and visit your website from another browser. Review the settings of your website.

The best way to keep your website updated and upgraded is by delegating the task to a reputable agency that offers comprehensive website maintenance services.

By leaving it to experienced hands, you mitigate the risk of making mistakes and you can spend more time running your business.

Conclusion

As powerful and effective as a WordPress website is, it cannot perform well on its own.

Much like other creations of technology – your car, computer, mobile phone, and smart appliances, a WordPress website needs frequent updates and upgrades to ensure top-level performance.

An investment in a website doesn’t only involve money. Website maintenance requires time, effort, decision-making, and a commitment to prioritize its well-being.

Once you get a notification of an upgrade or update – don’t waste time. Don’t procrastinate. Act right away. Delaying an update might end up costing you more time and money.

Like a well-maintained car won’t break down on you on your way to work, a well-maintained WordPress website won’t shut down on you when business opportunities are just a click away.

Last Updated on July 16, 2023

The post The Ultimate WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist appeared first on Workroom.

But what would happen if users aren’t happy with your website because it’s not functioning properly? Or if for some reason, your website went down? Worse, if the technical issue occurred because your website was hacked?

These are issues and incidents that could potentially cause you to lose opportunities for income and your business reputation irreparably damaged because confidential data was stolen from your website.

You’ll also be exposed to class-action lawsuits from customers who will make you legally accountable for losing their personal information.

Your entrepreneurial dream can become a nightmare overnight unless you have proper website management services in place.

What Is Website Management?

Website management is a comprehensive system composed of processes and actions intended to maintain a professional-looking website that functions optimally and contributes to a safe and memorable User Experience (UX).

The processes and actions that form part of the website management system include features tasked to update software programs/plugins, design elements, content strategies, security protocols, and search engine visibility to name a few.

Why Website Management Is Important For Small Businesses And Entrepreneurs

A website provides you with an Internet-based hub to capture potential revenue-generating opportunities, a platform to build your brand, and to promote your services.

Likewise, a website affords you a means to run a business efficiently because it streamlines monthly expenses while allowing it to remain open 365 days a year.

However, as discussed earlier, the consequences of having your website shut down unexpectedly or improperly functioning can be catastrophic for your business.

Thus, it’s important for small businesses and entrepreneurs to sign up for website management services to protect their businesses and maximize returns on their investments.

To be clear, small businesses and entrepreneurs should sign up for professional website management services. Some entrepreneurs might decide to hire a freelancer or go the DIY route to lower the cost of website management.

Sure there are talented freelancers in the market who might be able to do the job. But what happens if your contracted freelancer becomes inundated with work and has too many clients to manage? Or what if your freelancer becomes unavailable because he’s sick or on a vacation?

A professional website design agency has the resources to make sure your website’s needs are covered all the time. Workroom has a team of professional website designers and developers, SEO experts, content writers, and graphic artists at your disposal.

And as an entrepreneur or small business owner, your time is best allocated to the core functions of your business – the day-to-day activities that add dollars and cents to your bank account.

Even if you’re a technology wizard with the requisite training and credentials for web design, to improve productivity, it would be best to leave website management duties to an agency that has the reputation, resources, and talent to keep your website protected and running smoothly.

The Role Of Website Management In Driving Traffic And Sales

Entrepreneurs invest in websites to help their businesses generate more sales. For the website to ring in more sales, it must receive more traffic or visits from potential customers.

But this is easier said than done.

A website isn’t a “Field of Dreams”. Just because you’ve built it, doesn’t mean “they” – meaning your potential customers – will come. You’ll have to put in the work to drive traffic to your website.

The higher the volume of visitor traffic to your website, the higher the probability of getting a sale.

What does “the work” entail?

First, your website must be found on the Internet. This means having your website optimized for the search engines so that it can be found by the crawl bots, indexed, and included in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Second, once someone lands on your website, its overall aesthetic design, functionality, content, and features must convince him to stay.

The website must comply with the ranking factors of Google’s algorithm – such as mobile responsiveness, fast download time, navigability, unique content, SSL certificates, and site security to name a few – to ensure excellent UX for its visitors.

To do this, the website management team will make sure the plugins of your website, its built-in programs, and its content are updated. Likewise, old and unused plugins will be removed to close out all possible entry points of cyber-criminals.

Third, the website is beautiful. Professional website designers are updated with current design trends. They want to make sure your website isn’t only functional but also visually appealing to your audience.

The good news is, you don’t have to do “the work”. All you have to do is sign up for website management services.

The Key Elements Of Website Management

As you’ve read from the preceding section, website management involves a series of processes that are intended to address a website’s key elements – content management, SEO, security and maintenance, and analytics and tracking.

In this section, we’ll discuss what these key elements are, why they’re important to the success of your website, and how a website management team would handle these areas of responsibility.

Content Management

Effective communication is an important component of business success. Content is your business’ way of communicating with its audience.

Through content, you’re able to answer your target market’s questions, promote your brand, foster long-term and sustainable relationships with your customers, generate leads, build trust, and increase sales conversions.

To deliver the desired results, you must consistently deliver high-quality content to your audience.

What are the characteristics of high-quality content? Your content must be:

• Fresh and Unique
• Useful
• Informative
• Actionable
• Engaging
• Compelling

Creating high-quality content is not an easy task. It takes time, effort, and patience to come up with material that meets the criteria of high-quality content.

If you want to know what goes into the creative process, here are our tips on how to create, curate, organize, and manage content effectively:

1. Identify Your Goals – There are different types of content to meet your business goals. Explainer videos are great for introducing your business and its products. Short-form blogs are effective for generating leads while long-form blogs can give your brand reputation a big boost.
2. Write For Your Audience – Write about topics your audience is searching for because that’s where their interests lie. Also, avoid using technical jargon. A good rule to follow is to write for a six-year-old.
3. Conduct Top-Level Research – The backbone of content is research. Spend time researching the topic, updated and relevant data, and the best keywords to make your content searchable on the Internet.
4. Create Structure – At its most basic, the content structure must have an introduction, a body or main section, and a conclusion. Organize these areas into headers and sub-headers to present the information in the most articulate manner and to establish a better flow of ideas.
5. Establish a QA Tier – To assure the audience of quality content, run it through multiple levels of QA checking. Review your work frequently. Evaluate its tone and language. Then, run it through software to check grammar and spelling as well as for uniqueness.
6. Perform a Content Audit – The great thing about content in the age of the Internet is that you can always reuse it. All you have to do is to update the information. But which ones should you update?

First, organize your content in a spreadsheet. Create a column per key category such as title, author, number of words, date published, and date last modified.

Then, include columns that provide data analytics like page views and average time per page. Finally, add columns that indicate actions taken. For example, “Updated – Y/N”, “Accurate – Y/N”, and “Notes”.

Performing an audit will help you keep track of which types of content are generating the highest levels of engagement and producing the best results. By doing so, you can manage your budget efficiently and allocate funds to types of content that generate the highest returns.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The basic definition of SEO is that it’s a system of processes, tools, techniques, and tactics designed to help your content get found on the Internet by search engines.

Web crawlers can find and index content by scouring the Internet for keywords. A person who wants to find the best Italian restaurant in Madison city would type in the keywords, “best italian restaurant in madison city” and launch the query.

Within micro-seconds, Google will present the first page SERP that ranks the URLs containing the keywords “best italian restaurant in madison city”.

It’s important to note that the number 1 position on the first page of the SERP accounts for 27.6% of all clicks. Consider that the top 3 positions already account for 54.4% of all clicks. Therefore, the drop-off from the number 1 position is quite significant.

The higher the search rankings, the higher the volume of traffic to your website. Consequently, the higher the probability of generating a sale.

This is why you need SEO!

As described, SEO involves different processes, tools, techniques, and tactics. Keyword research is just one of them although it’s widely regarded as the cornerstone of SEO.

Other tricks of the SEO trade include:

1. Link Building
2. Guest Posting
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Forum Posting
5. Registering your business in online search directories

The aforementioned SEO tactics are called “off-page” SEO techniques. We also need to utilize on-page or technical SEO techniques that identify areas in the front and back-end development of your website that need to be optimized properly.

A short list of popularly used on-page SEO techniques include:

1. Title Tags
2. Headers
3. Meta Descriptions
4. Image Alt-Text
5. Structured Data
6. Internal Linking
7. Mobile Responsiveness
8. Site Speed

An SEO professional uses a variety of tools to optimize a website and to track and monitor its performance. The SEO toolbox is packed with various software programs that are tasked to handle specific areas of responsibility.

Here is a list of some of the most commonly used SEO tools and resources:

• Google Search Console – Find out the best keywords to use in your content, identify pages that have crawling errors, measure your site’s level of mobile-friendliness, and learn where your pages are ranking with Google.
• UpCity SEO Report Card – Using data-based analysis, find out how your website is competing against other websites in your industry.
• Google Trends – Discover what people are searching for; learn the best long-tail keywords to use for your content, and compare trends over the years.

Other popular SEO tools include SEOlyzer (site analysis), SEOquake (link analysis), SEOability (SEO compliance checker), and BROWSEO (UX analysis).

Security and Maintenance

Your website stores your business assets including confidential information from your clients and customers. In addition, your business website is your conduit to customers.

Cybercriminals can install malware that can target anyone who visits your website. Without high-level website security protocols, instead of converting interested prospects into paying customers, you’ve unwittingly turned them into victims of cybercrime.

But the nightmare doesn’t end there. For you, the business owner, things might take a turn for the worst:

• Your business brand will be tarnished
• Your reputation will be irreparably damaged
• Your customers will leave you
• Your customers might file a class action lawsuit against your business
• Your business might never recover

According to a study by Patchstack, cyber attacks occur every 39 seconds. The year 2021 saw a 150% increase in the number of cyber-attacks compared to 2020.

It’s a foot race between IT security experts and cybercriminals. The good guys will try to stay a step ahead of the bad guys. That’s why you should never get complacent when it comes to website security.

Here are 10 tips on how to protect your website from hackers:

1. Keep your security software updated.
2. Update frequently used plugins.
3. Remove plugins that are no longer used.
4. Get SSL Certificates for your website.
5. Change your passwords frequently.
6. Limit administration access to your website.
7. Frequently clear your cache.
8. Run malware checks daily.
9. Don’t click on suspicious emails or links.
10. Run site backups every day.

As an entrepreneur, you won’t have time to carry out these tasks even if some of them can be automated. Your best option is to sign up for website maintenance services.

All of these site security and maintenance activities – and more – will be carried out while you focus on the core functions of your business.

Analytics and Tracking

Arguably, the biggest advantage of a website is having access to analytical tools that allow you to track the performance of your website.

Analytics provide you with data that shows if your current strategies are performing; if these processes are delivering the desired results and information that helps you understand the online behavior of your customers and site visitors.

With data in hand, you can pinpoint which strategies are working and which ones aren’t. You’ll have empirical evidence to support courses of action intended to improve performance and streamline costs.

If you were doing business during the pre-Internet era, it was hard to measure the ROI on marketing. Because of analytics, you’ll be able to manage your budget more efficiently and get more out of your digital marketing efforts.

There are many web analytics tools to choose from. Some of these are free tools while others require a monthly subscription. Keep in mind that with the free version, the features will be limited.

Here’s our list of the best web analytics tools in the market:

1. Google Analytics – The consensus #1 pick because for a web analytics tool that won’t cost you a cent, it carries a lot of useful features.
2. Hubspot – A web analytics tool that allows you to build your setup as you become more proficient.

Start with the free CRM to keep track of your leads as they move along the sales funnel. Then, slowly add other tools to the mix such as marketing and sales.

3. MixPanel – If you own an e-commerce site, MixPanel is the web analytics tool for you. MixPanel focuses on the performance of each product and identifies key behaviors that influence a customer’s purchasing decision.

The free version has limited features and subscriptions start at US$20 per month.

4. Google Optimize – Another free Google tool that works well with Google Analytics. Google Optimize allows you to run A/B tests to determine which of your options has the highest probability of producing the best results.
5. SEMRush – SEMRush is popularly used as a keyword research tool. You can extract the keywords your competitors are using and find out which ones are generating traffic.

Knowing what these keywords are will help you come up with an effective content marketing strategy.

You don’t have to be an IT professional to appreciate and understand how web analytics works and how these tools can benefit your business.

Here are some basic tips on which web analytics data to look for and how to interpret them.

• Pageviews – The number of times a web page has been viewed. It gives you an idea of which pages are popular with your site users.
• Unique Pageviews – Unlike Pageviews, Unique Pageviews measure the number of times a page was viewed by a new site visitor.
• Sessions – Tracks the activities that are undertaken by site visitors on your website within a particular time frame.
• Traffic Sources – Lets you know where your site visitors are coming from – organic search, referrals, social media, email, or direct traffic.
• Bounce Rate – Measures the percentage of visitors that leave your web page. A high bounce rate or any number above 70% isn’t good and is a signal that some elements of the web page are turning off visitors. A bounce rate under 40% is considered good.

Before reviewing your website’s analytics, revisit your business objectives and re-align your analysis with the metrics that are relevant to these objectives.

For example, if you want to build your brand, enhance your online reputation or increase the rate of sales conversion, you might want to keep people longer on your website and focus on its bounce rate.

If you want to target specific markets, you should put a special focus on traffic sources and unique pageviews.

Keep an open mind when analyzing data. Don’t get discouraged or feel distraught if data paints a picture of your business that isn’t as rosy as you thought. What you need to remember is that now you have an empirical basis – numbers – to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your online strategies.

Sometimes the message is correct but wasn’t properly received or perceived by the intended recipient. A little tweaking of the strategy map might be all you need to get the best results.

Summary: Advanced Tips And Strategies For Effective Website Management

We said this guide would be “the Ultimate” and we worked hard to give you all the information you need to thoroughly understand why website management is important for your online business.

To keep your newfound knowledge fresh in your mind, we’ve rounded up all the key points we’ve discussed and created a summary of our advanced tips and strategies for effective website management.

1. Setting Clear Goals and Objectives

What do you want your content strategy to accomplish? Setting your goals and objectives establishes the direction of your content strategy. Make sure these goals and objectives and clear, realistic, and well-defined.

2. Creating a Content Plan

Always keep in mind that you’re creating content for your audience.

Find out what interests are as well as their needs and concerns and create a content plan that delivers fresh, updated, well-researched, and relevant information.

Remember that for your content to be found by your audience, it must be optimized for search engines.

3. Regularly Maintaining and Updating Your Website

You’ve invested in building a website for your business. It stores your assets and valuable data.

For your investment to yield dividends, you must regularly maintain and update your website to make sure it functions optimally and to protect it from getting hacked or compromised by cyber-criminals.

4. Utilizing Tools and Resources to Streamline the Process

The Internet is packed with tools and resources you can use to manage your website. You can find tools for optimizing your website, enhancing security protocols, and analyzing its performance.

5. Improving User Experience (UX)

To ensure the continued success of your website, you must stay committed to improving User Experience (UX).

Consumers aren’t patient and will abandon the search if your website is stressing them out rather than providing immediate solutions.

Likewise, Google will penalize you in the search rankings if its analysis shows your website doesn’t offer a memorable UX.

6. Managing Social Media and Online Reputation

The Internet has given rise to platforms that you can use to market and promote your business and its brand. However, it can be a double-edged sword.

Unhappy customers can give your business unfavorable reviews. Irresponsible posts can damage your reputation. Develop a digital marketing strategy that will effectively manage your social media presence and online reputation.

As discussed in #2, create a content plan. This includes not only the creation of fresh content but a process of addressing negative reviews and comments.

7. Integrating Email Marketing Into Your Website Management Plan

Email marketing is a process that has been proven to deliver the desired results for brand building and improving sales conversions. It has the highest ROI of all digital marketing tools – US$36 for every US$1 spent!

Integrating email marketing into your website management plan allows you to capitalize and eventually monetize the leads that your digital marketing efforts have generated.

8. Leveraging Content Marketing to Drive Traffic and Sales

Search is the #2 activity on the Internet; just a few percentage points off “to send or read email” for the pole position.

People are frequently searching for information that will give them the best solutions, recommendations, or references. As you’ve read, creating high-quality content is hard work and takes time.

But if you’re diligent with your content creation strategy, you’ll be able to leverage content marketing to drive traffic to your website and boost sales.

Last Updated on June 18, 2023

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Last Updated on June 15, 2023

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While time and money should be primary considerations, they should not be the only ones. There are other factors that should go into the website decision-making process. If you rush into the process of redesigning your website, these factors, if not addressed, can have long-term repercussions on its performance and functionality.

10 Important Questions You Should Ask Before Finalizing Your Decision to Redesign Your Website

1. What is the cost of the redesign and how soon can I have my new website go live?

Since we already brought up time and money, let’s address both factors at the same time.

All businesses operate on a budget. Before a new project is undertaken, the company should first determine if they have the money for it. If so, the next step would be to find out how much of its available money can be allocated for the proposed project.

Keep in mind, a budget should have contingencies factored in. Contingencies cover additional work that was not part of the original scope of work. If money is tight, then you should discuss which aspects of the redesign process should be prioritized.

This is why you should consider WordPress for your redesign, that is if you’re not already using WordPress.

WordPress is the number one Content Management System (CMS) in the world for a reason. It is easy to update and manage. WordPress gives out advisories on new versions of its system and plugin upgrades. Its interface is highly-navigable. A web design neophyte can easily find his way around WordPress.

Finally, discuss timelines with the web design agency handling your redesign. Ask the agency to give its best estimate on when your new website can go live. Chances are, the agency will give you a modest estimate in order to moderate expectations. Their timeline will likewise factor in contingencies for delays and further testing.

From here, you should ask yourself if the timeline is doable. Will the timeline affect any commitments, such as a scheduled online event or activity? For an eCommerce website, will the timeline severely impact your ability to generate income and affect your online reputation?

Once you have firmed up your answers to these questions, the decision to push through a website redesign will be easier. You will notice, most of your questions will be directed toward the web design agency contracted to run the website redesign.

2. Why am I redesigning my website? What are my goals?

Giving your website a fresh makeover is a good thing. Your usual site users will enjoy the experience of exploring something new. Think of it like visiting your favorite coffee shop after it has undergone renovation. The coffee smells the same but the feel is new and different.

However, don’t lose sight of the fact that a redesign is first and foremost, an investment. You thought of having a redesign because you wanted to accomplish a goal. So what is the purpose of the redesign? What do you hope to accomplish with it?

A redesign is not just about improving your site’s aesthetics. Functionality is similarly important. Your website may look nice but does it run well?

How is its download speed? Is it mobile-responsive? Can it be accessed by multiple browsers? Do you want to incorporate chat support to improve your customer service?

If you want to enhance your reputation and publish more content, ask the web design agency how many pages it should have. Before anything else, keep in mind the number of pages will affect the cost of the redesign. Hence, the need to allocate funds for “contingencies” in your budget.

3. How qualified is the web designer? 

As important as it is to stay within your budget, don’t cut corners by trying to do the redesign yourself. Considering its cost in time, money, and the potential repercussions of the redesign on your goals, it is always a good idea to leave the job in the hands of a capable web designer.

However, don’t just award the redesign project to the first web designer who comes along. You should spend time qualifying web designers. Remember, not all web designers are created equal. Some are better than others.

And even if you do find someone who is “the best” in terms of technical and fundamental competencies, can you work with him/her?

Here are some tips on how to qualify the web designer for your redesign project:

• Interview at least three web designers.
• Ask them to submit their design portfolios.
• Require them to provide at least 3 references/ clients and contact them.
• Find out what services are covered in their redesign proposal.
• You will not get the design correct the first time. Ask the web designer how many website mockups he/she can provide.

Should you hire a freelancer or contract a web design agency? There are pros and cons to both options.

A freelancer would be more affordable but he/she may not have the ability to scale up the work. A web designer would have the assets but you may have to pay a premium for the services. Of course, most agencies are open to negotiating their rates.

As long as you strictly run your qualifying process, you should be fine with either a freelancer or a web design agency.

4. Will I own my website’s assets?

If you pay for services, then you should own the finished product right? Unfortunately, in web design, the rules of buying and selling are grey and not black and white.

Let’s talk about the white elephant in the room.

When you pay for web design services, it does not mean you have full and complete ownership of your website. The same goes for a website redesign. How does this happen?

In order to connect your website to the Internet, you need to lease space on the server of your web host. When you lease, you are given an IP address which is your domain name. In effect, you are paying the web host a fee for you to use your own domain name.

Once you stop paying the leasing fee, you lose the right to use your own domain name.

What you do own is your original content that was posted on the website. This includes text, images, and videos. In addition, you own the programming code and design concept. These are your assets.

It may seem unfair but that’s how it is.

The best thing you should do is to make sure your ownership of the assets is legally covered by a contract. Therefore, before signing up for the services of a web designer, hire a lawyer who can draft a contract.

If the website designer has an existing contract, have the lawyer review it and introduce the necessary amendments.

5. Will My Website Redesign Optimize User Experience?

It’s not enough for your website to be visually appealing. Your website redesign must meet your users’ needs. It must likewise be navigable and easy to use. This is why User Experience or UX is an important consideration whether you are building or redesigning a website.

In order for your web designer to optimize UX, it must have the following components:

• Useful – Addresses a need or concern
• Usable – The user must not have a hard time using your website
• Desirable – Design elements must appeal to the target audience
• Findable – It must be searchable and highly-navigable
• Accessible – Content must not discriminate against persons with disabilities
• Credible – Content must encourage users to believe in what you can do

If UX is poor, the visitor will leave your website. Remember that the attention span of humans is getting shorter. In the year 2000, it was 12 seconds. 15 years later it dropped to 8.25 seconds. Users have very little patience when it comes to websites.

The battle is won and lost with website UX. Think about it this way. Out of all the URLs that appear on the SERP, the user chooses your website. He clicks on your link and arrives on your Home Page. If he doesn’t like what he sees or finds what he needs within a few seconds, he will leave. The beneficiaries of your lack of UX will be your competitors.

Ensuring wonderful UX gives your site visitor the best reason to stay and explore your content. It will mark the start of his/her journey throughout your website. 

Find out how your web designer will approach UX. He/she must have a deep understanding of who your audience is; what they want, what they need, and what their strengths and limitations are.

6. How can you ensure that the redesign will improve my website’s performance and functionality?

We briefly touched on functionality in question #2 as one of the goals of your plans to redesign your website. Functionality and performance cannot be overemphasized in a website redesign. As we mentioned in the previous section, site users have a short attention span.

Getting someone to click on your URL is great. However, if your website makes it harder to access your content, he/she will abandon the search.

For your website to be functional, it must have the following qualities:

• Mobile-Responsive – The design and functionality can adapt to the screen size of various mobile devices.
• Fast Download Speed – According to studies, the top-ranking sites in Google have a download speed of 9 seconds. However, users expect websites to download in 3 seconds or less.
• Accessible by multi-browsers – You have to consider other browsers if you want to expand the reach and coverage of your website.
• Fully-functioning buttons and icons – Users may decide to sign up for your newsletter, visit your social media pages, or share your content. These are opportunities you cannot afford to pass up. Make sure the buttons and icons of your website are functioning properly.

One of the best ways to verify the web designer’s ability to improve site functionality and performance is to visit sites he/she has already made. Use your mobile device to access it and test its social sharing functions.

7. Can the web designer provide my site’s assets or do I have to create them myself?

The inability to produce enough content is one reason why website relaunches are delayed. It takes time to create content. For your website to be usable, it should not only have great content, but it should also have enough of it. Content can be in the form of blogs, articles, images, and videos.

The process of creating great content goes through the following stages:

• Drawing up a list of topics and titles.
• Topic research.
• Keyword research.
• Verifying references.
• Preparing an outline.
• Writing the initial draft.
• Reviews and edits.
• Approval of succeeding drafts.
• Spelling and grammar checks.
• Optimization of content.
• Publication.

When discussing timelines, content creation should be a priority discussion point. If you don’t have the time to create content, find out from the web designer if he/she can provide these assets.

Most experienced web designers have content writers, keyword researchers, and graphic designers available on call. If so, ask for samples of their work. You should also consider collaborating with the creative team.

Your input can change the tone of the content and bring it closer to resembling your own voice and personality.

8. Does the web designer accept web management and if so, for how long?

It’s not uncommon for clients to overlook the question of website management during the planning stages. Once the website has been turned over to you, site maintenance and ensuring its security and integrity become very real issues.

Before you finalize any arrangement, ask the website designer if he/she accepts web management and if so, for how long. Specifically, ask the web designer the following questions:

• Once the site has been turned over, will you remain on board to make sure the website is functioning properly?
• How often will you run site audits to make sure all the plugins are updated and working?
• Does the web management service includes Technical SEO and ensuring that the website site health score is excellent?
• Would you be able to fix my website if it gets hacked or is attacked by malware?
• What kinds of security features will you install on my website?
• (For e-commerce websites only) Will you get my website SSL certificates?
• Do you accept monthly retention engagements? And if so, how much would you charge?

Website management is very important. Although WordPress maintenance is easy, it is always a good idea to have a professional web designer oversee the care and security of your website.

9. What kind of analytics tools will be available with my new website?

Analytics tools will give you an idea of how your website is performing in real-time. It will provide you valuable data on on-site visitor behavior so you can improve UX:

• Where are your visitors coming from?
• How long do they stay on my site?
• Which pages are performing better?
• Which types of content result in the highest levels of engagement?
• (For e-commerce websites only) What factors are stopping them from finalizing their transactions at the checkout counter?

Google Analytics is a great online analytics tool. Make sure your web designer has Google Analytics set up on your website. It is highly reliable, provides accurate data, and best of all, it is free!

10. What are my competitors doing?

The Law of Comparative Advantage states that in order to stay ahead of your competitors by having immediate information on what they are doing or what they are planning to do. Find out what their advantages are and come up with ways to counter or overcome them.

Visit your competitor’s websites and take note of the following:

• Did they undergo a redesign?
• What new features have been added to the website?
• What types of content can be found on their website?
• Which types of content are generating high engagement and shares?
• Are the social sharing buttons working properly?
• Can you access it from your mobile device?
• How long does it take to download?
• Did they include customer service features such as chat support?
• Are the images better or have a higher resolution?

The answers to these questions will have an effect on your plans to redesign your website. Go through them thoroughly with your website designer.

Conclusion

Website redesign is not an easy decision to make. It will cost you time and money.  Keep in mind that your website will not be accessible during the redesign. Thus, total costs are not solely monetary in nature.

There are opportunity costs as well. You want to be sure you can generate a significant Return on Investment (ROI) to justify the cost.

At Workroom, we take away the guesswork in website redesign and provide the best answers to all of your questions. We have worked with many clients and have a good idea of what they want and need. Call it a combination of experience and intuition!

We can help you get a visually-stunning, yet fully-functional website at the most affordable prices. Best of all, we can get it live and running in weeks, not months, as other web designers may tell you.

If you’re interested in having your current website redesigned or a new one built, please do not hesitate to give us a call or an email. We will get back to you right away.

Last Updated on June 15, 2023

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Come to think of it, when was the last time you had your website redesigned?

The design process does not end once your website goes live. To perform at its best, your website has to be maintained and updated regularly. Likewise, you should also look for ways to improve its aesthetic aspects, the degree of optimization, and the level of user experience.

A website redesign can be an expensive undertaking for a small business or an entrepreneur with limited capital. However, the returns will be worth it. Given the amount of investment that redesign may entail, it is always better to contract the services of a reputable professional web designer.

How do you know that it’s time to redesign your website? We have taken away the guesswork and have listed down the signs you should book a schedule with a web designer and give your site a complete makeover.

12 Signs That Your Business Needs a Website Redesign

1. Your Website Is Not Mobile-Responsive

The need for mobile-responsive web design was predicted by technology experts in 2013. They anticipated the growth of mobile technology; that it would one day surpass the popularity of the desktop PC. The future is here. As of 2014, more than 65% of online traffic originated from mobile devices.

Have you ever tried to access a website on your smartphone and you need to zoom in to read its content? You probably clicked out of the site right? That is not a mobile-responsive design.

A mobile-responsive design means your website can accommodate mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. It should break down and set itself up nicely on the screen of a mobile device. The mobile-responsive design will fill up the screen without having the user zoom in on your content.

If your website is still not mobile-responsive, you will be undermining its chances of being found on the Internet. Google likewise has included mobile responsiveness as a ranking factor in its search algorithm.

2. Your Website Has a High Bounce Rate

A high bounce rate means your visitors are quickly leaving your website. It tells the search engine that visitors do not find value in your website. The search engine may penalize you by slapping your website down in its rankings.

Technical issues, user experience, or poor content are possible factors for having a high bounce rate. It usually happens on the Homepage because that is where visitors land when they click on your URL.

If your Homepage has a high bounce rate, it is an indication that visitors’ expectations were not met. You should have this immediately addressed with a website redesign before it further diminishes the reputation of your business.

3. Conversion Rate Has Not Improved

Among the primary reasons for experiencing slow conversion rates are outdated design and content. User experience is a critical component of website design. When visitors land on your website, they must feel secure, confident, and comfortable.

Outdated design and content could be disastrous, particularly for e-commerce websites. Poorly designed pages and vague content can be seen as misleading and may result in foregone transactions at the checkout counter.

If this happens more frequently, it is time for your website to get a redesign.

4. Website Page Loading Time is Slow

Your site visitors can be an impatient bunch. It used to be that they would wait for 3 seconds before deciding on pursuing the search. New data shows that the waiting period is down to 2 seconds.

Put simply, if your website page loading time is slow, users will abandon the search. It can be costly for your business in terms of opportunities lost and online reputation. Site speed is also a search ranking factor.

Test your website speed by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. If your website’s speed is not up to par with other sites, consider getting a redesign.

5. Your Website, Especially its Features and Content Look Outdated

We touched on this earlier and explained how having outdated design and content can affect your website’s conversion rates. There are other repercussions such as having low inbound traffic, poor lead generation, and consequently, low search rankings.

To stay relevant and become more useful to site users, your website’s features and content must be frequently updated. This is why most websites prefer to use WordPress as their CMS or Content Management System.

WordPress makes updating easy. It frequently releases advisories on updates for its programs and plugins. Updating these programs and plugins is very easy to do. WordPress’ interface is highly-navigable and user-friendly. The company made sure publishing your blogs and other forms of content can be done in a snap.

If your website is not using WordPress, consider making the switch by asking your professional web designer to migrate your site to it for your redesign.

6. Low Search Engine Visibility

There is more to having a website than being a footprint on the Internet. Unless your content can be found, then your website loses its value to your business. Keep in mind that a website is an investment in your business. Having low search engine visibility can lead to poor returns on your investment.

A website redesign can address issues that could be affecting your site’s visibility. We mentioned the lack of a mobile-responsive design, outdated content, and features as possible factors. There are other reasons such as poor site optimization and lack of marketing effort.

A web designer or agency that does design, SEO, and digital marketing can help improve your site’s visibility and initiate better ROI for your business.

7. Your Competitors Have Redesigned their Websites

The Internet has made the information very accessible to consumers. It has allowed consumers to make educated decisions before purchasing. They will read product reviews, and visit social media pages, and websites before finalizing their decision.

If your website provides users with a poor experience compared to your competitors, your business will be largely ignored. Consumers have very little patience when it comes to searching. They will not hesitate to patronize your competitor if your website fails to deliver consumer expectations.

In a highly competitive industry, you need every advantage you can get. You cannot let the competition stay ahead of you. If your competitors have redesigned their websites for the better, then so should you.

8. Site Users Have Given Unfavourable Feedback About Your Website

Despite your best intentions, it is not realistic to expect everyone will love your product and service. Entrepreneurs tend to view their business from a biased lens. This is why you should try to get user feedback as often as you can.

Users’ only interest is to have a great experience with your website. They will tell you like it is. If your website has received unfavorable feedback from its users, you should consider giving it a redesign.

What kinds of feedback would warrant redesigning your website?

• Some or most of its features and content do not display properly.
• Users have a hard time navigating around your website.
• They do not find usable, valuable, and relevant content.
• It does not download fast enough.

Take all kinds of feedback seriously. Discuss them with your web designer to determine the next course of action.

9. Difficult To Update Or Change Website Content

Blogging is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website. People love reading great content. Research has shown that businesses that publish at least 16 blogs per month generate 4.5 times more leads than those that post only four blogs per month.

If you want to increase the frequency of blogging, the last thing you need is a website that is difficult to update or change content. WordPress is widely recognized as the best CMS because the platform makes it easy to update or change content. This is the reason why WordPress is the industry leader; powering more than 30% of websites globally.

WordPress will greatly benefit your content marketing strategy. Just one more reason to switch to WordPress if your website is using another CMS.

10. Your Website Does Not Consider Social Media

Social media is a powerful driver of business. With more than 3 billion people actively engaging within their community and sharing content across a variety of networks, social media should be a regular item in your digital marketing toolbox.

If your website is not attracting followers or gaining greater search visibility, maybe you are not focusing enough resources on social media.

Are you planning to launch a new store or a new promo for Valentine’s Day? Use Twitter to send out invites or details about your event. Do you have new items on your products list? Create pins on Pinterest. People who click on your pins will get a link to your website.

Do you want to move up the search rankings? If you have a good-sized budget, you might consider putting out paid ads on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Social media gives you several options that will help your business achieve its online marketing goals.

11. Your Business Products, Services, and Branding Strategy Have Changed

As we mentioned earlier, your website must be dynamic. It must be allowed to evolve and accommodate changes in business conditions. This also refers to changes in your branding strategy, products, and services. Your website must likewise reflect the current status of your business.

What changes in business conditions or status will justify a decision to redesign your website?

Your buyers’ profile has changed. The demographics have shifted to market segments with different behavioral and consumption patterns.

Your products or services have changed. Your content which includes web copy, images, and videos must be changed to show the new products, services, and branding strategy.

Product details and specifications have changed. This is especially true if you have increased prices and the product/ service mix.

Other than just a web redesign, you might also want to consult with a brand strategist or digital marketer to firm up your online marketing and promotional campaign.

12. Site Security Is An Issue and No SSL Installed

Website security is a primary consideration for prospective site users. This is especially true for e-commerce websites where disclosing confidential information is a prerequisite to making a purchase.

Hackers and cyber-criminals are always looking for ways to stay one step ahead of the good guys. It is absolutely important to make sure your website’s security features are regularly updated and fortified.

For e-commerce websites, you should make it a point to have SSL or Secure Sockets Layer certificates. SSL assures site users that data transfer will be encrypted. You know if a site has SSL when the URL starts with “HTTPS” instead of “HTTP”.

Upgrading site security should be prioritized in your plans to redesign your website.

How often should you redesign your website?

It would depend on the type of website you have. If it’s an e-commerce website that normally carries a lot of features, you may have to schedule regular site audits from your web designer every three to six months.

The same can be said for websites that are highly active in blogging. Assuming your content marketing strategy is successful and your efforts have resulted in thousands of visitors per month, it might be worthwhile to have your site evaluated every month to ensure users of its functionality.

Of course, anti-virus and anti-malware features have to be updated as often as possible. SSL Certificates have an expiration date. Keep track of it or assign the task of updating the certificates to your web designer.

The bottom line is to take good care of your website. The more often you address its needs the lesser the possibility of undertaking a major website redesign in the future.

Last Updated on June 15, 2023

The post 12 Signs That Your Business Needs a Website Redesign appeared first on Workroom.

In fact, one of the most common problems that online business owners, sales teams, and marketers have is turning their website visitors into customers.

Many years ago, back when I started my online marketing career, I never had any case study, portfolio, or testimonials to help my services sell. So, what I did was learn more about consumer behavior and put an inbound marketing methodology in place for my own business.

The strategies alone helped me to work with the most amazing start-ups and businesses in the world. This also led me to earn a five-figure income during my first year.

In this article, I will tell you the modern steps that you can take to help you get more leads and customers for your own business or clients. Below are 10 steps on how you can convert website visitors into customers.

How to Convert Website Visitors into Customers

1. Make your website fast

If you’ve been on my blog and following me on social media for quite some time, you’ll determine that I heavily encourage you to increase your website performance.

Why? Because it’s very important, and I bet you have left tons of websites before because they took forever to load.

According to a case study from Radware, 51% of online shoppers in the U.S. claimed that they do not complete a purchase if a website is too slow. Whereas, Strange Loop has stated that “a one-second delay can cost you 7 percent of sales.”

One of the easiest ways to increase your website performance is by installing a content delivery network (CDN).

Making your website fast not only helps your site’s ranking on Google but also improves the user experience of your visitors, increases your page views, and increases your conversions. Make your website fast; it’s the first step and a big deal to converting visitors to customers.

2. Create engaging content

Notice closely the wording I’ve used—create engaging content—not just creating content.

Most website owners create content with the sole purpose of ranking and getting website traffic from search engines. Although optimizing your content for search engines is important, you need to remember that search engines aren’t the one who buys products or services from you—the searcher or person does.

Related article: How to Get 1,000 Visitors Per Day To Your Website or Blog

So, you need to determine if your content is also engaging for “humans” to consume. You can personally read and look at your contents and ask the following:

• Are the content and tone engaging?
• Do you like the content layout and structure?
• Is the content easy to read?
• Is it helpful and informative?
• Did you enjoy reading it?
• Are you going to take action, such as sharing or clicking the call-to-action (CTA) buttons after you read the content? (the most important one)

Present your content with the highest quality possible. Don’t bore your website visitors and keep them interested. Below are some ideas you can do to make your content engaging.

• Add videos, data, infographics, images, or slide presentations
• Write as if you are talking to a single person
• Encourage comments and respond to them

3. Create marketing offers

Marketing offers are pieces of content that you offer to your prospects, which become free in exchange for information about themselves, as defined by Nectafy.

Offers play a vital role not only in converting your visitors into leads but also in nurturing your existing leads. Some examples of offers are e-books, white papers, guides, videos, webinars, industry case studies, templates, free tools, and coupons.

Personally, I create e-books as my offers for new visitors and exclusive courses for my subscribers.

One of my offers is an e-book dedicated to freelancers (yes, you can download it for free). In this e-book, I have summarized 20 of the most common mistakes made by freelancers, and one of them is mismanaging their income.

Now, if you are a freelancer who experiences this problem and looks for a solution, then I’ll present you with a solution. The probability for you to purchase my product or service is higher due to your needs.

So, here’s what you need to remember. Whenever you create an offer, make sure that it is related to the solution (your products or services) that you are trying to sell.

4. Create a landing page

Once you created your offer, it’s time to create a landing page where your visitors can sign up in order for them to access it.

A landing page is any web page that a visitor can arrive at. It has a form and exists solely to capture a visitor’s information through that form. In other words, all landing pages are web pages, but not all web pages are landing pages.

The image below is an example of a landing page for the e-book offer I’ve created.

Before you start creating and designing your landing page, here are the best practices that you should consider implementing and testing:

• Write a detailed and actionable headline
• Explain the offer clearly and place visual emphasis on the value. It is important to write more benefits rather than features.
• Remove the navigation menu or links
• Form length should mirror the value of the offer
• Include a relevant image, animation, or short video
• Add social sharing buttons

When you start promoting your landing page with various CTAs or marketing campaigns, you should aim for at least a 20% landing page conversion rate goal.

5. Use high-converting elements

High-converting elements are things that can help you to convert your visitors into customers better.

Some examples are case studies, logos of companies that have trusted you, and other trust signals, such as testimonials, social shares, and guarantee seals.

Adding these elements to your landing pages or even to your thank-you pages can increase your conversion rates, which can also help you get more customers.

6. Use forms

Forms are part of converting visitors to leads and are often available on landing pages. You’ll see an example of a form I created for the landing page image I’ve shown above.

The landing page form is where your visitors give you certain information about themselves so that you can give them something back in return, or what we call offers.

You need to make it as easy as possible for a website visitor to become a lead. However, if you make your form too short, you may not know if the lead quality is high or low. Don’t take forms for granted and make sure to test different form lengths that could work best for you and your prospects.

For most B2B companies, your form should include at least three main pieces of information:

• Name
• E-mail Address
• Job Title

7. Design a thank-you page

A thank-you page is a place where your visitors go after they have converted into a lead or customer. You can create a thank-you page that could confirm their purchase and can successfully sign up for your newsletter or any other conversion actions they do.

Thank-you pages are very effective in keeping your leads engaged, plus you can use them for secondary conversion opportunities.

Depending on your goals and how far you would like to move your leads into a buyer’s journey, align them when you create your thank-you page.

Here’s the thank-you page that I used for the e-book offer sample above.

8. Create high-converting CTAs

A CTA or “call-to-action” is literally the action that you want people to take. This could be “call now,” “learn more,” or “download an e-book.” You can place a CTA anywhere in your marketing in the form of wording or graphics.

CTAs are important in starting the funnel that will convert your visitors into leads.

In my previous posts on how we increase our e-mail sign-ups and sales on Facebook, you’ll find out that our first CTA is placed on a Facebook post that we run on paid advertisement.

Once you click that post, it redirects you to a landing page that has another CTA. This CTA asks a visitor to get the coupon code or the marketing offer by subscribing. This is the phase where we turn visitors into a lead.

Once you get the coupon code, either you use it or we trigger our sales workflows through e-mail or other sales tools. This is clearly the phase in how you can turn leads into paying customers.

CTA can be seen and used anywhere on your marketing funnel.

The easiest way to start and create CTAs is by answering the “why” question. For example, why should your visitor buy your new product? If you know the answer, you can use a CTA “Buy 1, Get 2 Free!” or “Get 10% Discount Now.”

9. Execute sales processes

This step is mostly handled by the sales team, and the job is to turn leads into customers. Of course, depending on your industry or offers, the marketing team and sales team can work together to turn those leads into a customer using only the above steps or even without going to this step.

However, some industries, such as my inbound marketing company, need to educate or qualify visitors first before they become customers. Executing smart sales workflows or processes after a visitor turns into a lead is the solution to convert them into paying customers.

Let’s take for example a visitor who arrives at your blog, and let me tell you first how the previous steps work together.

1. A stranger has arrived at one of your blog posts (the stranger is now a “visitor”)
2. The visitor has read the blog post, has seen a free download of an e-book through a CTA, and has clicked it because it can potentially solve the problem he or she is looking for
3. The visitor goes to the landing page and gives information in exchange for the e-book
4. The visitor has downloaded the free e-book and goes to the thank-you page (the visitor is now a “lead”)

Now that the stranger has been turned into a lead, it’s time to make him or her one of your customers.

A few strategies that you can do are the following:

• An e-mail autoresponder with a good sequence (this works extremely well in the affiliate marketing industry).

• Traditional sales strategies, such as cold-calling or e-mail follow-ups

Another thing that you need to remember in selling is that the most common problem why a customer doesn‘t buy from you and stops you from selling is due to several objections. You need to learn how to recognize these objections and to deal with them effectively for you to close a deal or a sale.

10. Use remarketing

Remarketing has been proven effective in the past few years since it helps you to connect with visitors or leads from your website who may not have made an immediate purchase or inquiry.

Using remarketing, you can create targeted ads in front of these people so that they can finish the actions they’ve left. For example, you can use remarketing to the people who have visited your blog post or landing page but didn’t download your free e-book.

According to eMarketer, nearly three out of five U.S. online buyers said they notice ads for products they looked up on other sites. They also found out that 30% of consumers have a positive or very positive reaction to retargeted ads versus 11% who feel negatively about them. The greatest percentage though—59 percent—had a neutral reaction.

One of my favorite retargeting strategies is using Facebook, which I discussed in one of my case studies where I helped a client increase his e-mail subscribers on Facebook by 47%. We only spent $56.23 for this Facebook ad campaign, and the revenue produced ranged from $6,500 to $11,000.

Conclusion

The steps you’ve read above and (hopefully) followed will give you a lift on converting your website visitors to customers.

Sure, there are more ways to utilize and improve each of these steps but they are enough as starting points. At the end of the day for entrepreneurs and marketers like me, the most important metric we track is profit.

Last Updated on April 18, 2024

The post 10 Steps on How to Convert Website Visitors to Customers appeared first on Workroom.

I know you do!

In reality, getting a large number of visitors is one of the most common goals of many online businesses for their websites. Sadly, not everyone has the time and marketing budget to get thousands of visitors per day for their blogs and websites.

Four months ago, I conducted an experiment on the new website, Tycoon Philippines, to determine if getting a large number of visitors is attainable without spending too much money on advertising and by just using content, research, and optimization.

Here are the steps I’ve taken to perform this experiment.

First, I created, designed, and launched the new website. Second, I spent time researching for article topics that my target audience would search or would love to read. Third, I had been active on the website for two weeks and posted articles. Last, I stopped posting and updating the website for up to four months.

Those steps were made to know the answers to the following:

1. Will the traffic drop during inactivity?
2. Will this new website get sustainable traffic in the future through the things I’ve done in just two weeks of being active? If yes, why and how?

The result will surely surprise you.

The new website, which started from scratch and was inactive for four months, is now receiving almost thousands of visitors per day. It has also generated leads, radio guesting, interview proposals, and advertising opportunities.

The site is now also included in the top blogs in business and finance in the Philippines. Moreover, it has also generated a minimum of $80 USD per month from Google AdSense.

Do you want to know how I did it?

Of course, you do, and I am more than pleased to show you the exact strategies and things I’ve done to make this possible. So, let’s get started.

How to Get 1,000 Website Visitors per Day

1. Configure website technicalities

The website was created through WordPress, and when I built it, four things were prioritized: website speed, meta tags, design, and site architecture.

Website Speed

Optimizing speed on a website is one of my favorites, and I usually do this with the help of a content delivery network (CDN). Optimizing website speed has been proven to increase the website traffic of other websites that I handled and tested.

CDN delivers webpages and other web content to a user based on his/her geographic location. I use MaxCDN, which is inexpensive and easy to integrate into WordPress websites.

I’ve also installed WordPress plug-ins, which are free, to increase website speed.

The following are the WordPress plug-ins that I’ve installed and used:

• Lazy Load
  This plug-in loads images to improve page load times. It uses jQuery.sonar to load an image only when it’s visible in the viewport. Note: This plug-in doesn’t work on all themes, and it’s fine if you can’t use it.

• W3 Total Cache
  You can easily add a CDN, such as MaxCDN, through W3 Total Cache. This plug-in improves the speed and user experience of your site.

• Use Google Libraries
  This plug-in allows your WordPress site to use the content distribution network side of Google’s Ajax Library application program interface (API), instead of directly serving these files from your WordPress installation.

• WP Smush.it
  This plug-in reduces image file sizes and improves performance by using its API within WordPress.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are snippets of code on a web page that provides structured metadata about a web page. I’ve written a long article about meta tags from my previous posts, which you can check here and here. I strongly recommend that you read them.

For all of my WordPress websites, I only choose one of the two plug-ins to help me configure the meta title, meta description, and social meta tags. These two plug-ins are All in One SEO Pack or WordPress Yoast. I’ve found out that some people use both, and it’s okay.

Design

I love beautiful designs, and I know that you love them, too. I choose and buy WordPress themes at ThemeForest, which I then customize.

During customization, although I’ve planned to serve ads from Google AdSense, I always make sure that the site will still look professional and beautiful in the eyes of my readers. To do this, I ask for feedback from some of my friends regarding the designs I’ve made.

Site Architecture

Site architecture is how a website is laid out and how the pages are interconnected with one another. According to him, site architecture has three criteria: technical, aesthetic, and functionality.

To keep the description simple and to give you an idea, I’ve described in the following how I structured Tycoon.ph site architecture for functionality so that my readers can easily navigate the website.

For Tycoon.ph, I had planned to use three main initial topics: business, marketing, and entrepreneurship. I made these three main topics as post categories. Each of these main categories has five subcategories.

I had to create articles that were related and based on those subcategories. Let’s take the subcategory “productivity” as an exampleofm the main category of “entrepreneurship.” However, before we even begin creating an article about this subcategory, you should follow the second step below.

2. Assess top-ranking articles on the search engine result page (SERP) for ideas

You need to follow these two steps so that the top-ranking articles on SERP can give you ideas for your content creation process:

• Simplify the keyword research process
• Generate topic ideas from SERP

Simplify the keyword research process

The first thing you may want to do is to go to Google Keyword Planner, which is free.

In this tool, you can search for the main keywords that you will use for your article topic or the keywords that you wish to rank on the search engines. To do this, simply type all the keywords, and then you should see a result like this:

Since we are simplifying the process, the rule of thumb is simple: A keyword will remain a good investment for content production as long as there is a search count on it. You will still get rankings and searches from long-tail keywords anyway.

Generate topic ideas from SERP

In creating article topics, I’ve learned that few types of headlines stand out from the others, both on search engines and users. One of these types implies a “numbered list,” which is the easiest to create and outdo.

Here are a few examples of numbered-list posts:

• 10 Tips on How to Be Awesome
• 3,050 Digital Marketing Strategies that You’ll Love
• 100 Benefits of Coffee for Hardworking Entrepreneurs
• 5 Steps on How to Get 1,000 Visitors Per Day

You will notice that the first element on the title is a number.

Since we are trying to rank on SERP, we need to do a little Google search based on the simplified keyword research process. Here’s the result from the keyword “productivity tips”:

See? I’ve told you that numbered list posts rank well. We’ll then proceed to Step 3.

3. Produce better content

You need to produce content based on the research you have made from Step 2. Your content should outperform—both in quality and in quantity—the content that you’ve found.

There are different factors in measuring quantity and quality, but I’ll mention a few things that I consider important:

• Quantity – Total number of the list created and article length
• Quality – Flesch Reading Ease score, readability, grammatical error–free sentences, internal links, and external links

Outperform through Quantity

You should see from the result that we obtained by searching the keyword “productivity tips” that the highest tips generated are “30.” So in this case, if you want to compete with these already ranked articles, you should outperform them by providing more tips compared with the number of tips they have written and by presenting effective article length.

You may want to create 50, 70, or even 100 tips! You may also check the average length of their articles for comparison.

To give you an idea, the most recommended word count for articles that rank so well, which also worked for this experiment, is a minimum of 1,800.

Outperform through Quality

In addition to the originality or uniqueness of an article, that is, it shouldn’t be found anywhere else, the following are the things that you should keep in mind:

• The fonts and font sizes used in your website can affect readability.
• Having grammatical error–free sentences doesn’t equate to having a perfectly written article. In addition, the articles should be checked by an experienced editor. Alternatively, your users should at least easily understand your point.
• Make sure to link your past articles that are related to your current article. You may also want to link to other websites to support your idea and refer to related topics.
• Check your Flesch Reading Ease score or readability level, and make sure that it matches your readers’ grade level. I always aim for a Flesch Reading Ease score of 60% and above.

Once you are done creating the article, compare it to the high-ranking articles that you’ve seen from Step 2 and see if you outperformed them in terms of quality and quantity. You should also return to Step 1 and optimize the technicalities, particularly the meta tag.

4. Get Social

Since the website is new and I only have a limited time to manage the distribution process, I’ve decided to utilize the top-ranking social media website in my target country.

To determine this social media website, I went to Alexa and browsed the top sites in the Philippines. I’ve found out that Facebook is ranked as the number one most visited site in the Philippines. Thus, I’ve decided to choose it as the platform for sharing and building my audience.

Fortunately, Tycoon.ph managed to get 2,000 targeted likes in just two weeks!

Here are the steps on how I did this:

• Make the page simple and interesting through designs
• Invite your friends to like your page by using the Facebook page feature
• Invest $20 USD on Facebook ads to get an initial core audience

When the new article was ready for publishing, I simply scheduled its posting on the page based on the time my audience was online. You can easily determine the best time to post on your Facebook page by checking Facebook Insights.

To access Facebook Insights: Go to your Facebook Page > Click Insights > Click Posts.

I also ensured that I shared the new article on my profile so my friends would see it and probably share it, too.

5. Encourage contributions

Tycoon.ph has encouraged other people to submit unique articles in exchange for a link going back to their website, thereby improving their site’s SEO, that is, search engine optimization, and branding. But, it wasn’t the main reason why I did this.

Encouraging contributions not only helped my website obtain fresh and unique articles that can potentially rank on search engines but also enabled me to build relationships with blog contributors and receive free marketing services.

How? Whenever the article they submitted was approved and published, I notified them. Then, they shared this posting with their friends and audience, thereby making some of their active audience my audience.

Some lessons I’ve learned from this experiment

The preceding steps are the things I’ve done to generate thousands (and increase) of visitors with minimal effort, which are almost free. During this experiment, I’ve learned a few things:

1. Consistent article posting doesn’t mean that you’ll get tons of visitors. Optimization, research, and distribution are the keys.
2. You don’t need to complete all search engine ranking factors to get results and rank on search engines. Sometimes, minimal effort is enough as long as it is carefully planned and executed.
3. Spending some money to get an initial core audience isn’t a negative move. It has been always helpful to build a large audience.
4. Simplify, simplify, simplify.
5. The “Give-to-receive” approach works.

So, there you go. I hope that you’ve found this post very useful since I spent more than four months delivering this to you.

Is your website or blog already getting 1,000 website visitors per day? If yes, how did you do it? Are there other steps, not mentioned above, that you’ve made? Let me know by following me on Twitter.

Last Updated on April 18, 2024

The post How to Get 1,000 Visitors Per Day To Your Website or Blog appeared first on Workroom.

Some businesses think that spending lots of money on advertising is necessary to get consistent website traffic. Surprisingly, you don’t need to spend lots of money just to increase your website traffic. You could just be doing something wrong or missing something in your marketing strategies.

Three months ago, I experimented on my new website Northsocialmedia.com (which is Enamtila.com today) to see if minimal paid advertising would work and if pure business development, including optimization, is enough to see a consistent increase in website traffic. Hell yes, it did.

Since the experiment’s end–date is reached, I will exactly tell you the Internet marketing strategies and detailed steps I’ve used to increase blog or website traffic as seen on the graph above in this case study.

10 Marketing Strategies on How to Increase Website Traffic

1. Improve Site Load Times for Proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A 2010 study from Akamai Technologies found that 57% of online shoppers would wait 3 seconds or less before abandoning a site. Meanwhile, 65% of 18- to 24-year-olds expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less.

Besides the fact that search engines favor faster websites for rankings and proper SEO and that they increase website traffic and conversions, I have also considered the study conducted above and hence, act on it to improve my website load times through optimization and using a content delivery network (CDN).

A CDN allows your website to serve pages depending on where the user is located.

Neil Patel also explains more steps that still work on how to make your website insanely fast by minimizing your load times to maximize your revenue.

Tools for Testing Website Speed

• Google PageSpeed Insights
  Google PageSpeed Insights is a free, open-source web page service that analyzes how your website pages are running and offers guidelines to improve website performance and load time.

• Pingdom Tools
  Pingdom Tools helps you analyze the load speed of your website and helps you learn how to make it faster. It offers different features such as examining all parts of a web page, performance overview, performance grade, and tips, tracing your performance history, testing from multiple locations, and sharing your results. You may find my website load time and grade below using this tool.

• GTmetrix
  GTmetrix uses Google PageSpeed Insights and Yahoo! YSlow to grade your site’s performance and provides actionable recommendations to fix website speed issues. You may also find my website load time and grade below using this tool.

After making my website faster, it added more conversions, consistent visitor flow, and a major increase in website traffic from organic search results. I have also managed to lessen my bounce rate and increase the average duration of sessions from my visitors.

2. Meta Tags Optimization

Meta tags are snippets of code on a web page that provide structured metadata about a web page. Meta tag optimization is an important Internet marketing strategy that I do. In my experiment, I’ve focused on two important meta tags to optimize each web page on my website—page title and meta description.

• Page Title
  A page title is considered to be one of the most important on-page ranking factors that show up in the search engine results pages or SERPs. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing use the title tag of your web page as the search results title. Page title optimization should be done with care and thorough keyword research and analysis for better results and to increase website traffic coming from the search engines. The length of a title shouldn’t be longer than 70 characters. The page title should always be unique for each web page you have on your website.

• Meta Description
  A meta description tag usually provides a summary of web page content that also shows up in the SERPs. Better meta-description tags, especially those that are well-composed, informative, and compelling, tend to have higher chances of gaining clicks from the SERPs and website visits. The meta description should be at least below 160 characters so that search engines can display it in full. Just like the page title, meta descriptions should also be unique for each web page you have on your website.

Using important meta tags for social and search is not limited to title and description only.

For WordPress users, some plug-ins that I recommend and personally use are WordPress SEO by Yoast and All in One SEO Pack, which allows me to easily create custom page titles and meta descriptions for each web page that I have on my website.

Below is a graph that shows the time when one of my clients accidentally deleted the plug-in I used to activate the optimized meta tag on his website.

You will see that a big drop in traffic could happen if meta tags aren’t visible or created on your website whereas a smart and well-planned meta tag optimization can dramatically increase your website traffic fast.

3. Optimize Website for Mobile Users

One-fifth of Americans access the mobile web each day and according to a 2009 Pew Research Center report, that number is on the rise.

In addition, according to ComScore in 2010, nearly 73 million Americans accessed the web via a mobile browser, with a 31% increase compared to the data from 2009.

There are lots of advantages that you could gain from having a mobile-optimized website—improved user experience, improved SEO performance, competitive advantage, new advertising opportunities, and more.

The best way to get a mobile-optimized website is to choose a responsive theme that you can use when building your website. Elegant Themes and ThemeForest are great marketplaces for finding website themes and templates that you can use.

No matter what device your users are on, website optimization for mobile users is critical for all types of businesses. Tim Ash shares seven tools for creating a conversion-optimized mobile website to help you get started in improving the mobile experience you shouldn’t miss.

4. Eliminate Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is described as content that appears on more than one web page. It can be content that is either the exact duplicate of or closely similar to another content.

Search engines such as Google can penalize displaying your website on search results when multiple pages from your website have the same content, which means you could lose points to a chance of increasing website traffic.

There are different causes and solutions for duplicated content from your website. Kieran Flanagan shared easy steps on how to identify and remedy duplicated issues on your website.

You can use a few of the free tools available that can help you identify duplicate content on your websites such as Virante Duplicate Content Tool, Google Webmaster Tools, and Xenu.

5. Site Crawling and Indexing: Sitemap Creation and Robots.txt

Sitemap Creation

A sitemap is a list of the URLs on your website that informs the search engines that the pages listed are available for crawling. Although it does not guarantee that web pages listed on your sitemap will be included in search indexes, search engines use the data in your sitemap to learn about your site’s structure, which allows them to improve crawling.

There are more resources available on Google Webmaster Tools for help with sitemaps that you can check.

Using the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in for WordPress users easily helps you generate a special XML sitemap that will help search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com to better index your blog or website.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a file that can restrict access to your site by search engine robots that crawl the web.

You only need robots.txt if your website includes pages or contents that you don’t want search engines to index. While if you want to index everything on your site, you don’t need it.

You need to make sure that your robots.txt file doesn’t block your important pages from being crawled. You can create a robots.txt file manually or use robots.txt generation tools.

More details about robots.txt can be found on robotstxt.org, which explains what robots.txt is and how to use it.

6. Increase Search Traffic through Image Results

Optimized images can drive tons of traffic to your websites from image-based search engines like Yahoo! and Google Image Search.

3 Most Important Things to Optimize for Search Image Results

• Alt Tags
  The search engine uses the alt text or alt tag to easily recognize and understand the image used on your web page. Adding alt text is simple, you just need to add alt=“your alt text” to your image tag.

• Title/File Name
  Image file name or title attributes are important just like the alt tags and page title of a web page because they will help your search engine rankings.

• File Size
  As mentioned in #1 in this article, website speed is important for any type of website. Making your image file size as small as possible is better. JPEG image format usually works best since it offers a small file size without sacrificing quality. Online tools like Online Image Optimizer or editing software like Adobe Photoshop could be handy.

Using WordPress plug-ins like WP Smush.it and Lazy Load are also very helpful in optimizing images for your website and making your website fast.

WP Smush.it helps reduce image file sizes and improve performance, whereas Lazy Load helps improve page load times and server bandwidth and it only loads images when visible to the user viewport.

7. Blogging and Content Marketing

Blogging and content marketing are probably some of the best Internet marketing strategies I have used to increase website traffic.

Here are a few statistics on why you must consider blogging according to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing Report (2012) and Science of blogging (2010):

• About 57% of marketers acquired customers from blogging.
• Blog frequency impacts customer acquisition. The 92% of companies who blogged multiple times a day acquired a customer through their blog.
• About 46% of people read blogs more than once a day.
• 81% of marketers rated their blog as useful or better.

Since the website is new, I did not post daily; instead, I write less and promote as much as I can. I also made sure that the contents were updated, helpful to my audience, and high quality as possible.

Meanwhile, content helps you:

• how to get traffic
• keep loyal readers
• make your prospects find your business
• make a personal connection
• close sales
• … and more.

However, you only have seconds to grab someone’s attention before he/she can read your content. So, the best way to grab someone’s attention is by creating persuasive headlines.

I’ve found out that the headlines that work better are the following:

• Starts with “why,” “how to,” or “what”
• Numbered List
• Statistics
• Headlines that raise curiosity, which can also act as link bait

Another thing that you need aside from having persuasive and killer headlines is an enticing website design.

Elizabeth Sillence conducted a study where they asked people to find websites about hypertension. According to the study, 94% cited that design problems were the main reason why they mistrust a website.

The bottom line: Your design can trigger immediate trust and distrust.

In case you are offering professional services or have a company website, this deck, which I discussed in one of my speaking gigs, will surely help you get started.

8. Influencer/Blogger Targeting through Content

One of the best ways to increase your website or blog traffic fast is to target influencers or other bloggers from your industry that produce high-quality resources or at least with a high following.

Influencers are people who have high authority and a huge network in a certain industry.

Once you link to other resources, especially from their blogs, chances are they will share it with their network, which can also give you tons of following and website traffic. Don’t forget to build a relationship with them and inform them once you link to them.

BuzzStream is a great tool for managing influencers painlessly and easily helps you create blogger outreach campaigns. It features contact information research, social influencer discovery, and more.

BuzzSumo also helps us find influencers who can help us promote my content or people who could be interested in the topics I create. I also recommend using this tool on doing competitive analysis and finding topics that work, and that you can write about in your industry.

9. Boost Traffic from Social Media

To increase our traffic using social media, I have done five things:

• building a fan base
• social media management
• website social media optimization
• social media sharing
• and social media paid advertisement.

Building a Fan Base, Social Media Management, and Social Media Paid Advertisement

I have used social media, especially Facebook to target the right audience for my industry, and it has been possible by using Facebook Ads. I have managed to build more than 12,000 fans by allocating 50 USD per month.

Using Google Analytics demographic and interest data, I created a remarketing and targeting campaign for the right audience, and visitors I’ve received to my website.

Facebook Ads’ custom audience feature also helps me target the most valuable customers and prospects on Facebook by uploading a contact list from my MailChimp account.

Building a huge fan base on social media networking websites such as Pinterest and Facebook allows you to build loyalty and acquire returning visits from your users.

Once your followers see an update or announcement from your social media profile and click it, especially if it has a link, then you have just gained traffic.

Now imagine publishing updates from your social media sites daily, which could transform into daily website visits.

Website Social Media Optimization and Social Media Sharing

Optimizing your website for better social media sharing can also help your website traffic increase significantly. Integrating social media sharing plug-ins on your blog makes your readers easily share your content.

10. E-mail List Building and Marketing

E-mail marketing is using e-mail to distribute your marketing message or to build relationships. It is used in several ways by organizations and marketers for brand loyalty, acquisition, conversions, advertisements, communication, support, and more.

E-mail is still one of the most preferred modes of communication for the majority of consumers. To better convince you, Paul Jorgensen shared 33 mind-shattering marketing statistics that you should know.

However, before you even start doing e-mail marketing campaigns to increase your website traffic, sales, and conversions, you need to first build an e-mail list.

Derek Halpern said, “If you’re not building an email list, you’re an idiot.” And, he’s correct.

One thing that I would add is creating a list-building page.

A list-building page is a page designed to capture e-mail addresses. Here’s an example of a list building page that I have created for North Social Media:

I’ve offered a list of resources on a particular topic I write for my users and added an opt-in form to let them stay updated on future posts, which I will be sending directly to their inboxes.

Looking for an e-mail marketing tool?

MailChimp allows you to send 12,000 e-mails to 2,000 subscribers for free. MailChimp for WP Plugin also lets you easily connect your MailChimp account and put it on your website widget area.

I also recommend Aweber as an affordable alternative option in case you want to set up an autoresponder that converts extremely well.

Conclusion

To summarize, here are some proven Internet marketing strategies that you might want to consider to gain a consistent increase in website traffic:

1. Faster website load speed helps your SEO.
2. The page title and meta descriptions are important on-page ranking factors.
3. A mobile-optimized website offers advantages no matter what type of business you have.
4. Eliminating duplicate content from your website can prevent your website from being penalized by search engines such as Google.
5. Sitemap creation can help you improve web page crawling and indexing.
6. Optimized images can drive tons of traffic to your website from image-based search engines.
7. Blogging and content marketing are vital in Internet marketing, as well as having persuasive headlines and enticing designs.
8. Reaching out to or targeting bloggers and influencers in your industry can help increase website traffic quickly and build relationships.
9. Running different methods of boosting traffic from your social media helps you maintain consistent traffic, gain visitors, and build loyalty.
10. E-mail list building and marketing provide huge benefits and advantages.

Your Ideas and Thoughts

Share a tip: Do you have Internet marketing strategies that help you increase your website traffic that is not listed above?

If you have friends or business partners that you know would love this article, feel free to share it and I’ll be forever humbled.

Last Updated on April 18, 2024

The post 10 Proven Marketing Strategies on How To Increase Website Traffic appeared first on Workroom.