Entire businesses can operate solely online. This means that they don’t have a store or a location where clients can physically come to visit them. In some cases, it may even mean that they do not have an office at all. The power and potential of this is massive. Done right, you can keep your operating costs extremely low while still providing customers and clients alike with expert service. You can outsource and even manage a team remotely nowadays, which works to help you get the best team while also keeping your costs as low as possible.
This, however, puts a lot of pressure on your website. It needs to do so much, from acting as your digital store, to your waiting room, to your office. You need a great design, you need it to provide value, and you need it to be optimized for SEO.
To help you ensure that your business website launches with a bang, then you will need to ensure it has all the following components.
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What Your Website Needs
Your website needs:
- Excellent Design
The first step is to choose or have a web designer create an SEO-friendly website. This site needs to be easy to use, beautiful, and above all else, it needs to be optimized for all devices. This means more than just having a responsive theme. You need your site to look individually great on all devices.
- On-Site SEO
Your on-site SEO is typically behind the scenes. It refers to things like site speed, site security, link health (both internal and external), and more. On-site SEO is constantly in flux in terms of what is necessary, what is no longer necessary, and what has changed. Today even responsive themes and content aren’t recommended any longer, and instead specific mobile version of pages is preferred. This is different than having a mobile website and a desktop website and takes considerably longer to properly plan and implement.
- Optimized Content and Blog
All content must be well-written, and it must be optimized with a variety of keyword types and authority links. The links in question should be both to your own website and to websites of quality. This way, you can both assure your visitors that you know what you are talking about, and you can also help inform search engines of the quality of your content.
- Authority Signals
Authority signals are imperative when starting a business. They are, after all, one of the first methods you can use to get your customers or clients to trust your site and to trust you.
If you sell products, you will also want to have legal pages, as well as several layers of security and protection. You have likely seen these badges on other sites. There is the VeriSign Secured protection badge, Norton Secured, Verified by Visa, MasterCard SecureCode, McAfee Secure, and more. These are very simple but very effective ways to both protect your company and to relay your trustworthiness to your customers.
That is just one of the more visible methods, however, and it doesn’t work as well when you sell services or expertise instead.
In those instances, you will want to rely on two things. The first is your own qualifications. If you are a business that offers data science and analysis to companies, then you are going to want to advertise your degree. Having a lauded Data Science online masters degree from a top university is an excellent way to tell newcomers who you are and, more importantly, why you can help them.
Don’t just stop there, however. While having a data science degree is a great place to start, you are also going to want to explain your professional history as well. If you can, try to get direct testimonials from clients or even your past employers.
People trust testimonials, and they also trust reviews. Try to get happy clients now and into the future to provide one or other types of review after your work has been concluded so that you can advertise their good experience to potential new clients.
Ensure Everything is Optimized for SEO
Everything needs to be optimized for SEO, including your more personable authority signals. You will need everything from the back-end to the front-end optimized. A good way to do this properly is to think about making your website as accessible and clear as possible. While there are tricks to improve your SEO from behind the scenes, from site speed
to security to even optimizing the tag structure of your site, at the end of the day, what Google and other search engines want is a site that offers the right information to as many people as possible.
By considering those with disabilities in your design, you can actually work to further optimize your pages. For example, by writing a description for every image you use for those who are visually impaired, you will also work to enhance the SEO of your site by allowing search engines to better understand your images.
The same applies to videos. By creating a write-up of each video posted, you can make it more accessible to a greater number of users and also help search engines understand your site and rank it accordingly.
At the end of the day every algorithm update is geared towards improving the quality of searches for users. If you can make your site helpful, accurate, and accessible, then your content strategy will be on the right path and, more often than not, be far more enduring than those that over-rely on the latest SEO strategy.
Always optimize content for search engines, but do so with real people in mind. This is how you will rank highly, how you will connect with a greater number of potential clients, and how you can get your website ready to launch with a bang.
Marketing, PR, and SEO
The goal of most SEO campaigns is to increase your backlink profile. A great way to do this while also marketing and expanding the reach of your new digital business is to guest post on several sites. Use your qualifications to become a guest writer on increasingly valuable publishers. Not only will this help your backlink profile, but it will also help your reputation.