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Top 5 Ways to Use Working from Home to Optimize Your Web Site
Working From Home – Tools, Strategies and Best Practices – Webinar Series “Working Lunch”
March 30, 2020
Google Analytics Basics – 3 Simple Steps to Optimize Your Website – Webinar Series “Working Lunch”
April 29, 2020The current guidelines on social distancing, closed offices and other public places, and the abrupt shift to working from home have had a daunting affect on all of us. Every aspect of American society and culture has been affected. Still, there’s a silver lining if you’re a business owner or IT manager with a web site to maintain and operate.
The fact is, now is the perfect time to tackle all those web dev tasks you can never find time to accomplish. This is your golden opportunity to optimize and modernize your web site. Seize this moment, and you can literally take your business to the next level. Here are the Top 5 ways you can do it while working from home.
# 1 – Clarify your short- and long-term game plan.
Sometimes the hardest part is just getting the time and space to think clearly about your business website. Working from home can provide you extra time previously eaten up by commuting. You also may find you’re better able to minimize interruptions working from home.
Use that time and space to review why you created your web site in the first place. Honestly evaluate whether you achieved your original design goals. Identify any changes to your business needs, to your customers’ needs, or new technologies that were developed since you launched your site. The digital universe evolves rapidly, and something somewhere almost certainly has changed in your business, in your customer base, or in available technology since you launched, even if it was as recently as six months ago.
Following is a common development pathway your business might follow as it evolves.
- Short-term goals: Optimize for organic traffic, to be found, to establish presence.
- Mid-term goals: Optimize to build brand, educate and engage visitors, generate leads, influence opinion.
- Long-term goals: Optimize to provide a service, for sales and e-commerce, to delight and retain customers, to manage brand perception and reputation.
Use your time working from home to review where you are in your web site’s evolution. Honestly evaluate whether you’re meeting your current business and customer needs and have the necessary technology to do so. And take the time while you have it to anticipate the moves you need to make today to meet your business and customer needs tomorrow. Following are several specific tasks to consider.
# 2 – Boost visibility in search results.
SEO is a big topic all by itself. Search algorithms change frequently, and you’re competing against an enormous number of players, many of whom have enormous budgets. There’s a good reason why some people specialize in search and do nothing else.
What’s more, the game is played differently these days compared to just a few years ago. It’s no longer the main goal to be the first entry in a list of search results. Instead, your job is to make your website visible and easily discoverable to people who want, need, and are actively looking for your product or service. “Getting found” was likely your main short-term goal the first day you launched your site. What you may not realize is that it also has been the most important long-term goal of your website ever since.
Use the time and relative calm of your home office to reassess every link in your SEO chain. Then ask yourself the following questions:
- When was the last time you optimized all your site content – product descriptions, website copy, blog posts, videos, podcasts, images, and more?
- Do you have definitive goals or targets for your search strategy?
- You do have an overall strategy, don’t you?
- Have you established specific metrics to gauge your progress?
- Do you make use of those metrics along with web visit and other analytics to inform future decisions about your content, site structure and user experience?
- Have you considered popular Yoast plug-ins to help manage search, video search, local search and news search for your WordPress-based website?
Then decide whether you, as chief entrepreneur and head visionary, are honestly the best choice to lead the search team, or your business would benefit from naming a dedicated SEO specialist.
#3 – Integrate video conferencing, meeting and appointment apps into your site.
The current public health crisis, office closings and social distancing are extreme examples of why you need to be prepared to “meet” coworkers, colleagues and customers on your website.
At a time when the public is officially advised to practice self-isolation, video conferencing is the only way for you and your staff to lay eyes on one another and establish a human connection.
But beyond office communication, videoconferencing is a powerful tool you can use to assure existing customers you’re still doing business as usual, keep conversations moving forward with prospective clients, perform customer service, serve product demonstrations, host or attend marketing or financial presentations, collaborate on IT projects and much more.
For IT workers in particular, telecommuting has become the preferred work arrangement. A recent report by Flexjobs shows that 4.7 million people now work from home, a 91% growth in remote work over the past decade. Allowing staffers to work from home is no longer just a nice perk you can dangle to attract a new hire. These days, it’s expected.
As for your marketing and sales funnel, think of an appointment app and videoconferencing as the last mile of a prospective client’s customer journey. They discovered your website via search, they find your content useful, they’ve crawled your blog, downloaded a white paper, perhaps watched a few videos and listened to a podcast or two. They’ve pursued your product or service this far, why not make it easy for them to walk right into your business and book a face-to-face meeting?
And finally, when every mobile and laptop device on the market comes pre-configured with it’s own scheduling and videoconferencing apps, can your business and website afford not to operate in the same space as your customers and competitors?
# 4 – Develop an e-commerce or shopping solution to sell products.
According to business analytics website Statista, in 2019, U.S. online retail sales of physical goods amounted to 365.2 billion US dollars and are projected to reach close to 600 billion US dollars in 2024. Nearly 60% of shoppers worldwide purchase from overseas sellers. If you’re not selling something on your website, you’re clearly missing out on both revenue and potential market expansion.
Even if your business is service oriented and you don’t market a line of consumable products, you can still sell white papers, research reports, case studies, market data pertinent to your industry, technical or regulatory guidance, or any other type of information resource your customers need to support their businesses. Your team is likely already collecting or generating valuable data in the normal course of running your business. Start seeing it as more than content for internal use only. If it’s valuable to you, it will be valuable to potential customers and clients, too.
For a service business, such “products” are an excellent interim step in your customers’ sales journey, after prospective clients have gotten to know you and engaged with your free content, but before they’re ready to close a deal. With proper branding, these data products and resource guides can even help establish your brand as a thought leader and influencer in your industry.
Whether you market a traditional line of products or you’re in a service industry, you’re always in the business of selling something to somebody. Use your WFH time to get familiar with the top off-the-shelf e-commerce solutions for any web platform, or for WordPress in particular.
# 5 – Use site visitor analytics to add more and better calls to action, links and engagement hooks.
You’ve laid out your short- and long-term goals. You’ve unleashed a search guru to help make your website easy to find to those who need you most. You’ve made it easy and convenient for both coworkers and customers to schedule appointments, meetings and videoconferences. And your e-commerce platform is up and running and generating revenue.
Now it’s time to make sure you actively engage the visitors you worked so hard to attract to your website.
Visitor analytics will not only help you understand your customers better, they’ll also help you optimize your website to engage them more fully and serve them better. You’ll discover a host of valuable information about the user experience, including:
- How visitors get to your website, from which previous sites or links,
- Your most popular pages,
- How many pages visitors view in a single session,
- Amount of time spent on a page,
- What topics interest a particular visitor,
- A visitor’s geolocation,
- How well landing pages drive conversions,
- And much more.
Then you’ll use that data to build more and better engagement links to recommend similar content, keep visitors on your site longer, move them through their customer journey more efficiently, and ultimately convert more sales.
Whichever website analytics solution you choose, there are essentially four steps to the process.
- Collect raw data about visitor activity on your website.
- Analyse the data and develop metrics to quantify visitor behavior.
- Establish KPIs – key performance indicators – for visitor metrics you wish to improve.
- Develop strategies to achieve the goals identified in your metrics and KPIs, whether it’s drawing more visitors from affiliate links, increasing page views, capturing e-mail addresses, booking consultations, selling a product, etc.
Now’s also a good time to evaluate whether a CDP – a customer data platform – can benefit your business. A CDP can keep track of all your customers and prospects aggregated from all the customer platforms used by your company – your customer database, CRM, website visitor behavior, apps, website registration, e-commerce solutions and other transactional systems.
The CDP analyses all the first-party data and then helps you create personalized e-mail messaging, promotions and offers, exclusive premium web content for registered users, and more.
There’s no telling for how long we’re all going to be working from home. And who knows, now that so many workers and companies have found out telecommuting can actually work, maybe some of us never will go back to five days a week in the office.
Either way, use your work-from-home time wisely to refresh your business and website goals, and re-calibrate to a higher standard. One thing is certain: Neither your customers nor the other players in your space are standing still. It’s time to optimize your website, and take your business to the next level.
READY TO TAKE THE NEXT STEP?
We have seen websites of all shapes and sizes, from brilliant to completely dysfunctional. Your site may live solidly in the middle of the bell curve in this regard, however that doesn’t mean your site couldn’t stand to benefit from some amount of modernization. Just like all other technology, the technology of websites is constantly evolving and changing. Often times, elements of a site which were highly effective when a site was built lose their effectiveness over time; and depending on the nature of your business, you may not even realize how significantly even a small issue can affect your business.
While it may be difficult to fully comprehend and validate the decision to move forward and modernize, it is important to keep in mind that time flies as it relates to technology and user expectations fly right along with it. Your website is a 24-hour, 7-day a week representation of your organization online. It needs to properly showcase your brand, your message and your mission. It should drive results, rather than hinder your efforts.