Optimizing Your Online Presence: Tips For Success
By Suhaib Zaheer, HostGator
Having a strong online presence is the key to business success in today’s digital world, especially for small and midsized retailers that need to employ savvy strategies to be seen and convert visitors to customers both online and off. Although getting online has never been easier, the competition has never been fiercer, so having a top-notch web site, from design to security, is critical.
Below are core tips for everything from getting online to maintaining an optimized web presence.
1. Choose the right domain name.
Choosing the right domain can be one of the quickest steps to getting online, but make sure you take a moment to make the right selection. Having a URL that is short, simple and easy to say and understand aloud is critical. To that end, avoid punctuation, unnatural abbreviations or phrases. Keeping your domain name as close as you can to your business name helps. Don’t forget to spend time online looking for businesses and sites with similar domain names and adjust yours, if needed, to avoid confusion and potential lawsuits. If you’re building a social presence as well, it’s also worth looking at whether your domain name is available as an account name in the social media channels, for consistency across all platforms.
2. Take a mobile-first design approach.
When it comes to web sites, consumers do judge books by their covers, and visitors will decide at a glance whether they want to stay on your site based on its appearance. With roughly half of all web traffic coming from mobile devices, optimize your mobile site experience. To add incentive, Google’s search algorithm even boosts mobile-friendly sites. Responsive site design can go a long way toward optimizing your presence — automatically display your site properly on any type of device a visitor is using, and deliver readable fonts, touchscreen navigation and compressed image sizes for faster speeds. You can quickly see whether your site is mobile-friendly by checking out Google’s quick test.
3. Pick a web host that gives your site room to grow.
When first getting online, web site owners often pick host packages based on what they need now, as opposed to thinking ahead to what they might need to accommodate future growth. If you have a small site without plans to grow, shared hosting might be right for you. But if you plan to scale your business, you’ll need a host that can keep up. Cloud hosting or a dedicated or managed server might be right for you — look for a host that can support your traffic and resource needs without dips in performance. Additionally, having a support team might not seem like a big deal until you’re experiencing a server issue that impacts your business results or online sales. In those cases, good support is something you’ll want, even though you hopefully won’t need assistance very often.
4. Avoid high bounce rates with quick load times.
Speed impacts visitor experience, and whether visitors even make it to your site at all since page load time factors in Google’s search results rankings — and visitors’ patience. More than half of people will abandon a web site that takes more than three seconds to load, meaning lost sales and conversions if your site is too slow. PageSpeed Insights is a great tool to check the loading speed of your site. It also will make suggestions on ways to enhance your speed, if needed. Additionally, steps like enabling caching, removing plug-ins and add-ons, optimizing image size, minimizing code and using a CDN all help improve loading speed.
5. Don’t wait to protect your web site from hackers.
As many as 61% of small businesses have experienced an attack and 54% have experienced a data breach, according to a report from Keeper Security. Many SMBs might not think about web site security until it’s too late, and that’s what makes them vulnerable. Simple steps like ensuring your web site is protected with an SSL certificate are table stakes in web security. This one step can help you retain data integrity by preventing bad actors from modifying the communications between visitors’ computers and business servers or even injecting unwanted content into sites. It also encrypts data so it cannot be stolen. To boot, an SSL certificate helps authenticate your online presence to consumers and can even help boost your ranking in Google search results. Other nice features to have are additional layers of security via tools like SiteLock, along with regular server monitoring.
Suhaib Zaheer is the SVP and General Manager of HostGator, one of the world’s largest web hosting companies celebrating its 16th anniversary this year. He brings over 15 years of experience in the small business and technology industry and is responsible for delivering the strategic vision for HostGator and other hosting brands at Endurance International Group. Zaheer owned and operated a commercial real estate brokerage specializing in the sales and acquisitions of business opportunities before entering the tech industry in 2009. He held several leadership positions at other technology companies like Homestead Technologies, a web site building company that was later acquired by Endurance, and Intuit, a small business and financial software company, before he joined the Endurance team.