Shore up Your Web Presence in Under an Hour

Marketing your business online does not need to be intimidating. For the most part, following some basic guidelines can give you a leg up on the competition. Here are our five things to do today to optimize your business web presence.

1 – Ensure a Quality Mobile Web Presence

60% of internet browsing is done via mobile devices according to comScore. Ensure that people coming to your site via mobile devices are getting a quality experience. Make it easy for mobile users to navigate quickly and easily. Also make sure that page elements including copy, menus, and graphics are easy to read.

Most importantly, view your website from a mobile device. Test from as many devices as possible. At least try a phone and a tablet to ensure that each size device works well. As an alternative, you make resize your desktop browser window to approximate a mobile device. It’s not a sure thing, but it works in a pinch.

If your website does not appear properly on mobile devices, you are missing out on traffic.

2- Search for Yourself

How does a potential customer find your business on Google. Imagine yourself in their shoes and perform that search using the terms that they would use. Do you come up? The ideal position would be on the first page. Better yet, one of the first three positions.

If you don’t rank on that first page, do you at least appear in the second or third? If not, you should take steps to improve your search presence. An investment in search engine optimization now can have valuable rewards for months or years to come. Most importantly, ranking well organically can save you a lot of money in paid advertising in the future.

3 – Utilize Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools are two free platforms that offer a wealth of information to business owners.

Once you start digging into the data, you’ll find:

• Demographic information
• The time a user spends on a page
• The path that a user takes within your site
• Much more

They may be overwhelming, but start gathering the information now. In the beginning, you can at least find out what people searched for when they found your site and how much traffic your site gets each day.

4 – Website Speed

This is becoming more important as mobile device usage grows. Studies have shown that when a page takes 3 seconds or longer to load, the user moves on to the next website.

Page speed has become so important that Google and Facebook have rolled out their own mobility platforms AMP and Instant Articles, respectively.

There are a few tools to test website speed but one of the easiest is in Google Analytics. Google’s page speed checker will let you know how long a page takes to load and offer suggestions on how to make it better.

5 – Consistent Citations

Consistent citations at all of the many outlets does two main things: provide a broader network of sites for people to access your site from. Second, being listed consistently across multiple outlets may be a ranking factor for Google.

Ensure that all of your information, especially name, address, and phone number are consistent. You want to provide any potential customer with a similar message across all corners of the web.

Shore up Your Web Presence Today

That’s it. You can probably do these five things in under and hour or two. It would be well worth the time, especially if it means a better search and web presence for your business. in the end.