5 tips for a successful business website and online brand.
There’s a lot more to a website than meets the eye. Pretty pictures will get you so far, but in this modern competitive world your business
needs to be doing everything it can to ensure your website is as good as possible and a great reflection of your brand identity.
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Choosing the right website platform. Believe it or not there are a lot of website platforms out there other than WordPress
or Shopify. Although these website systems may be adequate for your business, have you ever looked at alternatives? We have spent years
coming up with the best website solutions for NZ businesses and each is very well suited to the business we are designing the website for -
you don’t want a square peg in a round hole scenario. There are website solutions that we use that have email marketing and Customer
Journeys built-in, Xero/MYOB and local courier integration - and have amazing Google PageSpeed Insights results.
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Google PageSpeed Insights. Both Search Engines and visitors want your website to be fast. Google puts a
big emphasis on the Mobile PageSpeed these days as, believe it or not, 75% or more of your website visitors may be using a mobile device.
You can easily test your website speeds (and more) by going to ‘Google
PageSpeed Insights’
and enter your website address to get a score on mobile and desktop.
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Article writing. Most businesses we speak to really dislike the idea of writing blogs and other articles for their site
visitors. But the ones who do it well often reap the rewards, both in improved Google results and more traffic from their Social Media.
Blogs also help to position your brand well with existing customers - turning them into repeat customers over time with increased brand
loyalty.
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Is your website the centre of your marketing ‘wheel’? Many people have well designed websites and are sending people to
their Social Media accounts (like facebook business pages) and losing traffic, when it should often be the other way around. Your Social
Media channels should be sending people to read your blogs and other interesting information on your website - where you have your services,
prices, testimonials, case-studies, articles, maybe online shop and most definitely a strong call-to-action to get in touch or to make a
product enquiry or purchase.
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DIY or Professional Website designers? If you're not an expert website designer or developer should you even be designing
your own businesses website? In NZ we all like to have a go and save money. But are you really saving money or are you potentially damaging
your brand and online sales without realising it? Do you know about page-speed, on-build Search Engine Optimisation (there’s a lot more to
it than just putting keywords in the keywords box), conversion using good user-experience, well designed call-to-actions and
after-sales/contact follow up and re-marketing. We have spent a lot of time and energy fixing up DIY websites that have seriously damaged
great businesses without them ever realising the damage the website was doing at the time.
