7 Ecommerce Store Conversion Hacks to Grow Sales

The effectiveness of e-commerce sites is reviewed based on conversion rates. In fact, the conversion rate acts as one of the main KPIs in e-commerce sites. Whether you’re starting a new e-commerce store or having a standing online store, the ultimate goal is to increase the e-commerce conversion rate. 

On the internet, there are millions of e-commerce websites. In this article, you’ll find out 7 conversion hacks that can help grow sales.

7 Proven Ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Hacks

It’s not easy to improve your store’s conversion rate by following a single strategy. There are almost 200 ranking factors that contribute to the better ranking of sites in SEO which flows on to traffic and conversions. To get started you will need to try these hacks to improve your site’s conversion rate:

1. Keep an eye on site speed

You want to get information about anything, and the site is taking time to show up the results, would you like to wait or close the site? Obviously you’ll close that site. So, the point is to keep your site speed optimized.

Your site shouldn’t take more than two seconds to load. When sites take more time than this, customers lose interest. Can you imagine a one-second delay can reduce the conversion rate by 7%? In today’s world, everybody wants to get quick results. Do the following steps to test and improve your site speed.

• Use Google PageSpeed Insights tool and GTmetrix to test the site’s speed.
• Check your hosting plan and ensure that you’re using the highest performing version.
• Use plugins or tools to optimize your site’s images. Images can kill your site’s performance, so you have to go for paid options to optimize images.

Check the site speed report and see where you can make improvements.

• Ensure that SEO and CRO are working together

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and you can optimize keywords to drive traffic to your page. CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimization. When both these factors work together, they help increase traffic and conversions.

It’s essential for an e-commerce site that both of these must work together because you can’t sacrifice any of them. SEO can help your content get a higher ranking in the search results. On the other hand, CRO help to optimize content for customers and users. In CRO, the goal is to encourage users and customers to complete call-to-action.

Let me tell you one thing; it’s not easy to merge these two. You might have seen some sites that only want to drive traffic, and they ignore the user experience. If you want to get traffic and conversions, do these three things:

• Do proper keyword research and on-page SEO of your posts and pages.
• Ensure that your content is of high-quality. High-quality content means it should be engaging and to the point.
• Provide better UI and UX. UI means User Interface and UX means User Experience. Both of these elements are ranking factors.

So, when SEO and CRO work together, you can achieve the desired goal that is increased conversions.

• Make your site responsive

Responsive design means whatever the device user or customer is using, your site must fit the device. Ensure that users will not have to scroll, resize, or pan to get what they’re looking for.

There must be clear navigation bars so that customers can go wherever they intend to go. Moreover, make your site mobile responsive. For e-commerce sites, mobile-first design is the key.

If your site isn’t mobile responsive, you’ll not get a higher ranking. Ensure that you test your posts before publishing.

• The format of the copy must be compelling

Your site’s copy must be eye-catching. Some visitors scan your site, and they don’t read it. So, the copy must be well-formatted so that it can capture the reader’s attention. Ensure that important information is at the top.

While creating copy, keep your target customers in mind. Use conversational words like mind-blowing, cool, and stunning to get engagement from customers.

• Use high-quality images

The Internet is a visual place, so you have to use high-quality images to show-off what you’re selling. These images will help your visitors know what you want to sell. Moreover, you can create a video to make an impact on the minds of potential customers.

High-quality images and videos can significantly improve conversion rates. Moreover, a short video can help customers know about the product features, and you can explain everything.

• Show customer reviews on your site

People love to buy products that other people are using and enjoying. Nobody wants to be the first customer. When you show customer reviews, you play with the customer’s minds. A study shows that more than 92% of people read reviews before purchasing a product.

Customer reviews improve your site’s credibility and help win the customer’s trust. You can use social sharing buttons to encourage likes and shares. The purpose of showing reviews is that people are using and loving your products. It will encourage new customers to purchase your product. In this way, you can convert more traffic into sales.

• Make the checkout process easy

Just imagine you are interested in a product and you put it into the cart, and when you reach the checkout phase, it has lots of complications. You’ll definitely quit and don’t proceed. Customers do the same thing.  

You have to simplify the checkout option. Make it easy so that customers can easily place the order. Offer a guest checkout option. Many customers don’t want to register on your site, and they just want to purchase the product. You can skip this option and let customers choose the product and directly go to the checkout process. Shopify websites do a good job of this by having a simplified standard checkout as the default. 

Guest checkouts can significantly reduce the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart.

Conclusion

The ultimate goal of any site is to get traffic. The goal of an e-commerce site is to convert traffic into sales. These 7 hacks can help improve the e-commerce conversion rate. Moreover, e-commerce SEO can do wonders for your e-commerce store.

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Business Trends To Watch In The Post COVID World

Life on the planet before COVID-19 seems so far away. Many businesses had to close while others are barely hanging in there due to the economic impact of the pandemic. Thanks to vaccine developments, immunization efforts are underway and the world is slowly emerging to a post COVID world that is very different from what we have experienced before.

Here are some ways COVID-19 changed the world as we knew it.

Digital Revolution

Before COVID hit our planet, some businesses invested time and money into digital transformation. However, not many businesses were too interested in this idea.

This all changed once the pandemic hit. Many businesses realized that contactless transactions could help reduce virus transmission so many businesses across the globe were forced to take radical steps to adopting technological advances in order to save their businesses.

Industries like hospitality, education, retail and healthcare had to adapt quickly to the changing landscape and digitize not only transactions but also the way they do business.  

For example online meetings, webinars and cashless transactions are more prominent today than they were pre COVID and experts agree that digitalization will become the norm in the near future.

Healthcare Reform

COVID-19 hit countries like the UK, USA and France very severely. Many were baffled how these advanced nations had major gaps in their healthcare systems.

Studies showed that more than half of citizens in the US with employer sponsored insurance delayed check-ups due to additional costs. In fact, over 68% of respondents reported that treatment cost played a large part in their decision to seek treatment if they had COVID-19. In cases like this, delaying treatment contributed to prolonging the pandemic while exacerbating economic impact.

Aside from healthcare reform, employees should also make it a priority to focus on the health of their employees. Mental health issues should also be addressed since many employees are working at home which can cause isolation, anxiety and depression in some people.

Growth Of Online Education

Many school kids around the world are also stuck at home. In order to minimize transmission of the virus, many schools have opted for online education instead of face-to-face classes. Many schools were unprepared to go online which resulted in confusion and chaos.

Despite all this, many schools have implemented online teaching that suits their requirements. This emerging business trend might be new and faces many challenges. However, many schools are coping very well to the changes. They have discovered (and are continuing to discover) ways to make assignments, tests and lectures interesting despite being held online.

Supply Chain Evaluation

The COVID-19 pandemic made the whole world realize how dependent we are on China. When the country shut down early last year in order to limit virus transmission, supply chains were disrupted around the world. This is the reason why businesses worldwide realized that they had to reconfigure their supply chain in order to avoid business disruption should a new pandemic emerge in the future.

Trends like patronizing local manufacturers are gaining traction. Strategies such as adopting a multi-tier approach are also becoming popular. These strategies will make it easier for businesses to manage logistics and inventory better.

Online Work and Remote Teams

While working from home is nothing new, it took off when the pandemic hit many countries around the world. Working from home used to be reserved for freelancers but lockdowns forced traditional office workers to shift to online work.

Online tools like collaboration apps, online video conferencing and the like are seeing a spike in demand since the pandemic started. Adapting to this new way of working has allowed many businesses to continue operations smoothly.

Experts agree that going back to traditional office working might not come back 100% post COVID. Many people will want to either work at home permanently or seek a more flexible work schedule in order to accommodate their needs for life-work balance.

Wrap-up

Many countries are hopeful for 2021. With mass vaccinations going on in many countries and Australia to start sometime in February, businesses are optimistic that the economy will experience a turnaround this year.

Despite the positivity, these emerging business trends are projected to stay with us. Dubbed as the “new normal”, will not only change the way we do business but also the way we live our lives in a post COVID world.

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How Link Outreach Will Help Your Website Build Authority

How Link Outreach Will Help Your Website Build Authority
Is domain authority (DA) a worthwhile metric or a meaningless waste of time?

The answer to this depends entirely on which SEO you’re talking to. Some swear by DA while others consider it a pointless vanity metric.

The confusion perhaps arises because domain authority is not used by Google when establishing search rankings. DA has no impact on the SERPs. Instead, domain authority is a 100-point scale used by Moz to measure the predictive ranking strength of a domain.

Whatever stance you take on the importance of domain authority as a metric, it’s difficult to deny that a site with a high volume of relevant external links is highly likely to outrank a site with a weaker backlink profile. Search engines judge websites partly in terms of the company they keep. If your health site has an abundance of links to Healthline, CDC, and Mayo Clinic, it will appear more authoritative than a new health site with no link profile in place.

So, a more pertinent question for business owners is this: “How can I increase the overall authority of my brand?”

We’re here today to outline the power of link outreach if you want to enhance authority and to potentially grow your sales.

Before anything else, a snapshot of some link building basics…
Link building at a glance
Link building is the process of obtaining links from other websites across the internet.

In general terms, link building provides three powerful signals for your site:

Authority
Trustworthiness
Relevancy

You can buy links, exchange links, and acquire links through writing guest posts. For the purposes of today, we’ll be focusing primarily on guest posting. This is an affordable and actionable way to start building links right now.

Why practice link building?
If authority, trustworthiness, and relevancy are not enough reasons to start link building, there’s more…

When you start building a profile of backlinks to your site, you can bring in more referral traffic and potentially rank for more keywords. Both of these elements could lead to more sales, the end goal of any business.

By increasing your perceived authority, you could become a thought leader in your industry. This will open up a wealth of public relations opportunities like appearing on podcasts and at conferences or masterminds.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Let’s get back to how you can start winning links for your site through guest posting.
Guest posting: lay the foundations on your own site
Guest posting is one more thing some SEOs claim is dead.

Even if you share this view, reframe it and consider the increased opportunity for you as more companies heed this questionable advice and stop guest posting.

The first thing you need in place is high-quality content on your site. Google wants to reward searchers with an enjoyable experience that addresses their query usefully. Make sure your content is entertaining, informative, formatted for skimming, and contains plenty of outbound links to relevant sources. Keep it simple, too. You don’t want to confuse your readers.

Your underlying goal of content is super-simple: make it so good that people want to share it and are eager to be associated with that content and your brand.

Assuming you have this bedrock of authoritative content live, it’s time to put a three-pronged strategy in place:

Prospecting
Outreach
Relationship-building

Prospecting
Prospecting is one of the most tedious and time-consuming parts of the equation. To this end, it’s an ideal task to outsource.

You need to get creative here, though. Generic cold email templates tend to turn most people off. Ask yourself when was the last time you responded to this type of cookie-cutter email.

Use LinkedIn and social media to find information about the editor that will help you craft a personalized message when you’re ready to strike.

Ideally, you should be searching only for relevant and authoritative blogs so take your time at this stage or pay someone to do the job for you. Finding appropriate sites to target will streamline outreach, the next step of your link building strategy.

Outreach
With a list of prospects compiled in an Excel sheet, it’s time to start sending some emails.

Don’t be afraid to stand out here. Indeed, that’s what you should be striving to do. Differentiate yourself from the scores of other daily emails filling the inbox of the recipient.

Avoid generic approaches that betray the fact you haven’t read any of the content on the site in question. Do your due diligence.

Bottom line, the person you are contacting wants great content and they want high-quality links. If you can provide that, deliver this message as concisely as possible while including some personality.

Remember, outreach might be time-consuming, but it saves you from buying links or taking a chance on PBNs.
Relationship-building
You should approach all attempts at link building as a long game.

Instead of sending a single email expecting one guest post and one link as a result, view this email as the start of a potentially ongoing relationship. Take the time to build a relationship from the get-go with your point of contact. Underpromise and overdeliver.

Final Thoughts
Well, we hope this overview has shown you that building a strategic link profile can increase your perceived authority within your industry.

Now, if you’re planning to undertake a link building campaign, remember that it takes time. This time could be very well spent, though. You might take months to reap dividends, but as those do-follow links start mounting up, and your domain authority score starts rising, you could even see a direct increase in sales.

If you’re still not sure how you can get started – and getting started is often the hardest part – get in touch and we’ll be more than happy to help out.

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5 Simple Steps to Digitize your Small Business to Combat the Impact of CoVid

CoVid has impacted every business in Australia, but small businesses without an online presence have felt that impact ten-fold and have had to cope with the new societal norms and the new ‘remote’ way of working.

And just when we thought that things were getting better, Melbourne is in lockdown again and partial restrictions are back in NSW. The virus is relentless which means we have to be too. Relentless in our fight against it and in keeping our businesses alive by adapting to the demands of the times and being accessible to our customers online.

Here are 5 simple and doable steps you can take to ensure you do not distance yourself from your customers.

Create a Google My Business account

When people search for a product or service near them, they most often than not want that service or product on the same day or in the next few days. You want your business to appear in these searches.

GMB is a great starting point without getting deeper into SEO. Log into the Google account for your business or set one up if you don’t have one already. You can then enter your business name, address, hours and contact details. Verify your account by following the instructions and voila, you’re set!

Get social!

Yes, we know we’re social distancing but you don’t have to distance yourself from social media! Set up a Facebook business page. Not a profile, a page. There is a difference. Users can simply ‘like’ your page without having to send ‘friend requests’ and a business page gives you a suite of tools for content creation, analytics and paid campaigns.

Facebook is the most popular social media platform world-wide with 2.7 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2020. Facebook is also the most rapidly growing network in Australia with 40% Australians forecasted to get on the network by 2022 according to this report by Statista.

A business page on Facebook is effective at engaging with your followers, you can update your customers on any changes in your service, timings and how you’re dealing with the CoVid situation. If your business has had to unfortunately close during this time, you can still engage with your followers by posting regularly.

Get a domain name
A domain name is nothing but the part of your website that comes after the www., for example, www.getonline.com. You would also get a business email address that would like hey@getonline.com.

Choose a domain name that reflects your business and what you do. It is not expensive to buy a domain name and you can easily buy one from GoDaddy or even on WordPress.

Set up a website or an eCommerce store

Okay, we know this sounds like too much if you’re not very technically inclined and do not have any budget to pay someone to do it for you. BUT setting up an eCommerce store or a website is not as difficult as it’s made out to be.

If you do not sell products, you will need only a simple website of about 4-5 pages. There are many platforms like WordPress, Wix or Square that are very easy to use once you get the hang of them. We personally find WordPress the simplest. Set up an account on WordPress. Play around with the design, templates, etc. There are many videos on YouTube that help you set up and design your website.

If you do sell products and do not have an online store yet, now is the time! There are many eCommerce platforms that are easy to use and affordable. You can also get a WooCommerce plug in for your WP site and list the products you want to sell. Again, many online tutorials are available to get you started.

Choose a platform that comes integrated with payment gateways, so you can accept payments online, and freight and accounting integrations

Drive traffic to your store or website

Without getting into heavy SEO, the simplest thing you can do to optimise your website or store is to create engaging content, create a blog if you have the time. Use keywords that you want to be found for. For example if you are a hairdresser, use keywords like ‘hairdresser in Marrickville’. Do some research online to discover the words and phrases people use to search for your type of business. And use these in your content, Optimize your products description using relevant keywords, use high quality images and optimize them by adding an alt-tag. Link your post on social media back to your website.

Sell on marketplaces

If you’re beginning to think that setting up an online store sounds like too much work, (it is not! Do it!), an easier starting point is to list your products on Amazon or eBay. You would need to set up an account and follow the steps to get started.

Remember that on Amazon you are competing with thousands others selling the same or similar products. But you cannot deny that the traffic on Amazon is great! Try a healthy mix of both to see what works best for your business.

We’ve tried to keep things really simple and doable, but steps that will show you some great results. This is just to get you started. There is so much more that you can do once you are comfortable and ‘get the hang’ of things. But don’t hold back from starting because you only see the peak! Follow these steps and get to base camp!

Let us know if any of these tips helped you, or if you did anything differently that has worked for you and can help some other business keep afloat in this time. Remember, we’re all in this together.

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Personalization Gone Wrong: User Enragement and The Wicker Man Website

A dark cloud of poor UX has been gathering across the internet, and web designers are the ones responsible. Recent years have seen more and more awful browsing experiences across business websites of every industry.

It’s not that web designers have suddenly lost all talent, or that the quality of content has plummeted. It’s that the browsing journey itself is being increasingly broken.

The Wicker Man Website

Web designers know that personalization works, 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from a business that knows their name and can recommend products based on their previous purchase history, and they know that data is needed to fuel their personalization efforts.

However, in an attempt to increase their harvest of personal data, web designers are burning alive the sacrificial lamb of UX, inside a wicker man constructed of engagement and personalization tactics.

Far from the desired increased user engagement and conversions, the result is often detachment and frustration as the user has to fight off an onslaught of invasive content – content that is neither helpful or wanted.

Accessing a Website in 2020

Being able to browse uninterrupted is becoming an increasingly rare commodity. The frustrating journey below is a much more likely experience.

1. Access website
2. Close interstitial
3. Okay, I’ll accept cookies
4. I suppose I can allow you to use my location
5. No, I don’t want to receive any push notifications
6. Huh? No, I don’t want to live chat with a member of your team
7. No, I’m not interested in downloading your free e-book
8. Nope, I don’t want to follow your company on Twitter
9. No, I’m not willing to take part in a survey to rate your website
10. Forget it, I’ll go back to watching videos of cats falling off washing machines

The Intelligence Paradox

Although some designers are more guilty than others, there’s an increasingly common problem: the more intelligent the tools at a web designers disposal, the more unintelligent their application.

The roots of the fragmented modern browsing journey can be traced back to the recent personalization boom. The fuel is consumer demand and advancing smart technology.

Personalized User Experience

There’s no getting away from the fact that tailoring content and marketing to each visitor works. Businesses want to create a personalized online experience that is welcoming and helpful to each individual user. To achieve this, they need smart technology.

Smart Technology

The progression of AI and improved e-commerce software has been instrumental in companies being able to get more personal with their users. Accessing a website now is more akin to entering a physical store than ever before. You’re greeted when you enter and can chat with a salesperson whenever you need assistance.

This isn’t a bad thing. Websites are more intelligent and responsive – they can locate what we are looking for more efficiently than ever before.

The problem is that businesses are going too far. In attempting to create an engaging and personalized user experience, many websites are instead delivering an encroaching and annoying browsing journey.

The Cringey Salesman

Have you ever been inside a mobile phone store? The chain stores where you are immediately pounced on by an intrusive salesperson. Despite your protestations that you’re only looking, they are never more than six feet away, trying to catch your eye at every opportunity, and offering you a deal if you spend more than 25 seconds looking at any phone.

You leave feeling slightly more dirty than when you entered, convince yourself your old Motorola will last another year and vow never to return the store again.

This experience isn’t far removed from the browsing journey of many websites heavily invested in personalization. You are confronted by a series of permission requests, invitations to live chat, and pop-ups. It’s a cacophony of ads and banners that requires ninja-like clicking skills to resume your browsing with minimal interruption.

The Need For Balance

Striking the perfect balance of engagement without overstepping the mark to annoyance is difficult. The benefits of engagement are plain to see. A well-placed pop up can see conversion rates of up to 50.2%, while live chat invitations can offer a high ROI of 105%.

The key is to deliver engagement tactics at the right time, in the proper context, and with relevant content. The danger is that when a tactic delivers results, it’s tempting to implement similar tactics at every opportunity and across your whole website. Targeting user’s every click and scroll.

That’s when the line between engagement and annoyance is crossed.

How to Get Personalization Right

Get Permission

GDPR has brought data protection into the minds of the mainstream and could be hugely beneficial for UX. Consumer data can only be processed if necessary and stored for just as long as is necessary.

This presents an opportunity to overhaul both the permissions you request, and how you go about requesting them.

Users aren’t surprised and put off by personalization techniques if they remember giving you their permission in the first place. Unbundle your permission requests and make it clear what users are agreeing to. People are more likely to agree to your location request if they understand that it means they will receive promotions and offers that are dependent on their location.

Don’t harass users with permission requests and push notifications within seconds of them landing on your site. Prove your value first. The onus is on you to prove you’re worth people’s time before you start pushing your content and promotions.

The Double-edged Sword of Pop-ups

Pop-ups can be incredibly annoying. Ethan Zuckerman, the inventor of the pop-up, has even apologized to the world for his contribution to global web annoyance. That being said, they can also be extremely effective.

The best performing pop-ups appear when a user is already engaging with your content. Schedule pop-ups to appear after 60% of the average user page session duration. This time period allows users to explore your site interruption free and pique their interest – without you delaying too long and losing out on engaged prospects.

A pop up with some random offer or promotion isn’t going offer any value to users. Your content needs to be relevant to the page the user is viewing. If a user is looking at a page of lawnmowers, a pop-up promoting a blender isn’t going to be very helpful.

Live Chat

Live chat is a great way to open up a dialogue with prospects, a dialogue that can be very profitable. Visitors that chat are worth 4.5x more than visitors that don’t. However, you don’t want to be a cringey salesman. Don’t try and force live chat with an invitation pop-up on every page and after every other user click.

People don’t want to be met with the same generic automated chat invitation on every page they visit, especially when they can see your live chat button for themselves at the bottom of the page.

Think like a helpful salesman, not a cringey one. Only offer invitations to live chat when it could help the user. Someone that’s been looking at a product’s specifications for 5 minutes is far more likely to want assistance than a prospect that only landed on a page 10 seconds ago.

Conclusion

Web designers walk a fine line between user engagement and user enragement. Many websites have failed to find the right balance between personalization efforts and UX. The above best practices are a step in the right direction to restoring some equilibrium to your site.

When users spend more time clicking off content they don’t want than clicking on the content they do, the result is frustration. Personalization works, it’s just that you won’t have any users to engage if you keep on annoying them.

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Digital Lessons From 2020

COVID-19 was perhaps the top news of 2020. The disease impacted many lives and will forever change the way we live. Australians and businesses in the country were also greatly affected by the virus. Even though government and the country as a whole fared better compared to other places like the United States and Europe, the pandemic has caused lockdowns which has caused waves across industries.

The good news is that Australia has been successful in keeping COVID-19 numbers down and has become the catalyst for change especially when it comes to how we do business. Here are some of the digital lessons we learned from 2020.

• Thrive or Survive

With so many of us having to work from home this year, apps like Zoom, Slack, Webex and Microsoft Teams have seen a surge in market share. Zoom for example saw a 335% growth last year with many teams and companies shifting from working at the office to working at home.

Many industries and companies also realized that working from home was possible and doable. In Australia, telecommuting is on the rise with over 40% of the workforce now considered as “mobile” workers.

This is not to say that all industries were unaffected by the lockdowns Australia had to impose. The tourism industry for instance suffered greatly due to the pandemic. Qantas recorded a $2 billion loss last year. Restrictions for the hospitality industry also had a big impact on Australia’s economy with many venues, restaurants and pubs reducing capacity and adapting to digital ordering systems to lessen physical contact.

Contactless payment, social distancing and sanitizing are now considered as the “new normal”. Businesses inside and outside Australia has had to adapt to this new way of doing business.

• Ecommerce Had To Adapt Or Die

The pandemic has accelerated many trends. Aside from working from home, ecommerce also experienced a big boost due to COVID-19 with many sellers turning to online platforms in order to continue business despite lockdowns.

Amazon for instance had perhaps one of the best years in terms of sales. It is projected that the company will do $52B in gross merchandise volume by 2023 and more businesses are following in their footsteps.

With more companies doubling efforts to shift businesses to ecommerce, companies also had to readjust marketing values in order to accommodate the message of the pandemic. The Dove campaign below is a good example of how brands have become conscious of their messaging and sensitive towards COVID-19.

Traditional brick and mortar stores will continue to struggle in 2021 without an ecommerce counterpart to pick up the slack. Those who adopt late will need to be creative in their marketing tactics in order to standout.

• Contactless Options

During the first lockdown, businesses in Australia had to adapt to contactless form of business in order to stop the spread of the virus. UberEats, Menulog and Dominoes advertised a no-contact delivery option wherein customers can select whether they wanted their food delivered and left at the front door so that both parties can practice social distancing.

Supermarkets also went with contactless options and customers can have options like shopping on line and then picking it up curbside, having scheduled shopping hours for seniors and other members of the vulnerable population or ordering online and having it delivered at your doorstep.

The Australian government also had to rethink services and launched an expanded Medicare-subsidized health service so that consultations, referrals and prescriptions can be done through online channels.

• Tech Jobs On The Rise

This shift to digital has increased the demand for tech jobs. According to LinkedIn, “software engineer” was the leading search term for April 2020.

R&D tax incentives in the budget were also revealed by the Federal Government with Treasurer Josh Frydenberg calling research and development and the adoption of digital technology “critical to Australia’s future prosperity”. $2 billion is being committed RDTI scheme.

The rapid growth of IT, fintech and platforms saw rapid growth in the pandemic which is seen to continue on after it has passed. This means that tech jobs will be in demand as it is important for business owners to understand the role of technology in growing their business. With government backing up incentives for R&D, companies need to take advantage of this opportunity starting this year.

Bottom Line

Businesses will continue to face challenges in the coming year. Even with news of vaccinations in many countries across the world, flexibility, innovation and resilience is important for businesses to prosper during and after a pandemic.

2020 has clearly been a turning point in history. Many companies have realized that they need to build the competencies the wished that they have invested in before. R&D, digitalization and a more data driven business can help businesses weather pandemics and other challenges to come.

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Why Website Development Reviews and Tests Are Important

A website is arguably your most important asset when it comes to launching your brand and your business online. Your website is where you share critical information about your products and services, where you communicate with your potential customers, and where you often make your first impression. Before a phone call or a visit to your store, it all starts with a website.

When it comes to designing and developing a website for your business, you have a few options. You can do it yourself using a website builder like WordPress, Weebly or Squarespace, you can contract a designer and developer to do the job, or you can work with a digital marketing agency to handle everything from development and design to SEO considerations. Of course, if you have the capabilities in-house, you can also do this all professionally yourself.

Whichever option you choose, it is important to insist on a thorough website development testing and review process. This is about much more than making sure your website technically works. Website development reviews will ensure the functionality, performance, accessibility and security of your website are optimised, which will go a long way to improving your SEO and UX (Search Engine Optimisation and User Experience)

Let’s find out a bit more about the importance of web development reviews and testing.

Web Development Reviews: Vital for Developers, Marketers, and Users

When it comes to website development reviews, everyone is impacted, and that’s why it’s essential to test everything and get it right. For example, a slow loading website is a design/development issue, but it’s also bad for SEO from a marketer’s perspective, and it makes users frustrated and more likely to abandon their experience.

When you check for the points below, remember to consider them from all three of these perspectives to ensure your website is running at its best.

Minor Errors to Check for in Website Testing

While the following errors are minor, they can make a major difference to the quality of your website and the experience you provide. Developers, designers, end-users, and other professionals (e.g. copywriters) should be utilised to identify these errors.

Some minor errors to look for include:

• Spelling and grammar mistakes in the copy
• Images and videos not loading
• Broken links
• Errors with form submission
• Errors with search functionality

Improving Website Performance (Speed)

As mentioned above, website speed is one of the factors that effects everyone who uses a website. Page speed is one of Google’s SEO ranking factors, so it’s important to optimise your website for speed if you want to rank in search results. As well as this, research suggests that 40% of people will only wait three seconds for your page to load before clicking away.

To improve website performance, you can optimise your images and multimedia for the web, review your code, and reconsider your hosting, among other things.

Functionality in the Real World

Just because something works in theory, it doesn’t mean it’s going to work optimally in real-world environments. That’s why it’s important to get end-users to test all the different functions on your website before a wide release.

While a form, an app, or even the website navigation might make sense to someone who has spent months working on the website, it might not seem so intuitive in the hands of an everyday user accessing your site for the first time.

Your Website on Other Browsers and Mobile Devices

Cross-browser and mobile compatibility is another important thing to look at when it comes to website development reviews. Just because you aren’t using Internet Explorer anymore, it doesn’t mean your customers aren’t.

It’s also essential to have a responsive, mobile-friendly website. This is not only because mobile traffic accounts for half of all global website traffic, but because Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it considers the mobile version of your website before the desktop version.

Website Accessibility

Website accessibility refers to the process of making your website easily accessible for anyone, including those who are operating with a screen reader or without a mouse.

Here are some important considerations when reviewing and testing your website for accessibility purposes:

• Include appropriate alt text for all images
• Ensure linking text is descriptive and accurate
• Evaluate colour contrast in your web design
• Ensure your website is 100% functional with only the use of a keyboard
• Place labels for forms beside the text box, not within it

Consider On-Page SEO

To ensure your website is an excellent resource that can be easily found by users, include on-page SEO in your web development review. With the top Google search result getting about a third of all clicks and page two search results barely being clicked at all (0.78% according to Backlinko), SEO is a powerful tool for your website that you want on your side.

Some aspects of on-page SEO to consider in your review include:

• URLs that are short and optimised with a target keyword
• Each page has a unique page title and meta description
• Your target keyword for a page is used in the first 150 words of the content
• You are linking to other useful resources, both on your website and externally
• H1, H2, and H3 tags have been used and optimised with keywords
• Positive customer reviews are used on the website (to generate more reviews from your customers, consider the Supple Reviews Tool)
• Your website has been secured with HTTPS

Get Started with Web Development Reviews and Testing Today

As you can see, website development testing is about more than ticking a few technical boxes. Rather, it can affect the whole outlook of your business online, from branding and reputation to SEO and revenue.

When running tests and reviews on your website, keep the points above in mind and remember to complete a comprehensive range of website reviews. To summarise, this includes testing for functionality, usability, interface, compatibility, performance, and security.

By taking the steps to review your website early in the process, you can avoid expensive redesigns and embarrassing errors, and ensure a smooth launch for your business’s online presence.

Author Bio:

A Digital Marketer and marketing strategist who works with Supple, a top Digital marking and website designing agency in Australia. Apart from this, he loves to write blogs on web design, SEO & internet marketing.

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Top 10 Things You Can’t Avoid for SEO in 2021

Getting top rank has become a big race and mission for businesses across the world, offering products and services on the web. Consequently, both the demand and value of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) have increased very rapidly.

Professional marketers very well know what SEO is and its importance to boost up the business reach, customers and ROI. The magical secrets of SEO help businesses to get higher ranking on different search results.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the technique of optimizing a website according to the standards set up by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. There are lots of things we should consider while optimizing a website and make it search engine friendly.

To better implement all the things you must connect with expert SEO professionals as they know the best ways and techniques to make your website optimized.

There are limitless benefits of SEO, however achieving these benefits is daunting because it requires lots of practice, patience and skills with SEO trends, tools and techniques. To better implement all the things properly, you also need to be updated with the Google algorithm updates, what is happening in the industry and the ways your competitors are following.

Lots of businesses think that SEO is just intended to some of the search engines such as Google, Bi, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo; however, it is the time to change the mindset. The key idea behind SEO is to bring organic traffic naturally through the search engine formulas, algorithm rules as per your company’s website.

The search engines analyse your website to know its contents, images, videos, text, navigation and other elements to determine if the information is relevant and valuable to the visitors or audience.

These rules and methods are becoming very broad and sophisticated with every passing day, particularly when we talk about the topmost search engine like Google.

Every quarter it launches new algorithm updates and pushes business owners and marketers to have a good online presence to the customers and audience.

Know top 10 Things You Can’t Avoid for SEO in 2021

Technology is an ever-changing process that’s why every business must be updated with the latest updates, technologies and tools to stay long in the market. It is also necessary to find the ways your big competitors are operating in the market. SEO is one of the best ways to win the competitive race, but you should consider lots of things to get unlimited benefits from SEO.

There are lots of things a website owner and the marketers should not avoid SEO in 2021.

• Voice search will impact the search queries

We should be thankful to Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, voice search technology created its strong presence. As technology is increasing and changing rapidly, voice search is becoming more popular.

The fact is, the percentage of households estimated to grab a smart speaker is 55% by 2022.

Always consider your keywords whenever you optimize your website for voice search. Find out the long-tail keywords and phrases that we use in our daily life. 

Voice searches will play a bigger role in the coming time with natural-sounding and natural phrasing. For example, you might voice search, “top things you can’t avoid for SEO in 2021?” however, you type “best things to consider for SEO in 2021.”

• Content is always the king

Always perform better research on keywords according to your business niche and frame out a dedicated and relevant content for the audience. The content is king, and it will still be the top contender for SEO in 2021. Write a readable, impressive and informative content to get attention from the visitors.

Content is the key to success for any business using SEO techniques. Audit your content regularly and find out the low-performing contents. Refresh or replace these low performing contents with fresh and updated contents.

Search-engine friendly writing is relied on maintaining a balance between our everyday language and keywords. It tends that you must write the content in a natural way. Use keywords naturally in the content and give the quality and flow in it to stay the readers till the last minute and last word of it.

Analyse semantically related keywords to your main keywords. Always consider it that if you want to gain the top benefits from SEO strategies, then your content should be relevant and productive.

It is a necessary and essential element to boost your business profits and its reach to people across the world. Always make a proper content marketing plan, and focus on the essential factors to interact with your customers. 

Examine the titles, headings and other factors to make your content better, lucrative and intuitive.

• Artificial Intelligence is a big player for every business niche

You may be thinking that the correlation between Artificial Intelligence and SEO. But, both these technologies are strongly connected now. The fact to justify the words is, AI is rapidly changing the interaction of people with online content. 

AI algorithm of Google is particularly worth noting. A few years back, the algorithm named RankBrain came out and plays a vital role in ranking factors of Google for SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) results.

Therefore, the big question is how you should make your website optimized for RankBrain? It is typical because the details are not out to the people, so the professionals believe that seamless user experience and easy to use the website are the primary elements. 

These could also incorporate factors such as click-through rate and time spent by the users on the page. Therefore, you need to engage and captivate your readers with well-organized and useful content. Use proper tools like on-page SEO checker and others to find the page strength relied on different points such as backlinks, readability and much more.

• Create responsive and mobile-friendly websites

Google rolled out it’s mobile-first indexing in 2019, tending the search engines seems first at the mobile versions of any website, considering the mobile-view as the primary version instead of the desktop version.

According to CNBC, “About 73% of the internet users will access the web only through mobile devices by 2025.”  

Never neglect the power of having a presence on mobile devices. It always matters. Millions of people are using mobile devices to access the internet, find things, and buy products and pay bills for services and much more. 

If you miss using the power of the mobile, then it will not be a good deal for your business profits and its reach.

It is not a big deal if we say that mobile is the best channel that makes your business global. During the pandemic of COVID-19 people were staying at home and during those anxiety-driven hours, they have spent lots of hours by tapping on mobile screens. 

The purpose might be different, but the usage of mobile devices is huge. Be it online music, online shopping, online therapy and much more people use their mobile devices to fulfil their needs.

After the mobile-first algorithm of Google, it has become much essential for website owners, web developers and SEO professionals to design and optimize responsive and mobile-friendly websites. Just think about the mobile-first concept and act accordingly.

• Long-tail keywords are strong dominants

Keywords always have been a key factor of SEO practices since the beginning. However, there have been lots of changes in the last few years in density, strength and use of keywords. Keywords are one of the most vital factors what you should never avoid while implementing SEO strategies. 

Long-tail keywords are getting more popularity and will impact the market again in 2021. Using phrases, organic and lengthy keywords will be essential for gaining maximum visibility, and audience reaches through the search engines.

• Never forget to target geographical-based clients

This trends still has a strong presence among the SEO experts. Marketers never forget to target geographical-based clients. 

Trends are evolving rapidly, competition is getting high and the way people are doing web searches, this has become essential for digital marketers to follow and implement the best SEO practices to target location-based market

Location-based marketing is a fruitful technique for businesses to optimize their website content according to the target location and to get higher ranking on SERPs. Use SEO-specific meta tags, keywords, contents and others in your website to get attention from different location clients better.

• Multi-platform website optimization

Currently, Google is top and the best search engine available on the internet. Billions of websites are optimized accordingly. Google give updates time to time in order to improve user experiences and to analyse website performances. However, there are other search engines also available where you should promote your website.

No doubt that not any search engine can beat the popularity of Google, but it doesn’t mean that other search platforms have less value. Therefore, always keep your website well optimized for multiple platforms to get good ratings and customers’ reach.

• Never forget to include video content for an effective SEO strategy

Integrating video content provides a seamless and unique experience to the customers of your business. YouTube is the biggest online video medium with more than 1 Bn users across the world. If you have not started it yet, then don’t wait for more and start it today. 

Still not convinced? Check the fact below:

According to Cisco, “In terms of consumption video is predicted to surpass all other content forms.”

It seems some tricky to optimize the video content. Isn’t it? First, optimize your video channel name and description according to your industry-verticals. The description of it not only equips the keywords but also provide a user-friendly channel to it.

• Data will be influence the SEO

The analysis and research of relevant, quantitative as well as qualitative data are essential to apply an SEO strategy for your business growth. Tracking user behaviour, reviews, and the queries they raise provide you with the best parts where you need to improve your business. 

Use the right keyword research tools, and site optimization strategies to move to shift your present SEO methods in the right direction.

To gather data, you can use Google Analytics. Analyse the data sources carefully and check the insights regularly using tools like Google analytics. It is a great tool to target your target customers better. 

It helps you find out lots of factors such as:

• Referral traffic
• Browsers used by the people
• Devices people are using to access the businesses on the web
• Analyse your competition etc.

Identify the common issues and lack of things your customers are facing while visiting your website for some purpose. Check out the locations, user-age, genders and other factors to better target your market and land it into your website.

Data science is helpful in different factors are as follows:

• Get the source of usual and unusual traffic.
• Identify pages facing issues in crawling.
• Analyse the least and most crawled URLs
• Identify the sources of converting traffic.
• Create relevant campaigns to meet the needs of the audience
• Identify the buyer’s pain and the ways to give them relief.
• Verify response errors, redirects, bounce rate, indexing and loading time etc.

• Accommodate customized searches

The search patterns of users always vary according to their behaviour, needs, like and dislike. Analyse how people find the things on the search engines, it will help you implement better plans for your SEO tactics.

In 2021, businesses owners would require more focus on user search patterns in order to meet their expected results. Professional SEO service providers, individuals or companies can help you to accommodate customized searches and get better rank in the search results.

Final Words

Whenever we talk about SEO, 2021 will be in the focus of every business owner, SEO strategies and marketers. It will not be easy to win the market and grab the top search engine rankings without proper SEO strategies. In this writing, we have tried to elaborate some of the best and unavoidable strategies for SEO in 2021.

Start analysing your current SEO strategies now to incorporate interactive video marketing, zero-click search, engaging and informative content, long-tail keywords and other essential elements to get your target market.

Author Bio

Ella Watson is an ambitious Outreach Manager and technical writer at Platinum SEO. Offering expertise in integrating digital marketing assets, creating online content, driving brand awareness, and coordinating digital marketing campaigns. She is a team builder, a natural leader, and thrives in a fast-paced environment. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, skiing, and hanging out with colleagues.

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