Online Checklist for the New Year

The beginning of a new year is a good time to review your company’s goals for the coming year. Company goals for growth and sales can be better met with a solid online presence. Even if you do not sell merchandise via your website, a website can be an excellent way of attracting new customers. However, having a company website is not all that is required to have an effective online presence. Landau Consulting, a web development and SEO company in New Jersey offers this online checklist for the new year:

If your company does not have a website, launch a website. It is a critical component for an online presence. Everything else rests on this.
Consider launching a new version of the website at the same address. If you already have a company website launched several years ago with few or no updates to it since you launched it, it is probably a good idea to upgrade it with more security, faster hosting, better web tools, a modern look, and feel, and, of course, fresh content. Google prefers websites that use modern technologies for performance, security, and overall user experience. It is not only the search engines that prefer this; humans do too.
Find a way to help people find your website. While having a great website is a great start, if nobody can find it, then it is not much of an online presence. Learn about Google Ads (pay-per-click – PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO). These are the most effective ways of helping interested potential customers find your website. PPC relies on an ad budget that is consumed whenever someone clicks on your ad. Your ads are displayed when someone searches for the keywords you have associated with that ad. Once your budget is finished, your ads stop showing for the month. With SEO, it is “organic” placement meaning that your website appears where Google thinks it should without paying them extra for ads.
Plan to create new content for your website at least once a month to keep it fresh and interesting. Humans prefer that websites have fresh and current content. If a new visitor sees that your site has not been updated in 18 months, they will likely think the site is abandoned and who knows what they will think of the business behind the website? Google rewards websites that are regularly updated by boosting their ranking in the search engine result pages.
Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, meaning that it renders well on smaller mobile device screens. With almost 75% of web searches being run on mobile devices, a website that does not look good on a mobile platform will not rank well. Google gives preference to mobile-friendly sites over others.
Promote your website to other, relevant websites. The editors of relevant blogs and other websites sometimes allow guest posts that you can write for them and they will repay your article with a link back to your site. This helps search engines rank your site higher in the search engine result pages. This requires regular and consistent attempts at promoting your site to many other sites. All these sites require unique content so a mass copy/paste will defeat the purpose; you must create a unique piece for each site.
Ensure that the site is secure and loads fast. Google checks security and load times as part of its method to determine each site’s rank. Humans prefer sites that load quickly so Google gives higher ranking positions to sites that use HTTPS for security and load quickly. If Google determines that the site has been compromised and contains malicious software, the site will stop being ranked until it has been cleaned or fixed. If Google test loads the site and finds its load time to be excessively slow, that site will rank lower. People want fast-loading sites and so does Google.
Ensure that your website has adequate text-to-image and text-to-HTML ratios. This is a bit technical but a website that contains a high amount of text with few images or a large number of images without much text, will not provide the ideal user experience that Googles tries to deliver. Google favors sites with content that is within its defined ratios.
Monitor your site’s search rankings and visitor traffic throughout the year to determine any adjustments to the plan that might be necessary. These kinds of marketing activities must be nimble enough to respond to changes in the marketing and search engine worlds. Or perhaps the selected search terms are not working well. Monitoring the rankings and website traffic will allow you to understand what is working, what is not working, and how the marketing campaign is impacting the business.
Learn about search engine optimization (SEO) online marketing strategy and craft one to fit your business. SEO is a process, not a once and done thing. In most cases, you will not be able to achieve rankings on the first three pages of Google search results without an ongoing, months-long SEO campaign.

You could do all these tasks but if you did, would you have time to run your business? Online marketing is a full-time job. You can accomplish all the tasks on this list by contacting Landau Consulting, an SEO and internet marketing company in NJ that helps small businesses (both inside and outside of New Jersey) establish and improve their online presence to raise your bottom line.

They can help you create an attractive and compelling website or they can refresh your existing website to make it current with Google’s latest standards. Google is always trying to deliver the best user experience for all its products. For Google searching, a superior user experience includes secure sites that load quickly, are mobile-friendly, and have fresh, unique content.

You can contact them at LandauConsulting.com/Contact. They will provide a free consultation to assist you in determining if online marketing is a good fit for your business. They can develop your online presence including your website and the marketing of your website. Contact Landau Consulting today!