When building a business, one of the first things many companies try to get done as soon as possible is the Website. Your website is often times, one of the first impressions your customers have when experiencing your brand and business. Therefore, it’s important that your website looks great, loads fast and shows up in the search engines (like Google!) when your customers are doing searches for products/services that you offer.
Is your website up to SEO snuff and ready to compete with other businesses for top rankings and customers in 2020?
New Google Algorithms
Google is always adding and updating algorithms based on user trends. In fact, Google launched the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers in 2019. Abbreviated as BERT, this new algorithm relies on natural language to optimize search results based on user behaviors.
As voice searches become more common in the market, it’s only natural that Google would move away from optimization based on awkwardly phrased keywords that people will gradually type in less often.
If you aren’t optimized for this – you may already be falling behind when it comes to keeping up with, or superseding your competitors.
Efficient Content & Data
A company can have a fantastic looking website, but when it comes down to it, if the content isn’t structured in a way to help online users and potential customers get to it – there is no point in really having it.
That’s why it’s important to help guide search engines to understand your business and what you sell. Always keep in mind how your website is portrayed to search engines and that it has timely and accurate information that relates to your product, brand or service.
Make sure you’re focusing on how your website works as a whole and how different elements work together. Leverage your content to help drive results by influencing each component to work with the next. Are you keeping your website visitors and potential consumers engaged and answering their questions? Are you encouraging them to make conversions? You should be.
Need for Speed
It is no secret that today, most people are accessing the internet via their cell phones. In fact, CNBC estimates that by 2025, 72.6% of the world will use only their smartphones to access the internet.
What’s important to keep in mind, is that Smartphones have much smaller processors and data speeds are slower than PC connections. This makes website speed an important factor in the customer experience when online users access your website – and there is no better time than the present to optimize for this.
When it comes down to it, if you have a website that isn’t mobile friendly, you will lose potential customers.
Stay Connected – Technology & Who’s Using It
Millennials and Gen Z have successfully taken the lion’s share of the consumer market. Both of these generations have two main things in common:
First – They connect with brands much differently from any other generation before them.
Second – They rely on tech to not just make purchases but evaluate companies. Managers need to keep this in mind when developing and executing branding campaigns to avoid falling out of touch.
Several studies have shown that consumers judge the quality of a business by the quality of its website. In fact, a Stanford study found that 75% of customers do this.
Are you worried that your website may not hold up to scrutiny? Sprout Media Lab provides the tools and services you need to change this. Contact us online, or give our team of website experts a call at (800) 617-6975 for more information today!
