During the coronavirus pandemic, you should keep your hands clean and your online business optimized. If you had an online business up and running before the start of this pandemic, consider yourself lucky, but do not let it go to your head because as things start to go downhill, not all online businesses will continue to thrive.
Why Should You Optimize Your Online Business?
Optimizing your online business during the coronavirus pandemic is essential for staying in the clear. Many businesses have had to shut down their brick-and-mortar locations due to the strict city-wide and even state-wide regulations that require all “nonessential” businesses to close temporarily.
These businesses now must rely on the digital side of their online business, and that is if they even have one. Without the ownership of an online business, closing means a complete stop in money flow until things get up and running online.
Although it is even more crucial at the present moment, optimizing your online business at any time, not just during a major pandemic, can significantly benefit the success of your business compared to competitors.
Online Business Optimization Techniques
- Get involved with search engine optimization (SEO) services
- Ensure your business website is mobile-friendly
- Improve page loading speeds
- Complete a website audit for performance analysis
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is an effective method for obtaining rank on search engines over competitive websites. When someone pulls up a search on Google or another search engine, you want them to see your website as one of the first couple of results. That way, more people that are online get driven toward your website to either buy products or view your posted content. Although it does take some work to earn a high rank on search engines, you can begin to take steps in the right direction to give your online business a little boost during the coronavirus pandemic.
Search engine optimization is a complex process. It immensely relieves some stress if you have someone to assist with creating the SEO content and knowing what needs to change with your website to increase rank.
Start by getting in contact with an SEO service online, and you may even want to gain some knowledge about the whole idea of search engine optimization by exploring informational articles online. Anything you learn about SEO and somehow use it to change the layout of your online business, it can increase the likelihood of a boost in online sales.
Mobile-Friendliness
Most everyone surfs the internet on their mobile phone, rather than on a desktop computer. Unfortunately, many online businesses do not keep that in consideration when designing their website and leave the mobile version of their site either lacking in quality or just wholly not user-friendly.
User-friendliness, both on and off the mobile version of a page, is a critical factor in rank because it can deter people from staying on your website for very long. Mobile-friendliness is just as crucial as sitewide user-friendliness, so make sure that no aspect of your website needs attention.
Page Loading Speeds
Page loading speed is another aspect of a website that can immediately make someone click the back button. No one wants to wait more than a few seconds for a page to load. We are too used to fast internet browsing and instantaneous results in this age. There are multiple ways in which you can optimize the speed of your webpages.
The first way to improve page loading speeds is to minimize and consolidate the number of plugins on the page. Reduce the number of WordPress plugins by choosing plugins that combine more than one task into one.
Another way to speed things up is by reducing the DNS lookup time. You can do so by reducing the number of hostnames or by downloading files that are being referenced to an external resource and hosting them on your origin server or CDN. Loading times do not take as long because the content comes from the closest edge server.
Website Auditing
The easiest way to complete an audit of your business website is to have a professional online optimization service do it for you. Almost all SEO content creation websites provide some form of website auditing. These services help you gain an understanding of how well your website is performing, if there are any broken links or outdated articles, and even how your site compares to the performance of competitive websites.
You can then use that website audit to make appropriate changes and learn what exactly needs the most work on the site. Are most of your articles sorely out of date? Is there a lack of variety in articles that obtain traffic? Which content topics or specific webpages are receiving the most attention, and why? Anything you can learn about the current standing of your website will ultimately guide your course of optimization.
How to Increase Online Sales Fast
Although thinking in a long-term perspective will benefit your online business the most, the case of the coronavirus pandemic is going to require some shortcuts for fast results, which will lead to a temporary boost in sales and more income for you and your employees. Most online businesses are likely to begin to plateau in sales soon, so you must stay on top of it if your business is going to come out on the other side of this pandemic.
Increase your online sales by purchasing a short-deadline package of content from an SEO service. You can also set up AdSense or another advertising service that will draw in traffic from other websites. Then, you should make your website as accessible and user-friendly as possible, even if it means shortening the checkout process.
Ecommerce sales growth statistics have almost become irrelevant because of how drastically coronavirus has thrown off the economy in every country it enters. Use this time to your advantage and fully optimize your online business in any way possible. Even if you are not getting sales during this time, the optimization could help once coronavirus passes.
