If your business is still using a decade-old website and doing most of its marketing offline, it’s high time to rethink your digital strategy. Many small business owners are wary of the costs associated with overhauling their digital presence, but it doesn’t require a full-blown digital marketing campaign to create an online presence that drives revenue for your business. If you’re looking to upgrade your business’s digital presence on a budget, these three projects are a great place to start.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization helps customers find your website by increasing its rankings in search engine results. There are simple things you can do yourself to improve SEO if you’re decently tech-savvy, like registering for Google My Business and writing descriptive page titles, but for a bigger boost to SEO, you’ll want to hire a web developer and an SEO specialist.
A web developer can improve the structure and speed of your website so it’s treated more favorably by search engine algorithms. A web developer can also redesign your website to be mobile-friendly, an important factor in your site’s rankings.
An SEO specialist, meanwhile, tackles the more nuanced aspects of search engine rankings. An SEO specialist can identify the best keywords for your market niche, analyze which content is driving traffic and which is falling flat, and develop quality backlinks. These improvements don’t just drive traffic to your site, they also increase conversions once shoppers are there.
Web Content Accessibility
It’s not enough to get shoppers to your website. You also need to make sure they can access the information it contains. While a basic website may be adequate for non-disabled users, people with impairments need special accommodations.
Increasing your website’s accessibility isn’t just good practice. It’s also legally required. Luckily, many of the changes your SEO team makes also improve accessibility, especially for vision-impaired users who need clutter-free layouts and simple navigation to use screen readers and people who rely on mobile touchscreen devices to access the internet. To accommodate hearing-impaired users, businesses can provide transcripts of video content using a subtitle service. There are subtitle services that charge as little as $1 per minute of video, and some can turn around the project in 24 hours or less. If your business otherwise passes an accessibility test, you may be able to complete this project without hiring a web accessibility specialist.
Online Appointment Booking
Online scheduling is a great revenue-boosting tool for appointment-based businesses. Online appointment booking makes it easy for phone-wary customers to book appointments and allows appointments to be scheduled 24/7, so your calendar doesn’t stop filling up when business hours are over. The result is more bookings and major labor savings since you need fewer staff members dedicated to answering phones and scheduling appointments.
Some booking apps, like Square, let businesses add online booking without changing their website via an external booking website and embedded booking links. You could also install a booking plugin, but may encounter security issues if the developer stops supporting their plugin. Businesses that want full-featured scheduling embedded into their website should hire a web developer to integrate a booking API (application programming interface) or write custom code. However, these options are more expensive than relying on an app.
If coordinating all of these projects is more than your workload can handle, hire a web design agency to spearhead your digital projects instead. Not only does a design agency have all of the pros you need on staff, they also have tech and tools that allow seamless collaboration between designers, developers, and specialists. The result? High-quality results on a quick turnaround so you don’t waste any time getting back to business.
Image via Unsplash