You have spent some money in getting a website designed for your business, but still have not gotten any single lead or sale from the website. You are probably starting to think you made a bad investment, the website is proving to be unnecessary. Well, I can tell you without a doubt that getting a website designed for your business was a very good decision and in this article will explain why.

Let’s start by describing what a ‘website’ is; a website is basically an online/virtual representation of your business.

Let us say for example, you own a shoe selling business, you have a shore store (brick and mortar) where people can walk in and buy shoes. You can have an ecommerce website created for your shoe business, where people will be buying shoes from you online via the website and you deliver their shoes to them.

Now that we understand what a website basically is, let’s go back to our main question, ‘why is my website not generating leads/sales?’ The main 2 reasons why your website is not selling or generating leads are; either you are having a traffic problem or conversion problem.

Generate traffic to your website ( traffic problem)

If your online store has no sales or your website has no leads, it could be because you are not getting traffic or the right traffic to the site. If no one is coming to your site, you have no one to sell to.

Some of the effective ways you can employ to generate the right traffic to your website are;

• Social Media Ads
• Google Ads
• SEO
• Video Marketing etc.

If you are selling products or services that are high in demand and are searched for often on the internet, you should make sure your website is visible to people searching for what you sell. You can achieve this visibility by investing in SEO or PPC like Google Ad Campaigns.

If you sell a very niche product that doesn’t get a lot of search volume online or if you want to get your products or services in front of a lot of people quickly, advertising will be your best option. To advertise your business and your solutions, you can run Ads on Facebook, Google, YouTube, Instagram etc.

Interested in growing your business online with digital marketing? See our offers >>>social media marketing

Getting traffic to my website, but not getting sales/leads (conversion problem)

You are getting a lot of traffic to your website, however, very few people or none are buying from your site or signing up up as leads. Here are a few tips to consider to fix your problem;

Keep content on your website focused

Make sure your website keywords, copy and imagery speak to your target customer. Make sure you are addressing the pain points of your customer and offering them a solution to that problem. Your sales copy should be aligned with your target audience’s needs, focusing on benefits over features.

Create a user-friendly website structure and include clear ‘Call-to-Action’ Buttons

You will need to make sure the design of your website allows and guides your target customers into taking the right steps and actions towards converting them into buyers or leads. Choose the right colors and theme for your website that goes well with the kind of business you are in and the kind of customers you are targeting.

Interested in getting your website designed by professionals? See our offers >>>website design

Summary

Your website is not selling or generating (quality)leads because you are not getting the right traffic and also your website is missing the right elements to help convert the traffic into sales.

If you fix the traffic problem and add the missing elements on your website you will see some improvement in terms of getting sales. Invest in digital marketing strategies like SEO, PPC, Social Media Ads to attract the right traffic to your website and also optimize your site for conversions.

The post Why is my website not generating leads/sales appeared first on Digitechbolt Digital Agency.

Well, let me start by saying, I’m sorry for your disappointment but do not be discouraged, you are in the right track.

Your website is the online version/representation of your physical business. Just as no one would come to your physical business premises unless they know you exist, no one will come to your website unless and until they know it exists.

Below we are going to be looking at ways that can make your good investment in website design yield favorable returns for your business.

1. Submit your website design to search engines.

To boost chances of your target customers finding your business, your business must be visible on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

It takes time for search engines to discover and index new websites. Search engines are constantly looking for new links on websites and subsequently follow them. When they find that these links lead to useful content, the page is added to index.

You need to submit your website design manually rather than wait for search engines to crawl your site. Manual submission benefits include;

• Submitting your website takes a few minutes compared to waiting for search engines to crawl the site, which may take some time.
• You get the opportunity to supply search engines with some useful information and presenting the hierarchy of the importance of content on your website.
• You get insights from Google and Bing, from which you can improve the performance of your site.

Submitting your website to Google.

To submit your website to Google, you need to sign up for a Google Search Console account.

Next, create an XML sitemap which you will then submit to Google using the Google Search Console.

How to generate an XML sitemap for your website.

To submit the sitemap, go to Google Search Console:

Search Console > Select your property > Sitemap > Paste in your sitemap URL > hit “submit”.

Submitting your website on Bing

Submit the sitemap to Bing Websmaster Tools.

Webmaster Tools > “add your site” > Fill in the form > hit “submit”.

*By submitting your site to Bing, it will automatically be submitted to Yahoo.

Getting your website indexed is laying the foundation on which you will need to build on to get to the level where your business can be found on search engines.

You need to invest in SEO to get your website to rank on page 1 and get a lot of organic traffic.

2. Promote your website on social media.

You can help your new business website get noticed by using social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn are the most common social networks where you can promote your new website.

Promoting your website on Facebook

Create a Facebook page for your business.

• Click on ‘Create a Page’ on the Facebook Business site
• Choose the appropriate category from the options provided and proceed to start filling in your information, also add your website link.
• Add a nice profile picture (your logo is recommended) and add a nicely designed cover photo that resonates with your brand.

Share your content on your Facebook page. To keep the right audience interested in your brand, you will have to create content that is valuable to them.

Link to bog posts, videos, or any other sources with valuable information. Share your offers, sales and blog or website content, all with links back to your site.

Leverage the power of paid advertising to expand your reach and target the right audience that is relevant to your business.

Promoting your website on other social media platforms.

You can also promote your website on other social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and more.

These platforms host different kinds of audiences and operate differently. You will have to do some research to see which platforms work for the kind of business you do, before investing any time and money.

Twitter is a micro-blogging social media platform, which can be a powerful tool in making your content go viral.

A business Twitter account can be created the same way you would create a personal account. You will need to make your profile look professional, incorporating your brand designs. Start sharing valuable content on your account, linking back to your website.

Instagram is a visual based social media platform, an excellent place to share your content in the form of images and videos promoting your brand.

Create an Instagram business account, add your website link in Bio section. Make your profile look professional, preferably with your logo as the profile picture and a well designed cover image/video that matches your brand.

LinkedIn is a professional networking social media platform. You can create a company page for your business on LinkedIn and start sharing your content, linking back to your website.

3. Leverage the power of Email Marketing.

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing methods you can employ to promote your website and business.

You can create your email list of prospect customers by using a lead magnet like offering a free ebook download or whitepaper for the downloader ‘s email address.

Share your content, sales or deals with the people on your email list using an email marketing software. By using a software it will be easy for you to segment your audience and send personalized emails in bulk, with different content to relevant segments.

4. Measure performance and maintain your website design regularly.

Connect your website to Google Analytics and monitor how your site is used, see who visits your site and what they do when on your site. All this information is useful in that it will help you in identifying changes or updates you need to make so the site performs better.

Connect your site to Google Search Console, so you can monitor what search terms are being used to find your site and what position your site is appearing for those search terms.

Google Analytics and Google Search console are both very powerful tools in measuring and monitoring website performance. The best part is that they are free to use.

Conclusion

Creating and launching a well designed website does not necessarily mean that you will start to get customers coming in. You will still have to continually promote that website so more people know about it and interact with it. Regular maintenance of the site and updating content is strongly advisable, to boost the performance and relevance of the website.

Establish an online presence with an exquisite, fully responsive, search engine and conversion optimized website. Make that online presence solid by promoting your website using tools like email marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, etc.

Partner with us for website design and solid online presence establishment solutions.

The post Website design completed and launched. What’s next? appeared first on Digitechbolt Digital Agency.

A website is the center of your digital marketing plan and process, like an ocean all digital rivers run to and from it.

In creating a website for your business, first you need to make sure you clearly understand your business model, goals, target audience and value proposition.

Now that you have all that in place, it’s time to begin your website design process. At Digitechbolt Business Solutions, we believe that search engine optimization should be part of the process of creating your site from the beginning rather than save it for later.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is basically making your website attractive, visible and readable to search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Let’s get started!

Now let’s look at the the best parts that will make your website SEO-friendly.

1.Site structure and architecture

Your website must be structured in a way that makes it easy to be crawled by search engines and user-friendly to a human.The structure must be crafted in a way that shows the hierarchy of your content ;

Your website – categories – Sub categories – Pages (in descending order), for example;

Home

–Services

—-Digital Marketing

——-Social Media Marketing

——-Email Marketing

Context is depicted by the position within the site and the URL, so it will be good for you if you use simple words, (include keywords) to name the categories and pages.

2. Responsiveness (Mobile-friendliness)

Most people nowadays access the internet using mobile phones. In order to attract the maximum number of visitors to your website, you will need to make sure your site is mobile-friendly.

Google prefers and rewards mobile-friendly websites by ranking them high on search engine results pages.Ranking higher increases your chances of getting traffic to your website.

3. Page load speed

Optimize your site to load faster. Generally people have limited patience when it comes to waiting for pages to load on the internet. If your website does not load in less than 2 seconds, you will definitely lose a lot of prospects.

Use tools like the Google page speed tool to test the speed of your website, the free tool will also give you suggestions of how you can improve the speed.

4. Usability

First of all, your design must be appealing to the eye, choose your colors and fonts well. They must be fitting for your type of business and resonating with your target audience

Create a simple but elegant layout and allow for a seamless navigation across your site. Any user on your website should know where they are, where they have been and where they want to go with ease at any moment they are on your website.

Make form entry lightweight and easy to fill as possible.

5.Keyword targeting

Keywords are in integral part of search engine optimization.Search engines detect content on web pages using them. Conduct an extensive research of the keywords that your target customers are likely to use in searching services and products you offer.

Create content based on the outcome of your research and in optimizing your web pages for the keywords, try to focus on a few keywords per page. Avoid optimizing for the same keywords on multiple pages as this makes your pages compete with each other for them.

6. Title and meta tags

Create compelling titles for your content across the website, include keywords in the titles. Use the HTML headings (H1, H2,H3…) well, use the H1 just once on a page to highlight the main point and the H2, H3….to reveal the context of your content by hierarchy.

Include your keywords in meta tags during the site design process and make the copy compelling as well.Search engines can use meta tags to detect more information about the page for ranking purposes.

7.Page Content

Create great content that engages your audience, remember to include your keywords in your copy. Make your high-quality content readable both to search engines and human users.

Content includes text, images and videos that you choose to use, make sure you have the right combination of these.

Search engines scan and read your webpage content to detect if it matches the needs of the searcher.Focus on the right keywords, good structure of the site and write awesome SEO content.

8. Image Optimization

Images bring a page to life and also contribute to your website ‘s SEO.

It is always wise to use original images instead of stock images especially when you are writing about your team or work place etc. Use images that are relevant to their subject.

When it comes to optimizing your images for search engines, start with the file name. Use a file name that best describes what your image is about.

You should choose the right format for your images:

• JPEG for larger photos – it will give you good quality with a relatively small file size.
• PNG to preserve background transparency.
• WebP instead of PNG and JPEG – produces high quality results with smaller file sizes.
• SVG for logos icons -these can be easily modified using CSS and Javascript.

Add captions to your images, people read them when scanning your content and also add alt text so there can be descriptive text in place of the image if it can’t be displayed. (Include a keyword in your alt text so both search engines and people can read it.

Conclusion

A well designed and search engine optimized website will boost your business online by making your business visible and standing out in the crowd of your competitors.As you plan for your website design project, take into consideration what we have just discussed above. Feel free to contact us for any further information that you may need to set up your business for success.

The post Website design and Search engine optimization: A solid online presence. appeared first on Digitechbolt Digital Agency.

Yes, we will be doing it together and this is how it will work; I will give you 7 steps you can follow to create a comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy and since you obviously understand your business better, you will customize those steps to fit your business.Simple, right? Let’s dive straight into it.

Step #1 SWOT Analysis

The first step you need to take when creating your Digital Marketing Strategy is to analyze your marketing assets, environment, challenges or limiting factors. I recommend that you use the SWOT analysis framework to guide you on this exercise.

It allows you to look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for your business and market.

Step #2 Set Goals

Establish digital marketing goals that resonate and complement your overall business goals, for example, if your goal as a business is to increase sales by 20% for the year, your marketing goal might be to generate 50 leads per month.

The SMART goals framework is a very effective tool in setting goals that are ; Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. An example of a SMART objective is: ‘To attract 5000 visitors to my website per month within 3 months’, instead of just saying : ‘To increase traffic to my website.’

Step #3 Define your Target Market

For the implementation of your Digital Marketing Strategy to be successful, it has to be well crafted with right information for the right audience.

Create buyer personas of your target audience by their demographics : age, gender, type of employment etc, psychographics ; buying behavior etc ;interests,hobbies. Having a clearly defined audience to target makes it easy to create relevant content for them and increase their chances of converting into followers, subscribers, leads, ultimately into customers.

Step #4 Channels

Now that you have your goals and a clearly defined Target audience, it is time to choose the platforms where you can reach them. Will you reach them via social media platforms, a blog or website?

Audit your existing channels, improve them, create strategies and tactics that are relevant to your Target Audience, keeping your goals in mind.

*TIP:Identify distribution channels that are best to reach your target audience and the best times to post.

• Facebook : Wednesday, Thursday and Friday 12-4pm
• Instagram: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday 11 am – 1pm
• Twitter : Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday around 12pm
• LinkedIn : Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday 5pm -6pm

See also Best times to post on Social Media

Step #5 Content Strategy

Write content that your target audience will find educational and useful. Maintain consistency of the type of content you post and tone across all your channels.

Research key words for search engine optimization and create a content calendar, organize your posts and schedule posting.

*TIP Publish content as a blog on your website and share URL link to this new blog on social media.

Step # 6 Campaigns Strategy

The Digital Marketing Strategy is not complete unless it has campaigns. These can be email marketing campaigns, Social media marketing , Google Ads campaigns etc, depending with your goals and target audience.

Make sure your campaigns are well planned and optimized for conversions. You may have a number of channels to manage or combine to achieve certain results, use marketing automation tools to enhance efficiency of your activities.

*TIP Personalize messages based on buyer personas.

Step #7 Monitor and Analyze

This is the last and most important part of creating an effective Digital Marketing Strategy; Monitoring and Analyzing your progress and outcome.

Measuring your performance across all your channels and of your campaigns will enable you to detect what is working and what is not in time to make necessary changes.

Measure your Key Performance Indicators by using tools like Google Analytics, Insights built in some Social Media platforms like Facebook.

Conclusion

Every business that plans to utilize Digital Marketing must invest in the creation of a comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy. This strategy must include; a SWOT analysis of the company and market, establishment of SMART goals, a Target Audience, selected Channels by relevance, Content Strategy, campaigns strategy and ways to monitor and analyze progress and outcome.

Good luck on creating your Digital Marketing Strategy!! Alternatively , contact us, our Digital Marketing experts will assist you with one customized to your business, based on an extensive research of your industry, market and competitors.

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Computers are the major facilitators of this communication nowadays. Computers can send and receive information faster and better. However , they cannot communicate the way people do, they require codes.

Web technology is the process of communication between the computers with each other, using mark-up languages.

Before delving into the nitty-gritty details of web technology, let us look at a few stats about South Africa:

• 31.8 million active internet users (Statista 2019)
• 28.99 million active mobile internet users (Statista 2019)
• 60% of South African population uses smartphones (We are Social, 2018)
• South Africans spend an average of 3 hours and 17 minutes on the internet per day via a mobile device. (We are Social, 2018)

Looking at these stats, clearly there is a need for businesses to invest in Web technology. 60% of South Africans with at least a smartphone(computer) means that a business can easily establish a communication with anyone in this pool, if not all.

Web technologies

Browsers

These are interpreters of the web. They request information (for example, from Google serves) and then show us in the way we can understand.

Some of the common browsers available are Chrome, Firefox, Safari.

Mark-up languages

These are the codes/ languages used in creating websites and apps.They are stored in the web servers and are interpreted by browsers into what we understand upon request.

Examples of mark-up languages are HTML , XML etc.

Programming languages

Vocabulary or grammatical rules for instructing a computer to perform specific tasks.

They may be used to determine how the websites and apps behave when users interact with them. Examples include JavaScript, PHP, Python etc.

Protocols

Instructions for how to pass information back and forth between computes and devices.

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a protocol through which a website can get to the browser from the server.

Websites , apps and search engines

Server

Websites and application codes are stored on the servers

Client

Users of applications or websites are called clients. These can be mobile devices , tablets, laptops etc.

*Usually, multiple clients are interacting with the same application stored on the server. This quality gives businesses the ability to address an unlimited size of an audience, without being limited by distance or boundary.

Search engines

Platforms like the famous Google, designed to respond to requests by searching the information from the websites and applications on the servers.

*During the design and development of your website or application, search engine optimization (SEO), should be a priority. Good SEO practices will make your site visible on the first page of search results to your prospect customers.

In conclusion…

Every business should invest in web technology to benefit from the exposure and accessibility it creates. South Africans are adapting to online banking, online shopping, use of blogging software. This shows that they are open to web based software.

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Many businesses are joining the online community daily, establishing their presence.It may be because of the opportunities created by the internet to reach a wider market or simply because their competitors are already there, the reasons are many and vary from business to business.

The rise in the use the internet to search or buy products and services attracts many businesses to have an online presence or basically a business website.This creates high competition for the online customers for these customers ,the benefits of being online become difficult to realize, nevertheless, there are ways of making your business website stand out among your competitors.

Let ‘s look at the factors that you need to consider in creating a proper business website that will add significant value to your business.

Optimize your website for search engines

When internet users access the internet, usually they will be using search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc… to search for products, services or information that they may require at that moment.The goal of search engines is to match the user ‘s query with the relevant content/result.

Search engine optimization is using keywords (i.e words or phrases that your target audience is likely to use when searching for similar content as yours), as part of the development of your website.This ensures that the right people are directed to your website, those actively looking for your products or services.

You will need a Search Engine Optimization strategy that includes researching of the keywords, including them in your content , linking strategy and also incorporating the schema markup or structured data which serves to communicate with the search engine crawlers so they can pick up what your website is about.

Make sure your content is great and compelling

Good content on your website is what will determine whether the prospect client stays on your site and engage with you or they just move on to another website.Content includes words, images, and videos; it is wise to research about your target audience and find out the content that is appealing to them and provide them with just that.

Make your website responsive , especially mobile friendly

Responsiveness refers to the ability of the website to fit the screen-size of the user’s device retaining its look and functionality.Most internet users access it from mobile devices , which makes it necessary to make your website mobile friendly.

Google highly recommends that your website be mobile friendly, this will contribute to your ranking on SERPs.

Give your site a professional look and feel

The design of your website must be pleasing to the eye and also be professional.Match the colors of your brand and make use of good combination for those colors.Make sure your design fits your industry and target audience, for example, a clothing website would be proper to have images of clothes or related to fashion but not food.

Remember your website is part of your brand, so you should make sure its design and tone is aligned with your branding goals as well.

Improve your site ‘s load time and navigation

Avoid using large images or videos(in size) that will reduce the time it takes to load your pages, this might push visitors away (remember there are many other websites like yours that they may be viewing). Make sure it is easy for a user to move/navigate to any part or page of the site.Link to the right pages/content(the visitor must know where they are, where they are from and where they are going at any point in time they are on your site).

We believe a business website is the face of the business online, so it has to perfectly reveal the professional image of the business.This can only be achieved if the website is designed and developed well by experienced people. Our developers, designers and content writers are ready to work on a perfect solution for you.

CONTACT US, lets discuss your options.

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