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10 Ways to Get Your Website in Shape for the New Year in 2019

Posted on November 12, 2018 by Hosting

The post 10 Ways to Get Your Website in Shape for the New Year in 2019 appeared first on HostGator Blog . A New Year should come with new goals for your business . As you work through your end-of-year to do list – reevaluating your finances, hiring new employees, and deciding which tactics to embrace or toss aside in the year to come – it’s important that you make plans to maintain your website along with your larger business. Your website is the main way a lot of people interact with your brand, after all. “One of the most often overlooked components—yet one of the most critical—to any successful website strategy is ongoing maintenance. While the initial website project is critical to creating the right foundation, the ongoing maintenance and upkeep is where you’ll really see your website shine,” writes Don Cranford , principal and director of technology at Katalyst Solutions. If you’ve tended to let general maintenance of your website slide over the years, make it one of your goals moving into the New Year to correct that. Here are a few action items to add to your to-do list now to get your website in shape for 2019. 1. Evaluate your analytics. Analytics are the ultimate tool for examining the health of your website traffic . It’s vital for your team to understand how your visitors and qualified leads find your business. Knowing whether people come to your website from organic search, paid search, or Facebook tells you a lot about how your online marketing efforts are working. And keeping an eye on your analytics as part of regular website maintenance can save you trouble down the line. Kim Garst , founder and CEO of Boom! Social, offers the following suggestion, “Compile a bunch of blog posts on a particular topic, and promote them as a multi-day e-course. Each day, send one email (blog post) to your new subscribers to help them accomplish whatever goal you have promised to help them achieve.” Don’t be afraid to revisit your content archives and promote your old content anew. Your audience that’s been with you for a while may appreciate the refresher, and your new audience will get to see some of your old hits for the first time.   5. Revamp your homepage. Your website’s homepage will be the first impression you make on many visitors – you’d better make it a good one. Your homepage should accomplish a few main goals:   Clearly communicate your brand’s positioning (why should a customer choose you?)   Look professional (you don’t want to scare new visitors off by looking like you’re still in the 90s )   Answer the main questions people may have (where you’re located, contact information, etc.)   Make it easy for people to know where to go next Update your design by tweaking the navigation of your site. Anticipate where consumers will click and provide clear calls-to-action to help them locate what they need. Eliminate any wording that doesn’t benefit the visitor. Too many words can distract customers from their intended reason for checking out your site. In the example below, HostGator customer  Hiatus Spa + Retreat  uses their site to say more with less. The website looks clean and professional, has a clear CTA, and provides an intuitive menu for those who want to find more information. A few words and vivid imagery can go a long way. Make the best first impression by showcasing a modern, uncluttered homepage. It’ll give clarity and accessibility to your visitors.   6. Review and improve your calls-to-action (CTAs). Every page on your website should be designed with a clear goal in mind. You should always know what you want your visitor to do next, and it should be obvious to them how to do it. The CTAs you include on each page have an important job to do , but you shouldn’t just assume they’re all doing that job. Check your analytics to see how often the people who visit your pages are taking the action you most want them to. Then do some experimenting. Work up different variations on your CTAs – try different visual designs, different wording, and different locations on the page. Try out different CTAs on different pages to see if some work better when paired with specific content. Do A/B testing to confirm which of the CTAs you try work best. The more data you have, the more you can refine your website so that people are more likely to take the steps you want them to.   7. Fix any checkout process issues. Everything else you design your website to accomplish leads back to the main end goal of sales. If you’re not driving revenue, you won’t last. To meet your sales goals, your checkout process must be frictionless. Jeremy Said . If you discover that customers hate creating member registrations, one solution is to try a social login. This one-click alternative will help consumers move through the checkout process faster. If you’ve noticed the checkout seems to stop at the moment the customer sees the cost of shipping , think about offering flat-rate shipping or free shipping for qualifying orders. Anything that stops the sale from happening is bad for business. Figure out what roadblocks are in your customer’s pathway and remove them.   8. Make sure your security’s up-to-date. Every time a story about a data breach makes waves, people get a little more nervous about handing their credit card information over to businesses. You can’t help what happens in the news, but you can take steps to keep your own website secure and ensure all the private information your customers give you is protected. Go through our web security checklist and make sure your security measures are up to date. There are some easy ways to reduce vulnerabilities in your website to make your customer data safer. You owe it to your customers to do your part in protecting them.   9. Check your domain registration. This is a simple step to take, but one you have to remember to do every year. Contact your hosting provider to learn when your registration will expire. If it’s due soon, go ahead and pay for the renewal, and consider signing up for auto-renewals for future registrations. And remember to update any contact information—business name, address, and phone number. It also may be time to purchase a new domain for upcoming brand changes . So, ask your provider for details about availability and prices. Sometimes the smallest things in your business are overlooked. Make sure your domain registration continues so you can offer uninterrupted service to your customers 10. Reinvest in your brand community. This is less something that you do to your website, and more something that you do for it. As your business grows, it’s essential to keep your brand community engaged. Make a plan this year to give your consumers the engagement they deserve. Respond promptly to comments left on your blog posts. Take time to say thanks in response to positive reviews and ensure that no complaint goes unanswered. Interact with users on social media – plan to be quick and polite at least, but if your social media manager is up to it, try to be clever or entertaining as well. Experiment with starting a new loyalty program or making improvements to the one you have. Brand ambassadors serve as an extension of your company. If they’re not satisfied, you may expose your business to unwanted negative publicity. Get reacquainted with your target audience. A dedicated community opens the door to business opportunities.   A New Year, A Better Website It’s time to roll up your sleeves. The New Year is a time to reflect and reassess your business’s needs, and that includes your website. A better website is part of running a better business. A few tweaks now could garner you better results in the year to come and ensure your website can continue to do the important job it does for your business. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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7 Benefits of Google Advertising

Posted on November 9, 2018 by Hosting

The post 7 Benefits of Google Advertising appeared first on HostGator Blog . Everyone with a website has likely spent time thinking about Google and how to improve your visibility in the search engine. While SEO  gets a lot of attention (and rightly so), it’s not the only game in town. The fastest way to get your website right at the top of the SERP is with Google advertising . If your website isn’t getting as much traffic as you’d like and you want a fairly quick and easy solution (and are willing to pay for it), Google advertising is well worth considering. 7 Reasons to Use Google Ads Any business with an advertising budget has a lot of tactics and channels to choose between. Google Ads offers a few key benefits that can set it apart from some of your other options.   1. It’s a fast way to get noticed. SEO is an important way to build your website’s visibility and get more visitors, but it’s slow. Most businesses can expect to spend months of continual work before they start to see much progress – and sometimes longer. Not all businesses can wait that long for results. If you want to start gaining traction and getting people to your website faster, Google advertising works as a shortcut to getting the kind of visibility and results you want from SEO faster and with less work.   And with Google Ads, your ads usually show up above the natural results and can sometimes include images as well, which makes them that much more noticeable and likely to earn a click.   2. Google’s reach is vast. Google gets over 3.5 billion searches every day . Advertising on Google gives you access to one of the largest audiences you’ll find anywhere. But the Google Ads platform goes even further than that. In addition to buying ads on the search engine results page itself, you can also buy ads for Google’s other properties – including the extremely popular Gmail and YouTube – and for all 2 million websites and 650,000 apps that are included in Google Display network. All of that adds up to Google Ads reaching over 90% of all internet users worldwide. That’s a bigger reach that you’ll get from just about any other advertising channel.   3. You can target ads for relevance. The possibility of reaching a lot of people is nice, but what’s even more important is figuring out how to reach the right people. Google Ads offers two main types of targeting that are both very important for getting your website in front of the people most likely to click to visit and buy your products: Keyword targeting – The best visitors and leads will be the people who find your website when they’re in the process of looking for what you sell. With Google Ads, you have a direct way to reach those people and get them to your website. Choosing the right keywords to target is one of the most important parts of getting good results from Google advertising, because it’s the best way to ensure your ads are consistently relevant to the people who see them. Demographic targeting –  Google has a lot of data on user behavior and demographics. When you advertise with Google, you get to tap into that data in order to better get your ads in front of the people most likely to be in your target audience. You can target your ads based on gender, age range, and general online interests. Google Ads’ targeting options are a powerful way to make sure your ads have relevance and reach the potential visitors that are most valuable to your business.   4. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Advertising is often useful for brand awareness, but your goal is usually less about just making people aware of your business and more about getting them to actually engage with your brand. A visit to your website is much more valuable than someone seeing an ad and scrolling past. The main payment model for Google Ads is pay-per-click (PPC) , meaning you don’t pay anything just to get your ad to show up – you only pay when someone clicks on it. You’re not paying for exposure; you’re paying for actual visitors. For marketers who have long had to struggle with figuring out how to show results for hard-to-measure ad campaigns, the PPC model means that you always know you got at least a website visitor out of the money you spent. And if you use Google Analytics (and you should!), you can track what happens with the visitor once they land on your website as well.   5. It’s easy to control your budget. You don’t have an unlimited budget. When you invest in a paid marketing channel like Google Ads, you have to know that you can stay within the limitations of the budget you have. Luckily, Google Ads has no minimum spend, so even small businesses that can’t spend much can use it. And the platform makes it easy to set your daily maximum budget. Once you go over it, Google will simply stop showing your ads so you never spend more than you intend.   6. Remarketing reconnects you with relevant leads. Every visitor that comes to your website is a potential customer, but many will visit their first time without making a purchase. Between the busy lives people lead and the ad saturation we all face both on and offline; a visitor could easily forget your brand completely after that first visit. Google Ads provides remarketing , which lets you serve relevant ads to past visitors that make them more likely to come back and engage with your brand again (and hopefully buy). You can even use the data on what a visitor did on your website to further tailor remarketing ads by highlighting a product they viewed or content related to the pages they visited. Remarketing gives you a way to keep a relationship going after that first marketing touch point and continue to reach your most valuable leads.   7. You can improve campaigns over time with useful analytics. No one gets everything right on the first try. Google Ads provides useful analytics that provide a detailed view of what works in your PPC campaigns and what doesn’t, so you can continually improve your ads and the results they achieve over time. The longer you run campaigns with Google Ads, the more data you’ll have on what your target audience responds to. By continually making updates to your campaigns as you learn, you can count on a higher ROI.   Get Started with Google PPC When your budget’s limited, accepting the need to dive into paid channels for online marketing can feel like a tough sell. But even for the types of online marketing that are technically free, like content marketing and social media, the amount you spend in time or on hiring professional help quickly adds up as well. The extra boost you get from investing in Google Ads can make your other marketing efforts go further and help you get greater visibility and more traffic faster.   Ready to get started with Google advertising? HostGator’s team of PPC experts can work with you to develop a strategy for your website and execute your campaigns. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How to Sell Your Services Online: 5 Steps to Getting Started

Posted on November 6, 2018 by Hosting

The post How to Sell Your Services Online: 5 Steps to Getting Started appeared first on HostGator Blog . How to Sell Your Services Online So you’ve taken some time to learn a marketable skill and now you want to start selling your services online. Whether you want to go the freelance route or start building an agency, the foundation of your work online starts with a website. Your website will be the cornerstone of any kind of business. Luckily, building a website doesn’t have to be difficult by using the hidden power of a website builder . Below you’ll learn the steps you need to take to start selling your services online, including building out a website and the site elements you’ll need to start selling. 1. Consider Your Service and Market Before you even build out your website and start marketing your services you’ll need to think about how you’re going to position yourself. For example, if you’re going to be a freelance writer it can be helpful to focus on a specific niche. It can be much easier to find work as a freelance writer for the real estate market than as a general freelance writer. Think about who you want to serve and how your unique experience and expertise make you well positioned to serve this market. You need to be able to answer two questions: What specific service am I offering? Who am I offering that service to? Being able to confidently answer these two questions will help make the design and messaging of your website much more intentional and effective.   2. Build Out Your Website Equipped with the above information, it’s time to start building your site. If you’ve never built a website before, then this process can seem a little intimidating. Will you use a CMS? Will you learn to build a site from scratch? Will you hire someone to do it? Will you use a website builder? If the technical steps of building out a website intimidate you, then the easiest approach to take will be using a website builder. With a website builder your hosting, domain name, and site building tools will be all under one roof. The process of building a site with a website builder is incredibly simple as well: Choose a website builder, like the GATOR builder . Setup your account and choose a domain name. Pick and customize your theme with the drag and drop tool. Publish your site.   3. Create the Necessary Pages When you’re selling your services online there are certain pages that are must-haves. We cover what these are below, so you can build your website the right way. A home page that immediately tells your visitors what you offer and how you can help them. A portfolio page that gives potential customers an idea of the quality of your work. A testimonial pages that highlights stellar reviews from past clients (you might not have these right away). A services pages that gives a breakdown of the services you offer. A contact page that lets visitors reach out about a potential project. Building out the above pages will give your site a rock solid foundation. You’ll have everything you need to start selling your services online. Finally, you’ll need a way to take payments. You can either send invoices via PayPal, or choose a website builder that offers eCommerce templates and payment processor integration and sell your services that way. By the way, either is possible with the GATOR builder.   4. Generate Traffic and Clients To start selling your services you’re going to need traffic and clients. There are numerous approaches to building out your service-based business. Here are a few common methods for generating new clients: Guest blog on popular sites that your potential clients read and have a bio link that directs back to your site. Create a popular blog to rank for customer-centric keywords (this is a long-term approach). Create social media profiles on platforms your audience hangs out, like LinkedIn and Instagram. Scour popular job boards in your niche and pitch any jobs your services are in alignment with. Start cold pitching companies and individuals who are in need of your services. There are dozens of viable methods to generate new clients and traffic to your website. The important thing isn’t to spread yourself too thin, but instead to experiment with approaches until you find one that works and regularly execute on that every day.   5. Do the Work! Now that you’ve generated your first few clients it’s time to do the work. It’s important that you regularly go above and beyond with your deliverables, especially for your first few clients. Providing consistently excellent work can lead to testimonials you can place on your website, and potentially even referral work from your past satisfied clients. By now you’re well equipped to start selling your services online. It’s important to remember that this is a long-term game and all about consistency. Keep at it and you will see success. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How to Design an eCommerce Website

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Hosting

The post How to Design an eCommerce Website appeared first on HostGator Blog . When building an eCommerce website , you know that the ultimate goal of the site is to get people to make purchases. You can’t just focus on building an e-commerce site that looks great (although that’s worth doing too) – you have to make sure every element of the web design guides people toward the point of buying something from you. Fortunately, building an eC ommerce website is easier than it’s ever been. You don’t have to hire an expensive designer or learn coding from scratch. If you don’t have much money to spend or time to work with, you can use a eCommerce website builder to create an eCommerce site that’s professional and geared toward achieving your goals. Whether you build the website yourself or hire someone to do the legwork, there are a few important steps you should take to make sure your eCommerce website will do its job. 1. Organize Your eCommerce Website Based On How People Shop. One of the first steps to building an eCommerce website is figuring out what pages and categories to include. You’ll obviously want a home page and pages for each of your different products. But how will you organize all those product pages so that people can find what they’re looking for? Think about how your potential customers are likely to shop and browse and build out the site architecture that makes the most sense based on that. For example, if you sell pet food and supplies, you might organize your website based on the type of pet your visitors have (dog, cat, fish, mouse, etc.) with subcategories under each for product types (toys, treats, food, etc.). Anyone visiting the site can pretty quickly figure out how to narrow down their search based on their particular needs.  And by visiting a page that groups a lot of similar products together, they can browse all the dog treats or cat toys available and pick the one they most want.   2. Make Your eCommerce Site Responsive. According to mobile shopping trends , almost a third of all shopping online now happens on mobile devices. If your eCommerce website doesn’t work well on mobile, you’ll be missing out on a lot of potential sales (and it will hurt your SEO to boot). For most eCommerce websites , the best way to make your website mobile friendly is to make it responsive. Responsive websites provide the same information and images on each page no matter what device they’re on, but they position them differently in order to make the page fit the screen. An image that shows up next to text on the desktop will show up below it, for instance. Luckily, responsive websites have become enough of a norm that a good website builder or designer will offer a responsive option as a matter of course.   3. Include a Search Bar. Many of your visitors will be content to browse the site to find items they like, but some will know exactly what they’re looking for. A search bar gives them a way to get directly to the page they need and is, therefore, one of those features that every eCommerce site should have .   4. Have a Shopping Cart. Your ideal customer isn’t going to see one item they like and go straight to the purchase process. They’ll spend some time browsing and choosing several items they want. A shopping cart is another standard feature of eCommerce stores because it allows visitors to save the items they want to purchase while they continue browsing, and then go through the purchasing process once for all of them. And for visitors that add items to a shopping cart but don’t buy right away, you can follow up with a reminder email to your customers to help nudge them back to the site toward a purchase.   5. Include Wish List Functionality. Including wish list functionality accomplishes a few different things: It gives people an easy place to point friends and family in the lead up to a gift-giving event – a situation people regularly make purchases for. For people who prefer to do research before they buy a product, it gives them a chance to save the items they like for possible future purchase. For anyone avoiding impulse buys for budgetary reasons, they can mark now the things they want to come back for later. Giving people a way to use your website to create a list of items they want creates a few opportunities where those items are more likely to become future sales.   6. Include Reviews. Over half of regular online shoppers  say they read reviews almost every time they shop online. Looking at customer reviews has become a regular part of the purchasing process.By including a review feature on your website, you give your customers a way to hear directly from each other – which is more powerful than what you can tell them. Enabling reviews from third parties shows your customers you’re confident that your products can stand up to customers’ honest feedback. And if the reviews are positive (which they should be if your products are solid), they’ll increase your sales. As an added benefit, reviews can help you gain valuable feedback about the products you offer and the service experience your customers have. You may be able to pick up some tips that help you improve your eCommerce business results over time. For example, at HostGator, we feature reviews on a dedicated page on our site: 7. Offer a Guest Checkout Option. When someone takes the step of creating an account on your website, it provides you with awesome long-term opportunities. It means they can use some of the features we’ve talked about here – like creating wish lists and adding reviews –  and that you can provide them with relevant promotional emails and reminder emails after cart abandonment. But creating an account takes time and for some visitors who aren’t sure they’ll come back, it can feel like an inconvenience to have to take the steps of creating an account. They just want to make their purchase already. Including an easier guest checkout option removes friction from the checkout process so more people are willing to go through the whole process, rather than changing their mind when it looks too time-consuming. 8. Invest in High-Quality Product Photography. For physical products, a photograph can often tell your visitors valuable information about the product that your words can’t communicate as well. 78% of online shoppers say they want to see images that bring products to life. You not only need to provide photographs for all of the products you sell, but you should also invest in making sure the images are high quality. Whether you take the photos yourself or invest in a professional product photographer, make sure the images you use look great and show your products in the best light.   9. Make Your Contact Info Easy to Find. You should do your best to answer all the common questions your customers may have on your website, but even so, you’ll have customers that need to get in touch at some point. When that happens, make it as easy as possible for them to find a way to get in touch about whatever issue they’re having. Don’t make them dig through the website for a simple email address or phone number. You can’t provide good customer service until your customer has successfully managed to get in touch. And customer service is the best tool you have for repeat business.   10. Perform User Testing. Building an eCommerce website requires doing a lot of guessing about what people will respond to. Even if you work really hard to put your potential visitors first and try to design the site based on how you think they’ll behave, you won’t get it all right on your own. Before you launch, do some  website usability testing . Bring in some other people who can look at your website with fresh eyes. Have them take the steps on the site you most want your visitors to take – like creating an account, making a purchase, and signing up for the email list. They can provide honest feedback about any difficulties or inconvenience they experienced. Their feedback will enable you to make any last minute tweaks needed to correct problems you didn’t know how to see yourself.   Design Your eCommerce Website with Quality in Mind eCommerce businesses live and die on the quality of their websites. Make sure you do your due diligence to build a successful eCommerce site that can do the main job you need it to. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Hostgator Customer Service?

Posted on November 4, 2018 by Hosting

I’ve been dealing with hostgator for over a week on a pretty simple billing issue. I’ve had 5 chats that take 30-45 minutes each due to spee… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1737892&goto=newpost Continue reading →

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