Don’t let these online pitfalls damage your company’s reputation

Compared to other traditional mediums, the digital platform is a relatively new concept for promoting a business. Today, having an online presence, through a website and social media is of growing importance to businesses, both small and big. Having a strong online presence lets you expand your reach and get more leads for conversion. But in the race to be the first, companies often make some major blunders, 5 of which to avoid are discussed below:

Hiring Freelancers instead of Agencies

Small businesses often choose to hire freelancers for their online needs, basically to get a website. This may seem like a relatively cheap option at first, rather than choosing a professional web design agency, but the consequences of doing this may cause a lot of hassle in the future.

A web design agency, like SoftNEP, is a team of experienced web designers and developers, project managers, graphic designers, SEO experts, and at times, even content writers. As such, freelancers have limited expertise. Speaking from experience, a strong developer is rarely a strong designer, and vice-versa.

Freelancers are also found to be less accountable after the delivery of the project and tend to provide poor support when required. Let’s say the chosen freelancer is on holiday and god forbid, your website has been hacked, then who is to look into that?

There have also been cases of clients coming to SoftNEP after having “lost” websites to freelancers; login access and other details were lost to freelancers who took the information with them while migrating permanently outside the country.

Lacking a proper strategy

Oftentimes what happens is that businesses are not familiar with their online audience and are unable to make projections about their future. At SoftNEP, we’ve helped a lot of clients garner a considerable online audience through meticulous planning and strategies.

A proper digital strategy includes internet marketing campaigns through newsletters, online ads, search engine optimization, and social media marketing. As the size of the audience grows, we encourage our clients to invest in suitable ‘resources’. A business needs to anticipate growth and plan accordingly. Once a site garners high traffic, the server costs would rise accordingly, but a bigger audience means bigger opportunities for monetization.

Disregarding the need for a proper design and development

Before going online, a company needs to have proper online guidelines, similar to print or other electronic guidelines. The design and development of the company website should be on-brand, utilizing brand colors and other related designs, and at the same time, the design needs to incorporate both aesthetics and proper development.

A website should have visual appeal and at the same time have proper functionality. User experience, or UX to us, should be of the utmost priority while designing and developing a website. A website that makes the user rip their hair off is no good.

Lacking strong content, and proper internal linking

A website like any other form of marketing has to be precise in its content. There should not be the case of tl;dr (too long; didn’t read), and it should be proper content that you choose to display on your website. A website should be easily navigable, and pages should be properly interlinked.

That being said, “bounce rates” should be minimum, meaning you should try to not redirect your audience outside of your website. Also, make sure you get rid of broken links. You don’t want a visitor to see Error 404 when they think they have clicked content relevant to them.

Ignoring SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Search Engine Optimization is the process of designing websites to make them search engine friendly, suitable for “crawling and indexing” and complying with search engine guidelines and standards without putting barriers that would otherwise hamper their discoverability. It is up to web pages to help search engines provide suitable information.

This is how Google, Bing, Yahoo! or some other search engine miraculously finds whatever you are looking for on the web, auto-completes your search queries, are able to give you other relevant search results, and helps you navigate through the 6 trillion individual web pages on the internet. Having strong content, building online relationships that would get you “backlinks”, social media integration, and engagement all help in making sure your website shows up on the search.