If you’re a small business owner, you already know the importance of an online presence for your brand to gain and retain customers. You may have experimented with a logo maker and some email or social media marketing as well, but what about your website? After all, your website is a window into your products and services, and if people like what they see, they’ll be more inclined to purchase from you. So how do you optimize your website for financial growth, and how do you prepare for possible cyberattacks?
Integrate Your CRM and Your ERP
The efficiency and productivity of your business will be greatly improved if you can make both your customer relationship management system and your enterprise resource planning system work in tandem. Integrating the two will save you time, as duplicate data won’t need to be entered manually, and will also reduce the chance for human error and typos since you won’t need to retype the same information multiple times.
These systems can be tied together and automated if you choose business process management solutions. And when all your customer data is available in one place, you have more time to deliver outstanding service and to focus on new product development and offerings.
Accelerate Search Traffic to Your Website
Optimize your page speed so that people visiting your site can get the information they’re looking for quickly and efficiently. Visitors will get frustrated if they have to wait for pages to load, and your business will end up missing out on sales. Your website will also end up ranking lower on search engines, so make sure you take speed into consideration when looking for a web host. Keeping your web technology up to date will also help optimize your page speed. Maintain your database regularly, removing unused data and blogpost revisions, and enable caching to create an HTML version of your pages for faster retrieval.
Prioritize SEO
SEO is one of the most effective ways to ensure that your website is visible to potential customers. Here are just a few reasons why your website needs SEO:
- Helps you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), which means that more people are likely to see and click on your website.
- Helps you attract more qualified leads, since people who find your website through organic search are typically more likely to be ready to buy than people who find you through other channels.
- Improves your click-through rate (CTR), since higher SERP rankings usually lead to higher CTRs.
- Generates more traffic, which can lead to more sales and conversions.
Have a Recovery Plan for Cyberattacks
As a business owner, you may be exposed to cyber security threats where hackers attempt to alter, steal or destroy your stored data and attack your system from within. Since a cyberattack has the potential to infect your website with malware or ransomware and give cybercriminals access to your customer data and other sensitive business information, it is imperative that you protect yourself and your business by improving your cybersecurity online.
So make sure that your digital assets are secure with regular backups, both local and in the cloud, in order to minimize the impact of such an attack on your business. Be proactive and identify the data and systems you’ll need to recover first after a cyberattack to get both your business and website back and running again.
Obviously, your website is an integral part of your business strategy – and that means it needs to be running smoothly and rank high to bring you the customers you’re looking for. So invest in productivity tools that will keep your data in one place, make use of financial apps to improve your customers’ shopping experience, and don’t skimp on cybersecurity and data protection to quickly get back to business after an attack.
