5 Areas of Focus in 2014 – Your Website

There are so many tracks you can take in building a better web and mobile presence for your business, it’s often hard to tell where to begin.

Below are five areas we suggest as the most important for a small business to focus on for 2014. In this piece: Your Website.

Improvements in each area will position your business to be more findable, shareable, and profitable. This is a short summary of each of the five areas we believe to be most important of your attention as it pertains to your website.

5 Areas of Focus in Building a Better Business Presences
Your Website in 2014

1.  Landing Pages with Opt-In: Creating content is important. Landing pages help turn visitors into leads, and leads into customers. Creating a landing page allows you opportunity to collect and exchange some important data. A landing page can showcase your regional standing, a product offering, or an upcoming event. The opt-in portion allows you to being collecting email and contact information from a visitor in exchange for the value your landing page offers.

2.  Open Graph Meta Data (http://ogp.me/): You will be hearing more about Open Graph and Cards as 2014 goes on. Local Marketing, Social Media, Authorship, and Product Offerings are important in Open Graph protocols and similar meta data to describe what type of content it is you’re putting on the web. All this helps you become more findable to your targeted audience and potential customer base.

3.  Your Business Blog: This is not a new topic on this site, but it’s still a new idea with many small business owners. While page depth is still an important reason (possibly more for credibility than findability), a blog also positions your business for putting together many small pieces for larger products in the near future. Think Ebooks, presentations, infographics, and other ecommerce or offline sales opportunities. Page depth still carries some weight, especially if there is quality within the pages.

4.  Click-to-Call Phone Number and Contact Info: Huge item – and most often the quickest to accomplish. Your legitimate contact information (not named info), above the fold and easy to find is why most people visit your site – especially on a mobile device. Additionally, store hours and directions or a map are both important pieces of information to make available to the user.

5.  Measuring Metrics: It’s almost sickeningly sad how few business owners keep up on their own web traffic data – and how most are relying on metrics that no longer matter or are no longer measured. How do you tell which way is up if you don’t know where you are now?