The Top Website Optimization Mistakes You’re Making in 2021

The Top Website Optimization Mistakes You’re Making in 2021

What are the top website optimization mistakes you’re making in 2021?

With ecommerce swiftly becoming the preferred way to both browse and purchase, what with approximately 2.14 billion global buyers that is only expected to continue growing in coming years, to be making common website optimization errors means leaving money on the table.

Here are the common pitfalls you may be falling prey to (and what to be doing instead):

#1: Duplicating Your Website Content

While not a direct penalty against your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts, duplicating your website content does negatively impact a search engine’s ability to index your content.

Why does this matter? Well, indexing decrees how easily findable your business is online. When the search engine cannot easily index your pages, which is the case when content is duplicated across multiple pages, it will be forced to pick one page to link to versus dividing its efforts. This results in damaged SEO rankings and losses in website traffic due to one page being indexed and linked versus all of your website’s pages being indexed and linked.

What to do instead: Ensure that each of your website’s pages do not have the same information copy-pasted, especially if you are looking to have your website rank for specific keywords. A blog is a popular way of doing this; even we here at Time2getonline.com utilize blogs to add variety to our pages’ content!

#2: Not Optimizing For Mobile

Mobile e-commerce sales have been projected to reach a staggering $3.56 trillion by the end of 2021, which is 22.3% more than the $2.91 trillion recorded earlier in the year.

This means that not optimizing for mobile equals leaving money on the table. With the bulk of consumers and potential clients accessing websites through their mobile devices, not approaching your business’s website with the mindset of “mobile-first” is a common pitfall that can lead to increased bounce rates and lower traffic rates than your competitors.

What to do instead: Optimizing for mobile can look like:

  • Redefining or refreshing your website’s aesthetic to play nice on small screens
  • Creating a consistent user experience across all platforms, mobile and desktop alike
  • Testing your website’s mobile-friendliness using online tools
  • Using visitor surveys to pinpoint their likes and dislikes concerning your existing site
  • Improving your website’s mobile loading speed by implementing caching, using a Content Delivery Network, minifying your code, compressing all available images, and, of course, keeping your business’s website up-to-date

#3: Having Cluttered Category Pages

Ease of use is, undoubtedly, one of the #1 factors that determine whether or not your business is bought from online.

Having cluttered category pages that are difficult for consumers to navigate is a sure-way way to have them abandon their cart. This could include not having a search feature for your site, not having the categories appropriately labelled, or having too many category sub-sections that, in turn, unwittingly turn your website’s online store into a maze.

What to do instead: As with most things e-commerce related, simplicity is key. Ensure that your product and category pages are conversion-oriented by clearly organizing and labelling your categories, having a search feature, and being conservative with the number of sub-categories to avoid potential client overwhelm.

Time2GetOnline.com Can Help

While the Time2GetOnline.com headquarters is located here in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, we proudly service clients around the globe.

Contact us today to optimize your website today.

The Top Five Apps to Get Your Business Organized in 2021

The Top Five Apps to Get Your Business Organized in 2021

Organization: one of the key components of any business, regardless of its size.

Signs you need to begin (or restart) prioritizing organization in 2021?

  • You aren’t automating routine tasks
  • You are struggling to set and/or meet goals
  • You are having difficulty coordinating schedules and/or managing deadlines
  • You find that a bulk of your time is still spent on communicating vs. effectively delegating
  • You have noticed that your energy is spent on small everyday tasks rather than strategizing and implementing long-term goals and business development endeavours

Today, Time2GetOnline is outlining the top five apps to get your business organized in 2021 (and wave goodbye to the concerns listed above!)

For Managing Team Workflows: Trello

Self-described as the tool that “helps teams move work forward”, Trello is a collaborative app that permits users a way to organize, track, and manage work for multiple projects all in one place.

Divided into intuitive boards (for broader projects), lists (for checklist items), and cards (for specific tasks or tasks descriptions), Trello’s strength lies in its user-friendly layout and number of available apps and interactivity: depending on your and your business’s needs, Trello can be as simple as one board or as expansive as limitless boards, multiple app integrations (such as Dropbox or Google Drive), and communication tool interactivity.

As a bonus, Trello’s basic plan is free, meaning it is accessible for even small-scale businesses.

Notable alternatives include:

For Organizing Emails: ActiveInbox

Does your gmail inbox feel like a black hole when it comes to your time? Then ActiveInbox may be the solution for you.

ActiveInbox is a browser extension that A) turns emails into tasks, B) automatically sorts your tasks into projects based on the action required or sender’s address, and C) streamlines writing replies.

As a free-to-use extension ActiveInbox is accessible to all business owners using gmail or the web version of google workspaces. However, it also has a paid upgrade that grants access to setting specific in-app deadlines and accessing shortcut options to even further minimize the time you spend in your inbox.

Notable alternatives include:

For Remembering Passwords: LastPass

Especially when you are managing passwords for accounts that are either shared between team members or that are owned by clients, there are few things less secure than having a running Google Doc or equivalent document running.

That’s where LastPass comes in: hailed as the “#1 password manager and vault app”, LastPass offers both a free and premium plan depending on the number of passwords and users desired. It offers:

  • An opt-in save feature for each and every used password; when opted in, LastPass instantly and securely stores your password to make logging in to any account a one-click process
  • A built-in password generator that creates hacker-proof passwords
  • A digital record library that can be safely shared with collaborators
  • A dark web monitoring system that immediately alerts if data breaches or suspicious activity is detected

Notable alternatives include:

For Scheduling and Monitoring Social Media: Hootsuite

With over 200,000 paid accounts and millions of users as of 2021, Hootsuite is an all-in-one scheduling and monitoring app for social media.

Available for free in an initial 30-day trial, Hootsuite offers a visual drag-and-drop interface for scheduling social media posts, integration with all major social media platforms, built-in direct messaging with both social media users and in-app collaborators, and report generators.

Direct your time towards more creative and impactful input by simplifying social media scheduling and monitoring with Hootsuite.

Notable alternatives include:

For Keeping Track (and Making the Best of) Time: Toggl

Combining time-tracking and project management features, Toggl is divided into three distinct components: Toggl Plan, for project management purposes; Toggl Track, for time-tracking and reporting; and Toggl Hire, for generating skill-testing questions for job candidates.

All three start their generous free plan, which has no expiry if used for a singular person. It has both mobile and desktop compatibility, with an intuitive layout for beginners and integrations with other common apps such as Zapier, Slack, Google Drive, and QuickBooks.

Notable alternatives include:

What is Your Business’s Biggest Pain Point in 2021?

Contact us today to see how Time2GetOnline can help your business overcome it.

How to Create Successful Brand Positioning In Your Market

How to Create Successful Brand Positioning In Your Market

Defined as, “the way you differentiate yourself from your competitors and how consumers identify and connect with your brand”, brand positioning is made up of the core qualities, values, services, and/or products that define your business and its offerings in comparison to competitors.

Here are Time2GetOnline.com’s tips on how to create successful brand positioning in your market.

Define Your Target Audience

To market effectively, knowing and defining your target audience is the first non-negotiable.

Before tackling your brand positioning plan, ask yourself the following:

  • “Who is my existing customer or client base?”
  • “Who do I want my existing customer or client base to be?”
  • “Who are my competitors’ existing customer bases?”
  • “Can my existing or target customer or client base afford my services or products?”
  • “Can my existing or target customer or client base benefit from my services or products?”
  • “Do I understand what drives my existing or target audience to make buying decisions?”
  • “Is my current brand positioning speaking to them in a way that taps into those buying decisions?”

Having to answer each of these will guide you towards thinking more critically about your existing audience, who you want your audience to be, who your competitors’ audience is, and how effectively your existing brand positioning speaks to your audience base.

Tap Into the Power of Creative Storytelling for Brand Positioning

On top of providing on-brand website design for clients, we here at Time2GetOnline.com also specialize in website copywriting. We’ve seen the power of creative storytelling for brand positioning first-hand!

Creative storytelling answers your target demographic’s main questions:

  • Who you are
  • What your business is
  • Why they need your product or service
  • Where they can purchase it
  • How your business is different than your competitors

Creative storytelling can be interwoven on every page of your website, every post on your socials, and even every content piece on your online directories of choice. Remember: breeding familiarity is key for winning your target audience’s trust, so being creative, authentic, and, most of all, memorable will go a long way in your brand positioning endeavours.

Test Quickly and Widely

The value of feedback cannot be overstated when it comes to branding. That’s what makes testing quickly and widely so crucial to your business’s brand positioning success.

When in doubt, let data be your guide. Testing your brand positioning provides the benefits of:

  • Directly comparing your audience’s reaction to your new positioning vs. your old positioning
  • Seeing where on the effectiveness scale your positioning lands, particularly compared to competitors
  • Which feedback is the same across the board and which differs (for example, your target demographic loving your brand colours but not connecting with the language used in your tagline)

Of course, be cognizant of sinking too much time and money into testing, especially if you are receiving only neutral feedback in the beginning. If you find yourself in that situation, know that that’s what hiring an expert is for!

Call the Experts at Time2GetOnline.com

Time2GetOnline.com is here to help you with general brand positioning, such as copywriting, website development, and social media, that will give you an edge… even in competitive markets!

Reach out today to make it happen.

How to Choose the Right Logo For Your Brand

How to Choose the Right Logo For Your Brand

Just the other day here at Time2GetOnline.com, we were debating our own logo and brand name.

Does it align with our existing brand positioning and offerings? Is it reflective of our brand’s values and personality? Will it hold up in the digital marketing market in both the short-term and long-term?

Today, we wanted to share our findings… as well as our tried-and-true tipson how to choose the right logo for your brand.

Firstly, Why is Choosing the Right Logo So Crucial?

A good logo is all of the following:

  • Unique
  • Memorable
  • Eye-catching
  • And, of course, reflective of your brand as a whole

Logos are a core component of any successful brand positioning and tie into your tagline, your website design, and your social media branding. Think of your logo as a thread weaving through each of these components to stitch them together in a cohesive way.

Logos oftentimes combine both text and visuals to represent the business in question.

Common Logo Mistakes Business Owners Make (and How to Correct Them)

Common logo mistakes business owners make include the following:

  • Not narrowing down your ideas before beginning the drafting phase (after all, you are more likely to settle on a winning design when working with four potentials versus a thousand)
  • Being swayed by those around you who A) are not your target audience and who B) do not know your business’s values and offerings as thoroughly as you, the business owner, do
  • Not doing sufficient research to ensure that the logo design you are settling on is well-received by your target audience, is easily communicated, and is not overlapping with existing logos of other businesses
Actionable steps to tackle each of these common pitfalls are, in order: whittling down your potential logos to five or under to streamline the drafting and approval process; selecting a targeted testing pool of both your target demographic and other key stakeholders to guarantee that the feedback you are receiving is valuable; and, last but certainly not least, dedicating ample time to research to ensure that there are no copyright infringements and that your chosen logo’s message is both well-received and easily understood.

Time2GetOnline.com’s Tips for Choosing the Right Logo for Your Brand

Whether you’re having a logo designed for the first time or have been unhappy with previous logos for your brand, we here at Time2GetOnline.com believe that the following quote summarizes the entire process perfectly: “The designer behind the famed Twitter bird icon once told me his core rule for logo design: ‘Only do one trick’. I love this focused approach, as it forces you to prioritize simplicity and not over-design. Some of the smartest businesses these days are those with the simplest solution to solving a problem, and this philosophy carries through to branding.”

Attributed to the CEO and co-founder of AND CO, Leif Abraham, we recommend that this quote act as a guideline for any and all business owners looking to nail down a unique, on-brand, and timeless logo design.

Seeking more tips on how to choose the right logo for your brand? Call Time2GetOnline.com today to talk to an expert.