4 Typical Mistakes Businesses Still Make Online

Not a single person can deny the remarkable impact of the Internet upon our world – driving the growth of commerce and propelling communications to a frantic speed. People shop online more than ever, and there will be 1.92 billion digital buyers worldwide by the end of this year. That's 25% of the world's population, and those are just people who shop online. 56% of the total population uses the Internet in their daily life, whether they access it via their computer or smartphone. Millennials can’t imagine the world without it.

People use the Internet to educate themselves, research anything they want, communicate and connect with one another, find and investigate products or services they’re interested in, and even to help them with travel. Today, when a person is interested in a particular business, the first thing they do is to search for its website and social media profiles. In the mind of a today's consumer, a business without an online presence doesn’t appear credible or trustworthy.

Yet, so many business-savvy company owners fail to properly understand the relationship between their enterprise and the Internet. Such lack of knowledge makes them more prone to making mistakes. In this post, we will present some of them and how you can avoid them.

Not having a website

More than one million people come online for the first time every day, and most business owners say their website is crucial to their company. Some of the world’s strongest companies, like Facebook or Google, wouldn’t even exist without it. Yet, there are still those who believe their business doesn’t need a website. They couldn’t be more wrong. If your business doesn’t have a website presence, it doesn’t have a presence at all.

Building a website was never easier. Any business owner can use various website builders, like WordPress, Wix, or Weebly, to get their site online. As they were designed for a non-technical user, these tools offer easy-to-use templates and drag&drop builders that anyone can use to build a website. They have other features, like:

• Online forums
• Blog
• Social sharing links
• Shopping carts
• Audio and video players
• Customer support
• SEO management

The main principle is to start small. Build a couple of pages and expand from there. Just research beforehand, so you can adequately select a website builder that suits the needs of your business.

An effective internet connection

Almost everyone is connected to the Internet today. Ever-present and always available, the Internet now plays a substantial role in business, all the way to the extent that many business owners take it for granted. They never seem to think about what happens when the Internet connection becomes a problem. A low-quality connection makes company’s website go down more often, obstructs data-heavy functions like video conferencing, accessing cloud-based apps, streaming videos, etc. Even marketing efforts can be ruined, as they must be completed quickly, and how can you do that with a slow connection?

A bandwidth problem can slow your business' productivity, waste your workers' time, and result in lost sales. How you can deal with this? Through fiber-optic Internet. In recent years, this type of connection spread across the globe up to the point that Internet fiber optic services are offered everywhere, from Norway, the UK, and the US, all the way to Kenya, Japan, Jordan, and many more.

Fiber optic transmission is faster. Fiber optic, when compared with copper wire (the traditional and more present type of transmission), offers much greater speed. This is because it uses light waves for transmitting information, while the copper wire uses electric current. Photons travel at the speed of light, whereas electrons at less than one percent of that.

Poor search engine visibility

What’s the use of having a business website if people avoid it like a haunted ruin? Even worse, can’t find it when they need it. 85% of consumers use the Web to search for a company. How? – you might wonder. Through search engines. Out of all search engines, Google is by far the most popular. To be visible there, and show up well in their SERPs (Search engine results pages), there are a couple of things you can do. Google looks at three dominant factors to determine the rank of a website:

• On-page factors
• Off-page factors
• Social signals

To rank better, you’ll have to make sure that these are taken care off. Moreover, a local business will want to ensure that localized keywords are placed on a website, build citations (submissions to local business directories) with NAP (Name Address Phone number) consistency, and gather as many positive reviews as they can, so to show up in location results for a given search.

Social media presence

Is being active on social media platforms. This means creating business accounts for your brand and updating them often with posts that offer information that might interest your followers. When social media updates are regular and monitored carefully, they will have a positive impact on your marketing and improve brand awareness.

Besides, social media offer a close connection with your customer and direct informal contact. They're a place where you can reach potential customers and convert them into followers or brand ambassadors. When you interact with clients on social media, use this as a starting point for building a perfect buying persona by answering questions like:

• What online platform do they use the most?
• What product are they purchasing and why?
• What problems do they want to solve?
• What are their behaviors, interests, and hobbies?

After you understand your buyer’s persona, you can start choosing the right social media platform for your business. Competing with other businesses from your niche across all social media is inefficient and time-wasting. Don’t cover everything when you don’t have the necessary resources. Instead, monitor just a few accounts closely and respond quickly.

“Being online” is an integral part of our everyday life, just as it is for our business. Never forget this, so that needless mistakes are avoided, and you don’t lose time, money, or branding efforts over them.