You can get away with being a bit out of the loop in your personal life, but you don’t really have that luxury when it comes to your business. Every successful company has an optimized website, and there are millions of e-commerce shops out there with more being created every day. The market is more competitive than it’s ever been, and if you’re falling behind on technology or trends, you’re at a serious disadvantage.
This isn’t just the case for big companies, either. If you’ve started a small business recently, you’ll need every advantage you can get to stand out from your competitors. Here are some great things to focus on to stay both current and organized.
Tech Support
Every organization needs reliable IT experts, whether they’re in-house or an outsourced service like EC2 IT. An IT team is naturally geat for supporting existing infrastructure, running data centers, solving technical problems, and ensuring your company website remains online and that each customer IP address can connect. A dedicated tech support team can also assist with integrating new technology with existing systems and help ensure your company’s cybersecurity. They can advise you on the best antivirus and firewall systems, help generate a secure administrator password, and choose the best technology to suit your goals and integrate with programs you’re already using.
Modern SEO Strategies
Search engine optimization is crucial for any company that wants to succeed online, and web developers need to be familiar with it. The more organic web traffic you can generate, the more opportunities you have to convert users into customers. SEO is a constantly evolving practice, and search engine algorithms are regularly updated, so you need to continuously update your methods to stay ahead of the competition. You’re likely already focusing on building good backlinks and optimizing your site for mobile devices, but there are other areas worth looking into as well.
Local SEO: These are your efforts to optimize your website to attract business from local searches. Mobile devices tend to display businesses in the local area when users search for stores, so ranking high in these results is important. You can create a free Google My Business profile to include information about your company and engage with users.
Content Marketing: One of the best ways to reach your target audience is by creating original content to engage them online. This can include YouTube videos about your products, blog posts on sites they frequent or hosting a podcast. This helps establish your company as an authority in your niche and builds rapport with potential customers.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
The OKR system is a way to clearly communicate your organization’s goals and measure progress toward those goals. The modern OKR framework is credited to Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, and it was further popularized when venture capitalist John Doerr introduced the concept to Google. OKRs can be broken down into two main ideas.
Objectives: These are your overall goals for the company. Strategic objectives could be things like increasing sales by 20% compared to last year or improving customer outreach. Objectives should be easily understood, and they should align with company values. It’s generally best to focus on just a few objectives at a time.
Key Results: These are the metrics that demonstrate your progress toward your objectives. Key results are measurable and specific, and they should be reflected through numerical values. If you increased sales by 5% in your first quarter, for example, you would be on track to increase sales by a total of 20% by the end of the year.
Using modern software to track OKRs can help you reach your most ambitious goals and grow your business. It also makes it easy to distribute new OKRs to team members and go over a quick summary of the steps required to reach them.
