The Growth of a Company Must Be Followed by Its Website

Adapting Your Website to the Growth of Your Company



This is a guest post by Nikola Banicek

Nikola Banicek is an internet marketing specialist at Point Visible content marketing agency. He’s a laid-back guy with experience in PPC, copywriting, and project planning. When he’s not working, he’s either gaming, watching football, or anime.

Got a website already? That’s cool.

But every single business that starts to grow needs to consider looking at the future. What worked for your website when you first started out might not work now.

In other words, you and your audience have probably outgrown it.

As businesses get bigger, everything about them needs to evolve, and this is especially true of their website. You may already be working with a website hosting provider, but if they’re not really offering much in terms of improving your initial hosting plan, it might be the time to move on.

In this article, we take a look at exactly what your business needs to do in order to grow your website so that it matches your business growth.

New Hosting

Many small businesses go with a shared hosting plan when they first start out. That’s fine, but as you grow, you need something more reliable.

More traffic needs more bandwidth, and a shared plan might not have the bandwidth required. If you fail to keep up with traffic demands on a regular basis, your host might even penalize you.

As your business scales, it’s a good idea to go with a virtual private server (VPS), as this will help you to deal with surges in traffic better. Especially if you anticipate high traffic on a frequent basis, you need a server all to itself.

As businesses get bigger, everything about them needs to evolve

More Pages

When you first started out, you might have catered to a fairly small audience with your website. But as you get bigger, audience expectations will change. This means that the information they expect to find on your website changes.

For example, when you first launched a website, you might have neglected to add a privacy policy page or even a testimonials page. Perhaps you didn’t have any testimonials at this stage or couldn’t see their value.

As you grow, the need for pages like these and others becomes obvious.

Here are the key pages your website needs:

A Sitemap

A sitemap might not have been the first thing you thought of when you launched your website. But all professional websites need sitemaps if they want their customers to easily navigate it.

There are two types of sitemaps:

  • XML sitemaps
  • HTML sitemaps

An XML sitemap is aimed at search engine bots who use it to index your content.

An HTML sitemap, on the other hand, is aimed at humans who use it to navigate their way around your website with ease. Typically, they’ll find it in the footer on each page of your website, and it should include links to all your key pages (see above).

There are plenty of WordPress sitemap plugins you can use to make this easy for you.

You will need a solid content plan to have a better website

A Solid Content Marketing Plan

Content marketing is the only type of marketing that’s left⁠—according to Seth Godin, at least.

Either way, it’s a pretty damn important marketing strategy that, when done properly, will educate, inform, and engage your prospects. Not just this, it will also help you to build trust and improve conversions.

The key to your content marketing plan will be a blog that you should use to turn prospects into buyers. How do you do this? By creating content that works.

To that end, it’s important to understand what your audience wants to see from you.

You can use a tool like BuzzSumo to find the type of content that’s already performing well in your niche. Or try entering your target keywords into Quora to get an insight into the problems your prospects are struggling with. Once you know what these problems are, you can then create content that offers a solution.

When creating content that works, it’s important to understand that you need to cater to the right marketing persona. Essentially, when a user types something into Google, they have a specific intent. 

There are four types of user intent:

  • Informational (search for information. For example, ‘how to …’)
  • Navigational (searching for a specific website)
  • Transactional (ready to make a purchase)
  • Commercial (doing some research)

Once you understand user intent, you can create different types of content that target each stage of the buyer’s journey. This is important because, as your business grows, the variety of users that are looking to buy from you will grow as well, and you need to target each persona with your content.

It’s also worth mentioning that Google and your prospects are on the lookout for in-depth, long-form content that offers lots of value. If you offer as much value as possible with your content, there’s every chance that you’ll make the connection you’re looking for. 

Aim to create long form (1,200 words+) content that’s stuffed with research, stats, and information⁠—the kind that sets you apart from your competitors.

If your business is growing consider a Live Chat service

Live Chat Services

If your business is growing, it means you’ve got more customers.

But what do you do when you simply can’t handle all those customer queries anymore?

You install live chat services.

A live chat service does a variety of things. It answers customer queries and objections, builds trust, and nudges them closer to a sale.

In short, it takes a load off and increases conversions.

There are numerous live chat services that you can choose from, so you’ll need to shop around. We like Live Guide Chat, but Crazy Egg did a whole article on the top 15 live chat software solutions that you can check out.

Speed Up Your Website

Consumers are getting ever more demanding when it comes to site speed. If your website takes too long to load, they will bail out. In fact, 57% of us will walk away if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

There are many reasons for a slow loading website, but the number one thing to do is to go with the best web hosting that your budget allows for.

To boost site speed, you should also install a WordPress plugin, such as WP Super Cache. It’s free and does more than just browser caching.

Again, if you’re using WordPress, don’t forget to implement a good theme that looks good, and which has taken speed into account. Here’s a mammoth list of the best responsive WP themes.

Lastly, images. Huge images will bring your site speed right down, so use an image optimization tool to compress your pics.  

As your company grows you will need more product pages

Improved Product Pages

If you don’t give your prospects more of what they want, they will go to a competitor.

Bigger images of your products can boost conversions. But what about virtual reality videos?

If your website and brand are to stay looking professional and mature, you need to keep up with the trends. And one of the major trends for 2019 is virtual reality videos.

Companies are already creating virtual reality videos that allow the customer to experience the product from the comfort of their own home. Limbic Life, for example, used VR to help their customers heal mentally and physically without having to leave their house.

Adding virtual reality videos of your products makes them more immersive and interactive. It also makes your website look more contemporary and can go a long way to improving conversions.

Other ways to improve your product pages include adding numerous payment options and making these super clear, displaying your product reviews more prominently, and displaying security badges.

This is how your website will catch up with your company's growth

Conclusion

The more your company grows, the bigger the demands will be on your website. More traffic means you’ll need better hosting. More customers mean you’ll need better customer service. And so on.

Follow the tips in this article to complement your business growth with an all-star website that gives your customers more of what they want in 2019.

How are you adapting your website to your company growth?

María is an enthusiast of cinema, literature and digital communication. As Content Coordinator at HostPapa, she focuses on the publication of content for the blog and social networks, organizing the translations, as well as writing and editing articles for the KB.

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