The tech world is ever evolving. Every market segment and target audience are migrating more and more online by the day. This makes it a matter of necessity for every business that wants to attracts and retain more customers to open an office online. There are several platforms through which you could establish your service point online. Your website, with a functional blog, plus engaging social media pages will provide your business with vibrant online presence. If your website is basically to serve as an online brochure, you could worry less about optimizing your website for search marketing and conversion.

As a startup or SME, business models vary and approaches to market are not the same. However, you have to ensure more visitors who visit your website take one or two actions that translate to profit for your business. This is called conversion. Also, you must ensure prospects who are looking for what you offer can find you easily via search engines. That is called search optimization.

If you could successfully optimize your website for conversion and search marketing at the same time, your startup will surely blossom in due time. In ways as brief as possible, we will take a look at what cogent features you should look out for in your website to ensure that your website is optimized for conversion and search.

Why Search Optimization?

The most terrible thing to happen to a business is that a prospect is actually looking for you but ends up with your competitor. For instance, you have spent a whole lot of money and effort on offline advertising and your business is generating lots of buzz around town, folks will still google you! That is the truth. Most people will not remember your website or your business name in particular. But they will remember what you sell plus your brand promise via your TV, billboard ads, radio jingles. It is this bit of message they grab offline that will use to search for you online.

The whole essence of optimizing your website for search marketing is that when prospects like these are looking for you, they can easily find you and identify you effortlessly when they find you. Since we all can’t be web developers or search optimization specialists, we should find ways of verifying that the website developed for us as business owners are well positioned to get attention of those searching for what we sell.

In simplest way possible, on-page optimization are a body of traits your website you should portray for search engines to list it as a search result when a prospects search with keywords relevant to your business.

What is Search Optimization?

Please bear it in mind that search marketing involves both search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising. While pay-per-click ads require you pay Google or other online publishing platforms to display your ad to their audience, search engine optimization (on-page) involves those features on your website that could be fine-tuned to better position your website for search marketing. Startups and SMEs may not have budget fat enough to accommodate cost of PPC, but they could make a checklist from this post, audit their websites themselves or liaise with their web developer to ensure their websites are optimized for search marketing and conversion.

What is On-page Optimization?

Common on-page optimization features startups should look out for in their website include title and description meta tags, image name and Alt text, web page URL and so on. Web page title and description meta tags may sound too techy for an everyday startup owner who just wants to sell successfully online and cash out. What those tags do is tell search engines about your website. Meta tags are the code used by your website to tell introduce the content of your website or brand message to search engines and internet users searching for information to guide their buying decisions.

Home Page Title meta Tag

Home Page title meta tag is the first line that shows on Google when your website is displayed as a search result. This gives you around 60 characters to briefly introduce your business to search engines and users of search engines. Most web developers over look this and it happens by default if Wordpress is used to develop your website. Unfortunately, it could have severe implication on a website’s search optimization.

This should include your brand name and summary of your Unique Selling Proposition. In shortest way possible, the content of your Home page title meta tag should tell a newbie what makes your business stand out. Check your website on Google now, if the first line does not summarize your USP, ask that it should be edited. You may be losing many leads unknowingly.

Web Page Title Meta Tag

Title meta tag is not important for only home page, every web page on your website should have unique title meta tag which summarizes the content of the particular web page. This helps search engine to index your web pages correctly and display them when relevant keywords are used to search. For every startup and SME that sells product or service online, each web page created for each product or service should have unique title met tag.

Description Meta tag

Description meta tag also applies to both Home page and all web pages. What description meta tag does is to buttress your title meta tag. Assuming your title meta tag is a newspaper headline, the content of your description meta tag is the snippet of the story. It is a short paragraph that highlights what is really catchy on your website. Thus, you use the content of your description meta tag to explain further what your title meta tag introduces. This is where you could lay emphasis on special benefits your offer users.

Having read your headline and summary of benefits as presented by search engine on search result list, a prospect has only few seconds to decide whether to click through to your website or not. This is the beginning of a mere web visitor’s journey to conversion, it will do your startup business a lot of good if you could convince a newcomer to check out your website by making sure the content of your title meta tags and description meta tags for your home page and all web pages are explicit, concise and catchy enough to make prospects click through.

Image Name and Alt Text

To optimize images on your website for search marketing, name each image correctly and ensure Alt text has information on what the image is about. This may sound trivia but it is quite useful. During image search, a lead could click through to your website when they find an image you have named correctly. Such lead may not even be looking for you or your product, but clicking an image that bears name relevant to their search query will automatically land them on your website.

What Image Alt text does is to tell your audience what the image is about in case the image fails to load properly. Poor network signals by internet service provider could make an image not to load properly and on time. Besides, some web browsers, especially on mobile phones have images automatically turned off. On such occasions, image Alt text will inform the audience about the message the image intends to pass.

Benefit of Search optimization?

With your website optimized for search, more traffic will be driven to your website. With more traffic being generated daily, quality content and FREE offers will help you obtain their contact information and follow up with them. Doing this will increase traffic and conversion over time.
In order not to put your increased traffic to waste, you should ensure that steps leading to conversion are seamless. One way to achieve this is to choose a user-friendly payment platform. Here are some key features you should consider in choosing a good payment platform for your website:

Security and Trust

Your payment platform must be secure and be the type that builds confidence in your customers as they transact with you online. It could deploy a third-party authentication like VeriSign or GeoTrust to validate the security level. This will guarantee the security of the information that is transferred so that users’ financial details are not compromised.

At a minimum, transactions must be carried out over a secure server; known as Secured Socket Layer (SSL). A website address that has SSL will change its display from http:// to https://

Efficient Customer Service

No matter how effective the security of a payment platform is, things go wrong when they are least expected. It may not be you, it may be your customers who are having a hard time getting their payment processed successful. No payment or tech-driven platform can boast of 100% performance at all times. But the system recovery provisions put in place to remedy the awkward situation on time differentiate some payment from others.

VoguePay is one-of-a-kind payment platform whose customer service is accessible via multiple channels like Facebook, Twitter, emails, phone calls, skype or support ticket platform. When you can quickly lodge your complaint, get speedy response and resolution of the issue, you can be sure to have smooth payment processing which will further encourage your customers to do more transactions with you online.

Affordable Cost of Integration

Until VoguePay hit the payment processing scene in Nigeria, startups and small business owners were paying through their humble noses to have their processing account setup and their websites integrated into the existing payment processing platforms. If you can set up a payment processing account for FOC (free of charge) in Nigeria of today and get your account verified and ready for transactions for as low as N1,500, why for Pete’s sake won’t you sign up with VoguePay?

Availability of Multiple Channels for Receiving Payment

Limiting yourself to one or two channels to receive payment from your customers is a bad for your business. With the level of tight competition in every industry today, once your terms of payment are not conducive for your customers, they swiftly look for who is ready to accept their preferred form of payment. You don’t want to be punished for trying to buy from someone, do you?

VoguePay has diverse channels through which merchants can swiftly get their payments processed. Through VoguePay, you could receive payment via Mastercard, Verve card, eTransact, Visa card and so on. The cost of integrating these payment channels individually is exorbitant enough to milk your profits dry as startups or SMEs. However, VoguePay can act as your payment aggregator that combines your multiple payment options into a single dashboard where you can manage them and do proper book-keeping.

To top it up, VoguePay has a versatile international payment gateway. You could as well choose your currency of domiciliation. That is, with VoguePay, your domicile country could Nigeria and you could still choose US Dollars, Pounds and other foreign currencies as your currency of domiciliation.

Yeah, at VoguePay your smile is our logo!

We guarantee you secure payment processing with many user-friendly products and services. Please SIGN UP NOW or click the button below to learn more about our services.

Learn more at www.voguepay.com/register