Category: Blog

5 Reasons Why Having A Website for Your Company is Inevitable

In today’ digital era, discussing about the importance of having a website for any business sounds pretty obvious, isn’t it?

Well no, not for all. Still around 44% to 51% of small businesses do not have a WEBSITE! and that’s the reason we are here to realize, those who still underestimate, the power of being online.

Having a website is no longer a choice these days, it is a must-have business channel/asset that you just can’t ignore. While some might still debate that a website is for businesses operating online, have a tech product, or selling their product and services online, but its equally rewarding for all those businesses that have nothing to do with the internet. This is primarily because the days of relying on phone books are long gone and now people search about each and everything online either it is a new dress they want to buy or find a broker who can help them in finding a new house.

Here is a fact, as per the eCommerce Foundation, 88% of consumers research product information before they make a purchase online or in the store. Well, that’s a huge number!

Let’s see why it is such a big deal, given are the five most important reasons why having a website is inevitable for your business: –

1. For Credibility

   A website gives a sense of existence and builds trust in the mind of consumers while they are looking for your business online. Around 80% of people have bad opinions of companies that don’t have websites. If you don’t have a website, then your company’s credibility is compromised & the tech-generation may not even consider you/your business serious about your product/service offerings. So, you just can’t afford to be this ignorant towards your business when it comes to your image in the market.

2. 24/7 Accessibility

   Imagine being able to work with your team and sell your products around the clock for 365 days a year, not possible, right? But it can be. You don’t need to be actually present at the counter answering queries, demonstrating and sellingyour products or worrying about the payment. You just need to have a website and this will do all your work even when you are sleeping at your home peacefully. Website is like a shop that never closes.

3. Wider Reach Than Any Other Form of Advertising

   With around 2.2 billion people online web has a far wider reach and it is much cheaper than any other form of advertising. Alike TV or radio ads, when you have a website you are not only visible to your customers when you want them to see you, you are also visible to them when they want to see you.

4. The Backbone of Your Online Presence

   I’m sure you all must be using the internet for your sales and marketing in one way or another. It might be content marketing, social media marketing or email marketing.

   But here is a thing, all your digital marketing efforts are useless if you cannot channelize that traffic to a website from where they will get more information, and then they will buy. Websites are a place for your content to live, it is the center of your company’s online presence.

   Most importantly, Google ranks web pages, not businesses. So, without a website, you just can’t appear in front of your customers when they search about you online.

5. Because Your Customers Are Looking for It!

   Isn’t it a valid enough reason to be available online?With 88% of your customer starting their purchase with an online search, means if you don’t have a website, you are only selling to 12% of your market. As the rest of them won’t even consider you as an option.

Convinced? Then no need to fret, creating a website is as easy as buying something from your next-door grocery store. But, if you want a professionally designed website for great user experience and better rankings, we can help.

6 Degrees IT helps brands like yours to reach new audiences online.

Talk to our passionate website developers and find out more about our web design services.

Contact our team today!

Why Your E-Commerce Business Certainly Needs a Mobile App?

If you are managing a small or mid-sized business, especially if you are into e-commerce sector, it would be hard for you to get customer’s attention on your stunning website and to make them stay and get actions. I can understand your struggle that how much time and efforts you have spent on search engine and social media marketing just to make them aware that you EXIST!

Also, you must be daydreaming to get loyal customers, more action, fastening your operations, gaining popularity (ohh I want that too!), and of course more sales!

Am I not correct?

But how you will get all of these?

Giving your customers exciting offers, discounts, and gifts which they might not be interested in accepting or what if they accept it and forget you as your ex did. That sounds horrible and surely this is not the solution!

So where your loyal customers-to-be are sneaking? How do they look like? Huh?

Ok, enough brainstorming!

You may have to get in touch with an expert individual or a mobile app development company but at the end of the day, you need to understand that your lifesaver is going to be a customized mobile application. YES! Not all superhero wears caps. Some are rocking in the Apple store and Google play store.

Your targeted audience has smartphones and they are spending their time (actually, a lot of time) on mobile in texting, posting, and ordering your competitor’s products & services which have thrilled growth of the global smartphone market.
According to the survey done by Yahoo in 2016 declares that “Mobile users spent 90% of their time in apps.” Mobile apps with more advanced computing capabilities and connectivity are one of the most powerful tools for reaching the target audience in terms of business. Here are the reasons to go for mobile app development for your business –

1 – Audience Building

You know one-third of people use their smartphone as their best medium to access the Internet.
Even if you have the website you still need the mobile application because today businesses need to connect with the customer in order to make them loyal and also to make a long term relationship with them.
Amazon, Alibaba, Flipkart or any other successful business have not relied truly on the website. It’s easy for customers to switch to other websites just by one click. Since the app is already installed it would be like a trap to retain your audience and not let them go.
Combination of Website + Mobile application will maintain a long term relationship and connection.

2 – Take the Advantage of Personalization

Personalization, who don’t want to get served according to them? We all want things the way we like it so do your targeted audience. Send push notification through mob app about personalized offers, and promotions.

3 – Go Global or Go Home

Go Global or Go Home, Yes! If you are not going global then please don’t think of growing and leading. Those businesses who didn’t grab this opportunity had seen a big fall.
Through the development of an attractive mobile app, you can build a global level audience, you can easily retain them, and you can easily serve them.

4 – Customer Engagement rate

Constant interaction develops support and loyalty, and in turn, a good loyalty level arouses businesses. With an intelligently developed and designed mobile app, you can benefit from this opportunity.

5 – Ease of Communication

Email has been the best communication tool but now it’s a time of innovation and change. As new technology is evolving, the one who accepts changes can only survive. Mobile app notifications i.e. push and in-app notifications both are exciting alternatives for communicating with app users in a less intrusive way.
As per the survey, push notifications have delivered more than 40% click-through rates.

6 – Fasten your Business Operations (Quite like the flash)

Apps are so much faster than the websites, a well-designed mobile app can perform actions much quicker than a mobile website.
Websites generally use web servers to store data locally though apps usually store their data locally on mobile devices. For this reason, data retrieval happens swiftly in mobile apps.

7 – Gain Name and Fame

Let’s talk about building your brand name! Yes, name and fame. Without a mobile app, you might seem out-dated from modern trends. Set your business apart by using mobile to connect the dots for your users, creating a more streamlined experience by enhancing current capabilities because your brand image is critical for your success.
Mobile apps are the absolute way to increase brand recognition. The more you involve your customers with your business through apps, the sooner they will demand your products/services.

8- Deserve your Customer Loyalty

Talking about the main awareness, why you should consider building your own mobile app?
The answer is customer loyalty.
With all the distractions, roadside banners, billboards, newspaper ads, flyers, coupons, websites, website banners, Facebook ads, and email marketing, we slowly lose our impact on customers because of the enormous amount of advertising surrounding us all. It’s time to make a true and genuine relationship with your customers and making them a loyal lover of your product/ service.

9- Much Required Intelligent Insights and Precious Analytics

Analytics and Insights gained from your mobile application are precious, using analytics tools will help in recognizing user behavior.
One of the biggest benefits of mobile apps is the volume of detailed customer data that you can gather through them. You can identify your most profitable and promising regions, demographic segments, customer needs, and overall app performance. All this knowledge and data can be used to make product enhancements, identify new business opportunities, and develop new and products or features that meet customer needs.

Let’s wrap it up. Shall we?

Mobile application development and especially a native mobile application development is flourishing and no doubt that Mobile applications are needed. It’s not needed to just boost sales but to make a long-term relationship with customers, to understand the customer’s behavior, make them loyal, and to use it as a new and effective marketing tool.

What do you think?

Can Small and Mid Sized IT Companies Collaborate?

I am the founder and co-owner of a mid-sized IT company based out of Indore, India. We are in business since 2008 and are focused on building customized web and mobile applications across platforms. Our clientele is mainly from North America and the projects vary from fully managed staff augmentation & development to fix priced and turnkey projects.

The big issue with IT service-based companies is maintaining a balance between the revenue and salary cost. We cannot afford to overstaff and hire benchwarmers but also cannot compromise on the service quality and delivery times. We also need to keep pace with the changes and upgrades in technology and continuously need to train or hire staff to meet market demands. This again adds to the cost affecting the bottom-line. To summarize running an IT service company is similar to walking a tight rope and crossing a cliff. Slightest misstep can send your company plummeting down the valley.

We have built a successful business over the years with a positive revenue growth but I can safely say we were one of the lucky ones who could survive and overcome the diversities. I am sure there are many other companies in my city, state, and country who have gone through a cycle similar to ours with different success rates.

Over the years one common problem that impacted our profits was making resources available for short-term projects. Hiring long-term does not do justice to the company’s bottom line and short-term hires are hard to find. There is an option of getting freelancers on board but that puts a major dent to the control, privacy, and quality of work. These are the aspect that matters most to my clients and me.

To overcome this I strongly feel there can be a collaboration of like-minded IT companies within the City that require resources of similar skill set and experience. There can be a stringent set of rules and regulation to get companies on board and become a part of this collaboration. The resources can be made available to members only portal and the remuneration and compensation can either be by barter or cash.

I strongly feel that culmination of like-minded companies, a strong IT platform, and strict qualifying criteria and make this concept a reality.

Give it a thought. It will help you.

5 SEO Tactics That Might be Missing From Your Strategy

SEO in 2018 is not same anymore. Hence whenever you plan your SEO strategy, there are quite a lot of things that you need to keep in your head.

For example, you have to optimize your contents for voice or audio search. Keep looking for backlinks making opportunities. As well as keep your website away from spammy backlinks.

However just to help you out we have brought up 5 SEO Tactics that might be missing from your Strategy. So go ahead and check out if you are using these SEO tactics as your strategy or not:

1) Google Search Console Keyword Optimization:

There are times when we do publish contents without any focus keywords. Also in some cases, such posts get ranked on SERP and get a few impressions. But those contents still faces difficulties to generate clicks.

This is where the Google Search console comes to rescue. Search console displays all the keywords for which you are getting impressions. So you better keep a track on these keywords and try to rank them.

To find these keywords, first, open up Google Search Console. Select “Search Traffic” and then click on “Search Analytics.”

Next, select “Clicks,” “Impressions,” “CTR,” and “Position.” Finally, select “Pages.”

Altogether, these four filters give you a wide range of results.

Finally, select “Queries.”

Filter out the best keyword for the page you didn’t optimize the content for. Check for the keywords with a decent number of impressions but few clicks and a low CTR. Since these keywords have high visibility, you can work on improving your SERP presence so more of those people click through to your site.

Now, optimize the relevant page for the keyword.

2) Use Rich Snippets to Enhance Content:

Rich snippets are an essential part of SEO, and that is why you should use them as well. Rich snippets give the user a visual idea of how the content will work for them.

For example, we have searched “chicken pot pie recipe” on Google and found two websites. Here is the screenshot:

Now here you can notice that one of the websites has the star marking where the other one does not. Now a user obviously would click on the first link. As it is giving us a visual appearance where the other one does not.
The end of the story is, that by using rich snippets you will be able to increase the CTR. Also eventually you would rank higher on SERPs and get more traffic.

3) Develop Optimized YouTube Videos:

Videos are also an essential part of SEO in 2018. That is why you need to develop optimized youtube videos for your website.

However, to make it easy for you here is a short guide:

Choose a keyword and give it a proper title along with an attractive description. Also, add a call to action feature and add a catchy thumbnail. This way people identify your keyword. Also, you have to include the youtube video on the content itself. Plus you have to add the video rich snippets for a better result.

4) Keep Auditing your Backlinks to Check if there are any Spammy Links:

As you are already aware of the fact that spammy backlinks are not so great. Hence you better avoid building them.

Back in the days, one could easily rank a website by making quite a lot of spammy links. But now that just does not work.

That is why you better be careful while link building. However, in some cases, your competitors might make spammy links to your website to steal rankings.

That is why we would suggest you audit your backlinks regularly and look for the spammy links. As well as block those links just to be on the safer side.

5) Optimizing for Audio Search:

We are living in a world where voice assistants are the new trend. Even there are quite a lot of people who love to search the web using voice commands.

Hence if you are not optimizing your website for audio search. Then you are avoiding a great opportunity to get some traffic.

Also, the voice searches are changing the way Google handles a search query. Even there are some people who believe that if you are optimizing your website for audio searches. Then you can rank higher on SERP.

Now check if these SEO tactics you are missing or not. If you are missing them, then it is the perfect time that you should go and implement them on your website.