For online businesses, conversion rates are extremely important. That is why, global businesses are under a lot of pressure to ensure that their online businesses achieve highest conversion rates. Of course, they need a lot of tools and techniques to improve their conversion rates. Here are a few valuable techniques to increase conversion rate: A/B testing According to Optimizely, A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing) is a comprehensive method of comparing two versions of a web page or application against each other to determine which one performs better. It is important to conduct A/B testing. In fact, A/B testing is all about making a website user friendly. Process of A/B Testing:

• Data Collection
• Identification of goals
• Hypothesis generation
• Variation creation
•  Run experiments
• Analysis of results

Benefits of A/B Testing:

• Improved Content Engagement/user interaction
• Reduced Bounce Rates
• Better Customer Engagement
• Increased Conversion Rates
• Ease of Analysis
• Increased Sales and ROI
• Reduced Future Risk
• Reduced Cart Abandonment

Valuable content High quality content enhances a website’s credibility. So, create useful content that can bridge the gap between company and customers. A Few points to consider:

• Create a simple and intuitive website.
• Create specific content.
• Provide detailed explanations.
• Use real pictures of people.
• Always provide complete contact information.
• Include testimonials.

Facts:

• More than 20% of businesses have reported that they do not have an effective strategy for landing page testing.
• According to KISSmetrics,  one second delay in page response time can result in 7 percent reduction in conversions.
• According to MarketingSherpa, about 75% of businesses have problem in finding suitable expertise for optimising their landing page copy.

Minimise design friction Create simple, intuitive and easily navigable website with various value added features, such as breadcrumbs, sitemaps, colourful buttons, etc. A few points to consider:

• Keep the form simple having minimum fields.
• Improve the speed of your website.
• Avoid  unnecessary details.
• Use simple and easy to see fonts.
• Always include contact form.
• Create XML sitemap.
• Include breadcrumbs.

Provide proofs This is yet another cherry on the cake. All you need to do is to provide comprehensive case studies to reflect your work and methodology. People will feel good and want to do business with you. In fact, this is a great way to gain trust and confidence of users. A few points to consider:

• Develop E-books and whitepapers so that users can read and share.
• Write detailed case studies and ask for testimonials from satisfied customers.
• Write blogs to make people understand  features of your products and services.

Bonus Tips:

• Simplify checkout process.
• Guide your customers through valuable product descriptions and crisp images.
• Always display prices and total shipping cost as well as delivery options.
• Implement security certificates on your website.
• Provide customer support.
• Add a resources section to your websites having guides, tutorials, videos, and "how to" articles.
• Write clear headings and use simple, easy-to-read fonts.
• Use colour psychology.
• Optimise your website.
• Use better combination of text and images.

Using the above mentioned techniques with various tweaks provide better experiences to your users, and eventually improve the overall conversion rates.

Optimisers always focus on building high-quality backlinks; however, they often fall short because quality link building is quite difficult. Being innovative and working on link building strategies can help a lot in achieving quality inbound links. Here are a few ways to build inbound links: Write press releases Writing and publishing high-quality press releases are is of the best ways to build inbound links. Tips:

• Write press releases for new product launches, updates on existing products, and opening a new office, etc.
• Include buzzwords, service updates and quotes in your PR.
• Use easy-to-follow press release templates.
• Make your headline compelling.
• Provide complete information about your company.

Create engaging infographics People love to share compelling infographics.  Create a fresh and useful infographic, people will link back to you as the original source. For better results, make the embed code for your infographic so that user can use it. Tips:

• Use the best infographic template.
• Include facts, figures and statistics for better explanation.
• Make your infographic funny and beautiful.
• Choose  an innovative design tool.
• Use Canva, Skitch, PicMonkey, BeFunky, Compfight, etc. for better results.

Create SlideShare presentations SlideShare presentations attract the maximum number of users. So, create visually compelling and sharable presentation for them. It will help you to achieve quality inbound links in less time. "SlideShare attracts 60 million unique visitors every month". Tips:

• Always create your own design.
• Use creativity when it comes to presentation.
• Use contrasting colours.
• Keep your text minimum.
• Rely on the best images.
• Always add introduction, conclusion, and call-to-actions.
• Add "animated slides" and clickable links.

Write case studies This is one of the best ways to get backlinks. All you need to do is to write convincing case studies of your clients. You need to explain their needs or problems, and your approaches as well as solutions. You also need to illustrate the whole matter with live examples. Tips:

• Write comprehensive cases studies.
• Use facts and statistics.
• Define problems and narrate solutions.

Bonus tips:

• Write high quality product and book reviews.
• Maintain a blog.
• Write e-books and tutorials.
• Conduct webinars.
• Ask for product reviews.
• Use link analysis tools like Ahrefs, Majestic, to get a list of backlinks.

All the above mentioned ways will help you to build inbound links for your website.

Entrepreneurs always want to improve their productivity, visibility, bottom lines as well as competitive edge. In pursuit of the same, they use a wide variety of tools and applications. Modern tools and applications are valuable and designed to streamline business operations. Here are a few valuable tools and applications to help you to:

• Increase sales
• Amplify brand awareness
• Establish better relationships with customers
• Expand and promote your business.

Evernote Use this platform to collect, nurture, and share ideas across desktop and mobile platforms. You can also use this to align your work. Tips:

• Use it to organise your work.
• Explore connections and use new information.
• Use it to memorise key business details.

Dropbox 500 million people around the world use Dropbox. It is one of the best business applications that helps you to store files, folders, videos, photos, PDFs, etc. in a secure way. You can access your files from anywhere on any device. "Dropbox is the finest file sharing and storage solution". Tips:

• Use it to share large files.
• Anyone can review and download a copy of files.
• Use it to take automatic backup.
• You can easily restore deleted files.

Zendesk This is the most popular software that improves business communication. This software is used for monitoring, prioritising, and solving customers’ problems. Tips:

• Use it to gather information.
• It offers personalised support.
• It offers clear visibility into customer interactions.
• It also helps to measure performance, and uncover actionable insights.

Buffer Use Buffer to schedule and share social media content in the fastest possible manner. This platform helps businesses to drive traffic, increase engagement and save time on social media. Tips: Use it to:

• Schedule as many posts as you want.
• Track clicks, reach and engagement.
•  Post new products or recommended items.
• Publish content in a reliable/fast and safe manner.
• Use Buffer to keep your customers well informed.

Grammarly Today, millions of people use Grammarly to check and correct grammatical errors. This tool helps you to make your writing error free. Tips: Use it to:

• Improve your writing style.
•  Expand your language awareness.
•  Enhance clarity and remove complex errors.
• Write error free on Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, or anywhere.

Freshdesk This is a powerful cloud-based customer support software and helpdesk ticketing system that assists businesses to improve their relationships with customers. Its email based ticketing system is perfect for tracking and responding to emails. Tips:

• Use it to streamline your inbox.
• Use Freshdesk to make your brand a vital resource for customers.
• Use it to identify actionable insights - issues, bottlenecks, your best players in statistical format.
• Use it to automate your workflow and support your customer.
• Use it to find the best leads and nurture customers.

So, use these smart tools and platforms to save your time, efforts and budget.

•  Want more sales from search engine optimisation efforts?
• Looking for new techniques to improve your traffic and rankings?

Learn how to use advanced SEO techniques to get ranking. Here are a few up-to-date and best SEO techniques: Optimise for RankBrain According to Google, RankBrain is a machine-learning AI system. Google uses it to handle unique queries that have never been asked before.  New queries make up to 15% of all searches a day – and Google processes 3billion searches daily, which means that 450 million searches are unique. Therefore, optimise for RankBrain. Tips:

• Understand machine learning and how RankBrain works.
• Never stuff keywords. (Poor optimisation or keyword stuffing doesn’t help.)
• Answer questions to solve problems.

Optimise your website for local presence Optimise your Google My Business page. Also choose specific local business listing sites to submit your website.  Unquestionably, local SEO helps websites to realise their full potential. Tips:

• Add a unique description that is correctly formatted and includes links.
• Choose the right categories for your business.
• Always upload original photos.
• Add a local phone number to your listing.
• Keep you NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) updated.
• Use Schema.org markup.
• Encourage users to provide reviews.

Optimise for voice search "According to Google, 20 percent of searches on mobile app and on Android devices are voice searches". Voice search is in vogue.  Marketers have now started optimising their sites for voice search queries. Hence, optimise your website for it to stay effective in the competition. All you need to do is to provide direct answers to questions.  Format your content, give proper headings and highlight the specific content so that both users and search engines can spot it. "Voice search is great for multi-tasking". Tips:

• Write straightforward content.
• Have a mobile-friendly website.
• Optimise your local business for voice search.
• Update your Google My Business and Bing Places.
• Keep your content as simple as possible in a natural language.

Implement AMP -Accelerated Mobile Pages AMP is Google’s open-source program, which gives webmasters the ability to create instant loading versions of web-pages for mobile users. You must implement AMP to improve user’s experience. "AMP results will be appearing throughout the mobile SERP by the end of the year". Tips:

• Download the Automattic AMP plug-in.
• Visit Search Console to understand more about AMP.
• Run the AMP validator tool.

Increase page load speed of your website In an increasingly competitive digital ecosystem, we can’t afford to ignore page load speed. In order to improve the overall browsing experience of users, increase the page load speed of your website. For that, enable compression and optimise your code to make it simple, which is still at its woeful stage. "Gzip is the most popular and effective compression method currently available and generally reduces the response size by about 70%". Tips:

• Reduce redirects.
• Use https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ to check site’s speed.
• Improve server response time.
• Optimise image.
• Use fewer videos.
• Choose the most suitable hosting.

All the above mentioned SEO techniques will get your website ranked.

If you still believe that LinkedIn is only for job seekers and recruiters, you are missing out a vital opportunity as a business owner. It has become a premier social networking website with advanced features and options. You must use it to influence customers, decision makers and improve your brand’s image in an interactive manner. Today, most marketers use LinkedIn for their B2C marketing purposes. Here are a few reasons why you should use LinkedIn: LinkedIn profiles It is easy to create LinkedIn profiles.  Use it to check company profiles, their culture, history and number of professionals, etc. Easy to connect with managers and business owners Use it to get connected with managers, information officers, recruiters, and business owners, etc.  It helps you to efficiently improve your business connections and its overall productivity. Visibility Today, visibility is not only a buzz word but a reality, so use LinkedIn because it is one of the best platforms for visibility.  "LinkedIn is the 16^th most visited website in the world". "For better results, optimise your LinkedIn profile". Source of business intelligence With its extraordinary features like LinkedIn Signal, it has become a unique source of business intelligence. In fact, it allows business owners, CEOs, CTOs and other industry leaders to interact with one another and drive better business outcomes. "Highlight your uniqueness, skills, expertise, and focus on your company’s details in your LinkedIn profile". Professional network LinkedIn may have fewer users as compared to Facebook; however, its users have a professional mindset. That is why it is advisable to use it as a business tool. In addition to that, LinkedIn has specialised widgets that allow people to recommend your products and services. "Take time to complete your LinkedIn profile for maximum benefit". LinkedIn increases targeted community Like any other social networking platform, LinkedIn also allows its users to follow business houses/firms and start interaction with them. Some people still argue that such features are available on other platforms like Facebook, but when it comes to relevance, nothing can beat LinkedIn users. LinkedIn Supports robust interaction Its "LinkedIn Groups" feature allows you to build a community of professionals. Having a LinkedIn Group itself offers a distinctive advantage, such as fast and reliable content sharing. Better Page Management features Whether you are aware about it or not, LinkedIn has multiple moderation tools, which no other platform offers. LinkedIn Group administrators can see the current status of people, add them, delete them, etc. Tips:

• Always add your photo to establish your social media credibility.
• Add your full name and address to increase the chances of your discoverability.
• Focus on your profile’s headline to attract users.
• Never skip the education, public profile and website section.
• Use its Introduction feature.
• Describe your area of expertise in the "experience section".
• Make sure your "contact setting" is updated and reflects your objectives.

It is a well established fact that LinkedIn has the potential to improve your business’ image as well as overall networking ability.

Creating an e-commerce website is easy; however, getting revenue from it is complex. Business owners create e-commerce websites to achieve success, but often fail to do so due to several reasons. They often struggle to:

• Develop a strong business foundation.
• Promote their website in an organic manner.
• Develop better relationships with users.
• Devise the most agile marketing solutions (both online and offline.)
• Execute specific digital marketing strategies to achieve better results.

Here are a few tips and techniques that can give you competitive edge: Choose the most appropriate domain name and extension You need to choose the most suitable domain name so that people can easily recognise your company. In fact, choose the .com extension because it is easy to memorise. (52% of all websites are .com sites.) Use Facebook Facebook is useful for making relevant business connections  and improving business. Add "shop section" to your Facebook fan page to increase sales and brand’s popularity. Fortunately, it is free and easy-to-add. (https://www.facebook.com/business/help/846547442125798) Post everyday If you want to engage the maximum number of people, you need to show your presence. So, share posts daily at every possible social sharing website. This will increase your reach, extend your network and improve your product’s and brand’s popularity. Tips:

• Integrate social media icons on your e-commerce website for optimum yields.
• Integrate Instagram on your site - https://help.instagram.com/513918941996087
• Never forget to you use hashtags on Instagram and Twitter posts.
• Always post at the right time for maximum exposure.
• If possible, use social media tools – Buffer, Hootsuite, etc.
• Always add utm tracking codes to your social media post links - https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/

Create videos To engage users, increase conversion rates, create short videos and upload them on your e-commerce websites. Tips:

• Create tutorials, and explained videos to improve the understanding of your users.
• Create a Youtube channel.
• Share your videos on Facebook and other powerful social media sites.

Rely on email marketing Email marketing is the most professional way to establish connection with customers. It is suitable for businesses of almost all sizes. All you need to do is to keep on sending newsletters containing information about  new products and offers to your customers. Tips:

• Keep your email template simple and intuitive.
• If possible, use high email marketing automation tools.

Google Analytics Use Google Analytics to improve the overall performance of your e-commerce website. Use it to study/analyse every minute detail of your website right from customer behaviour to traffic sources Tips:

• Create your analytics code - https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008080?hl=en
• Create goals.
• Analyse dashboard regularly.
• Always focus on mobile traffic.

Keep your website updated Always keep your website updated; remove products that are no longer in stock and remove that page from sitemaps. Provide complete product information. Tips:

• Choose high-quality product images.
• Provide security certificates and method of payment.
• Show delivery and final cost.
• Eliminate unnecessary checkout processes.

Besides that, try to improve the overall functionality (navigation, live chat feature, wish list, search box feature, categorisation of products, etc.) of your e-commerce website.

Business owners hire the best web designers, developers and optimisers; however, only a few websites rank high and achieve success in their paradigm. The reason could be anything right from an outdated design to wrong selection of keywords. Here are a few reasons why websites fail to perform: Outdated web design This is one of the important reasons.  So, design your website according to your industry. A few guidelines to create an effective web design:

• Create simple but beautiful designs.
• Keep navigation simple.
•  Use contrasting colours.
• Make your website responsive.
• Always develop a multi-browser website.
• Keep your website error-free.
• Keep your design consistent throughout the site.

Incomprehensible content Web design is not only about colours, patterns and graphics; it is also about font size, background colour, etc. In other words, content should be readable and scanable. A few guidelines to create effective content format:

• Choose the right font size.
• Stick to contrasting colour combinations.
• Use "sans serif" fonts for the best results.

Outdated plugins Old, heavy plugins and add-ons make a website slow. So, remove such plugins and add-ons, if any,  to make your website fast. (Plugins are tools used to extend the functionality of a platform.) Nothing frustrates user more than a slow load speed.

• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
• 40% abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.

A few guidelines to make your site fast:

• Use HTML5 for all of your videos and animations.
• Install new plugins.

Unclear navigation structure Poor navigation structure forces users to leave a website. Therefore, keep your site’s navigation structure simple, logical and readable. Tips:

• Organise  information.
• Uncover potential spots and remove dead pages.
• Update your sitemap and navigation structure.

Your site lacks personality  As a brand, your website should reflect its image, personality and look like a leader. Your website should improve the overall learning experience as well as knowledge of your users. Tips:

• Remember, your site should support your business objectives.
• It must have business logos, icons, slogans, etc, so that it can support your business.

No Call-to-action According to a study, 80% of small B2B business websites lack a call-to-action. This not only confuses a user, but also lowers the overall conversion rate of a website.  So, always guide users to take action through proper call-to-actions. Tips:

• Use CTAs appropriately across the website.
• Be direct and conversational.

Bonus tips:

• Use intuitive web designs.
• Highlight your company’s uniqueness and strengths.
• Use compelling templates.

By addressing these important issues,  you can easily enhance website’s performance.

Ideally a website should have high conversion rate, high page load speed, and low bounce rate. It should be fully functional and error-free.  The question remains - can it be achieved? Yes, all you need to do is to focus on bounce rate. "Slow website loading speed may impact your search rankings as well as increase bounce rate". According to Google, Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page). Here are a few methods to reduce bounce rate of a website: Create specific landing pages Reduce the bounce rate by offering the most suitable answer to user’s query.  Write specific and relevant content. This will improve your site’s overall traffic. For example, if a visitor is looking for information on aviation engineering in Boston and your landing is all about aviation engineering, user may bounce. Tips:

• Provide specific set of information with relevant examples.
• Provide digestible and scanable content.
• Keep your site’s navigation as easy as possible.
• Use keywords wisely.
• Provide sufficient images and videos for better explanation.
• Keep the website theme the same across your website.
• Use suitable call-to-action where ever possible.

"47% of websites have a clear call-to-action button that takes users 3 seconds or less to see". Focus on formatting Format your content properly to improve users’ experience. Poorly written content full of mistakes and errors may deter users. In fact, you need to focus on:

• white spaces
• utilisation of sidebars
• bullets and numbers
• poor navigation
• internal links
• headings and sub-headings
• poor website design
• clutter
• font size and images
• background colour, etc.

Tips:

• Use bullet points and keep your content well formatted.
• Use easy-to-load audio and video content.
• Include links on sidebars.
• Use A/B split testing.
• Use "visual website optimizer" to test different versions of your landing pages.

Never annoy users Most people use pop-ups, banner ads, blinking text, bold content across the site, which irritate users and eventually force them to leave.  So, focus on improving their experience rather getting them out. "70% of users said they found irrelevant pop-ups to be annoying". Tips:

• Never use banner ads.
• Keep fewer pop-ups .

Create compelling stories Most marketers achieve success because they have the ability to create better and emotional stories around their products and services. If you want to grab the eyeballs, create engaging stories. Tips:

• Understand your targeted audiences.
• Keep your stories fresh and original.
• Write great blog posts. (According to HubSpot, businesses that update their blogs with fresh content regularly generates 126% more leads.)
• 90% of content marketers say that custom content has a positive impact on audience attitudes and reduces bounce rate.

So, use these methods to reduce bounce rate of your website.

It is necessary to maintain consistent search engine marketing efforts to meet the demands of customers as well as challenges of online business. Read this article to know how to use various productive SEO tools. seoClarity This is an amazing tool that allows people to customise SEO dashboard for various uses. Use it for SEO audit. Linkdex As the name suggests, it is a link-building tool. This tool has the ability to influence data-driven SEO, content marketing and outreach strategies, etc. Use it to explore new opportunities, monitor competitor’s strategies, and benchmark performance. BrightEdge This is an outstanding tool that helps to improve content marketing efforts. It provides a metrics to measure your content’s overall performance on the web. This tool also provides a complete competitive analysis, insights and perspectives on inbound links. In addition to that, it helps you to have a wider perspective on your digital marketing strategy. Facts:

• BrightEdge’s Data Cube provides marketers with an understanding of billions of pieces of content and consumer intent.
• BrightEdge’s Content Optimizer empowers content authors to customise recommendations that drive optimum content performance.

Conductor Searchlight This platform helps you to create great content, increase conversions, and get organic marketing ROI. It helps you to analyse, the most popular content on the web. This tool also helps you to identify easy changes that may improve page rankings. Businesses use it because it predicts traffic, leads, and revenues. Use it to prioritise your tasks according to your business objectives. Semrush SEMrush is an intuitive and powerful competitive intelligence suite for online marketing. It includes everything from SEO and PPC to social media and video advertising research. Use it to perform technical audit, track rankings, obtain ideas, as well as extract detailed backlinks reports. Screaming Frog Its SEO Spider is a powerful and specialised website crawler that allows you to crawl websites’ URLs and perform onsite SEO analysis. Use this tool to find and fix broken links, find temporary and permanent redirects, as well as discover duplicate content. This tool also helps you to analyse page titles and meta descriptions, generate XML sitemaps, and integrate Google analytics. Ahrefs Ahrefs is a comprehensive toolset for SEO and marketing. You can improve your backlink research process, organic traffic analysis, keyword research, content marketing and much more with the help of its premium features. (Use this incredible tool to increase the visibility of your website.) (Over 600,000 users all across the world have used Ahrefs to improve their optimisation efforts.) So, use these SEO tools to ensure online success.

Joomla is a powerful, flexible, and open-source content management system (CMS) with various features and designs. Most of the developers choose it due to its powerful social extensions. "Joomla has more than 7000 extensions". Here are a few powerful social extensions: Fast Social Share This is an effective social sharing plugin designed to display social share buttons, like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. The best part is that it never affects your site’s speed and overall performance. Fast Social Share also helps to embed buttons automatically. "Joomla.org has more than 2 TB of traffic per month". Social Stream extension This is a great solution to blend all of your social interactions into a single network stream. It supports many social channels and makes you  identify social activities from a single view point. It is time saving, flexible, and automatically updates itself. "Joomla uses object-oriented-programming (OOP) methodology". EasySocial extension This extension allows you to start your own social network on Joomla. It is fast and helps you to engage and interact with your audiences. "Joomla is easy to use and install. You do not have to be an expert to set up Joomla". CoalaWeb This extension is designed to help website visitors to share content and follow website through a variety of social networks. It has many configuration options and subscription rates are quite low. "According to Alexa Traffic Rankings, 7% of total successful websites run on Joomla". Ampz Social Share buttons This extension displays social sharing buttons on multiple positions on the website including WhatsApp. It is fast as well as compatible with all Joomla plugin/components. "Joomla is best for creating e-commerce websites". JUX Facebook Events This Joomla module combines all Facebook events on your fan page. You can manage all events without scrolling Facebook history, which saves your time and efforts. JUX Facebook Events is easy to customise with impressive control and back-end feature. Joomla Social Tabs This robust extension combines 16 social network profiles. It helps you to get real-time updates from different social network without hassles. Vote button This is a popular plugin that shows social share or vote button. It contains almost all popular social networks or bookmark sites that support button/badge for vote. All the above extensions are worth using. Use them to improve your website’s overall presence.