There are some important decisions that have to be made about the business before commencing the business and its digital transformation journey.

It starts with selecting the right name for your business. Your business should be related to your industry or the service you are offering and should have a domain name as such. This helps when you are doing SEO and allows the business to rank up easier. Businesses like Pizza Hut, Burger King rank easily because of their names.

The next thing you need is an online presence, a website. You must decide on what platform you would like your website to be built. There are plenty of options out there, there is WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix etc. My personal favorite is WordPress because it is an open source CMS platform and is also SEO friendly. It is also free which is great for small businesses to minimize the cost of delivering the end result. You also get access to WordPress Repository which is a great way to get plugins like redirecting and meta description on to a website and these plugins help when doing SEO. It is honestly a large pool of plugins that can be made use of with WordPress.

Now, there are two ways you can build a website design, one is using custom techniques that allows you to be a little more creative and make a website that looks just like your brand theme and the second is to use a template and play around with it to create a website. The good part about custom build and this is also a reason why I prefer custom build is that it gives you the freedom to do anything you want with your design. You have the liberty to make your navigation bar look in a specific way or put a CTA button where you like. You can add animations wherever you need and not have them where you don’t need them. And my favourite is forms, you can add forms, as many as you want, wherever you want, on your website. Forms increase your chances of getting a valuable lead and thus increases your chance of getting conversions as well. The bad part about a custom build in my opinion would be that it takes a lot of time to construct it. It’s just like building a house, you need to dig a hole in the ground, lay the foundation, and then build over it. And when you’re building it, you need to consider the size of the doors and windows and other little details. This is exactly what a custom build is like to work on. The good part about a theme build is that it’s simple, it’s already optimized for all devices including mobile phones, it is attractive, and it is extremely quick to build. It’s like a kit house! The downside is that it does not allow you with a lot of customization. It is what it is and changes are very limited. It can work for some businesses but the best option in my opinion would be a custom build for most businesses. It simply takes your vision and makes it a reality.

Once your website design is ready, now it’s time for the “king’ to enter the castle – Content. You have got to take time, think it through and make sure your content is relevant to your service being offered. And also make sure that your content is written in a way that it helps you rank on search engines when doing SEO. You need good content on your website, you need a lot of content on your website, you need keyword focused content on your website, and you need to make sure that your content is relevant to the service offered. Not just on your website but you need to be good with content when making social media posts and writing meta descriptions. Content indeed is king.

Generate some income, let the business make some money and invest into your business. It’s time for the Hero to enter, Search Engine Optimization. Investing in SEO is like increasing the value of your asset, by bringing it to the first page of Google. The sheer volume of clicks you get is overwhelming at times. I know it takes a lot of time for this to come into effect but believe me, once the magic begins to happen and the keyword gains pace, it is pure joy. While your business is picking its pace in SEO, you can have google ads running to give your business a little boost. SEO as you know, is an ongoing process. Constant attention is required, making on and of site changes. It’s a marathon, not a 100 metre sprint. Small businesses often hesitate to invest in marketing but they should be aware that these are the best methods of growing your business and gaining customers.