For an aspiring entrepreneur growing their first online business, building and managing a digital presence can seem like an insurmountable task. While there are many elements to a thriving online presence, building an amazing website should definitely be your top priority.
After all, your website is your storefront in the online world, and one of your brand’s biggest selling points. Running a well-optimized, SEO–friendly website is the key to long-term success, but you can’t do it all on your own.
Instead, you need to employ a set of handy tools that will help you manage your new website with ease. Now, there are many tools out there that specialize in a variety of web management processes. These range from data collection and report creation, all the way to technical website management, social media, and more.
Whether you’re building your first-time website or if you’re an experienced leader, you need numerous tools to reach your goals. The key is to group different tools into categories, and choose the ones that suit your needs.
So today, we’ll be taking a look at the five types of tools that you need in your arsenal. We’ll also be delving deeper into specific tools and their advantages to help you make the best choice. This will save you time and money, and allow you to manage your website like a pro. Let’s dive in!
1. Monitoring KPIs and collecting data
In the modern online world, every decision you make should be founded on relevant and actionable data. Sure, you could trust your gut feeling and go with your instincts, but chances are that you are going to make a mistake sooner or later.
That is why you need to monitor relevant website KPIs and use that data to support your decision-making process. If you don’t, you might never know where your visitors are dropping off or what part of the shopping journey you need to improve.
This is a risk that innovative reporting tools aim to eliminate so that you can build a successful online presence. Take Reportz as a clear example of an innovative and comprehensive data tool.
Source: reportz.io
Reportz is a platform that aims to simplify the reporting process by collating all data into a single comprehensive dashboard. This way, you can track all metrics and KPIs easily, and create actionable reports in a matter of minutes.
But Reportz is not the only handy tool at your disposal. You can always rely on good old Google Analytics to collect and collate important website data. Google Analytics is a basic tool that all business leaders should use, but it can be complicated and cluttered.
If Google’s tool is too cluttered for you, Matomo is a popular alternative with additional features and filters to really focus on a specific website issue.
2. Ranking your website higher in the SERPs
Monitoring relevant website KPIs also means monitoring SEO metrics. Once you obtain the right metrics with one of the aforementioned tools, you can start improving your SEO efforts. Now, SEO is a long-term commitment and it requires continuous investing and tweaking, which makes it difficult to manage manually.
So, you need a good SEO tool.
By far, one of the best and most popular SEO tools in the world is SEMrush. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that small businesses and global enterprises use SEMrush to elevate their standing in the SERPs.
You can use SEMrush to find relevant keywords for your site and content, and make every word you write as SEO-friendly as possible.
To execute a winning SEO strategy, you also need backlinks to your site from various touchpoints around the web. Monitoring backlinks is easy with a tool like Ahrefs that tells you how every link is affecting your standing.
Source: ahrefs.com
It also allows you to monitor and fix broken links, or turn them off if the website is on Google’s blacklist. You can combine Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to take your website SEO to the next level.
3. Building and managing a performance-driven website
If you’re building a website from scratch, you need to find the most cost-effective website builders on the online market. Now, there are many tools to choose from, so look for honest online comparisons and reviews to set the good ones apart from the rest. The builder you choose needs to be easy to use and intuitive, with plenty of supporting features to make web editing a breeze.
Most of the tools out there follow a fermium business model, of course, and it would be a good idea to pay for the full version. This will grant you access to additional features that you can use to create a competitive website.
Among the top-performing site builders you will find Wix, of course, but also Squarespace, WordPress, and Shopify for e-commerce applications. Be sure to analyze the features of every tool, check out honest reviews, and give different builders a test run.
4. Managing your online reputation with ease
Reputation management is the name of the game in the modern online world. If you take into account that 91% of consumers between the ages of 18 to 34 are big believers of online reviews, you can guess just how important reputation management truly is.
In fact, many people actually trust online reviews as much as recommendations from family and friends.
Source: brightlocal.com
This means that you need to manage all 1st and 3rd party reviews carefully, among other things. It also means that you need to control the narrative on social media and other platforms. Among the tools you need at your disposal for comprehensive reputation management, be sure to integrate:
- Mention – to get notified when someone mentions your brand.
- Get Five Stars – to get numerous tools that incentivize visitors to leave reviews and scores.
- Buffer – to plan, organize, prep, and schedule social media posts and interactions.
- SendInBlue – to make effective and streamlined email campaigns without technical knowledge.
- Dibz – to find and engage with the best influencers for your brand and website.
- Hootsuite – to manage social media and online reviews with ease.
5. Running a seamless e-commerce operation
Finally, in order to run a successful e-commerce site, you need to have a tool for every department. For example, multi-channel brands need a comprehensive inventory management tool like Zoho or StitchLabs.
If you have chosen WordPress as your website builder, then you will also need the Woo Commerce plugin. This tool will help you manage and boost your sales, payment, shipping, and other crucial as well as menial tasks.
Every online merchant also needs a platform for customer service and support. GrooveHQ is currently leading the pack with its many features and integrated tools. For example, it allows you to keep all customer conversations in one place, it offers a straightforward ticket system, and allows numerous integrations with other popular tools.
Whether you are an experienced business leader or an aspiring entrepreneur, website management can be a difficult challenge. That is, it’s difficult if you’re doing everything manually.
In reality, if you use the right tools, you can manage your online presence as a whole with relative ease. When you’ve accomplished the first step of creating a well-designed and user-friendly website, Boostability can help you with SEO! We’re a leading global white label SEO company with partners located worldwide. With numerous successful SEO campaigns under our belt, we’re confident we can help you grow yours and your client’s website traffic and online presence as well!
Learn more about our white label SEO partner program here and get a better understanding of how we operate behind-the-scenes while you take credit for an incredible product!
