Avinash Kabra is founder of Hi-TechWebMaster, a leading IT firm offering global web services. We recently checked in with him to get his advice on how businesses should create strategies for web design and development that will maximize growth.
Tell us about Hi-TechWebMaster. What’s your approach to web design and development?
Hi-TechWebMaster offers you almost all web-related services under one roof. We deal in website designing, web development, domains and hosting, SEO, Content Writing, and lots more.
Hi-TechWebMaster holds expertise in CMS and about 90 percent of our web portfolio is based on WordPress. We focus on building responsive and cross-browser compatible websites which is in much demand today.
How has web design evolved since you started your business?
We started as a small web development firm in August 2010, and our business is growing every year. We started our journey from building static websites and are now capable of offering full-fledged ecommerce portals or almost anything a client asks for. In the early days, our market used to be city-specific, but now we are serving global customers. In the past six years, we have designed 250-plus websites, handled 60-plus SEO Projects,and hosted 150-plus websites with a 300-plus customer base.
What should businesses be doing with their websites in order to maximize growth?
Usually, businesses invest in getting a good and attractive website, but very few of them take care of proper marketing and promotion. We believe having an awesome website without an audience is useless. People should set aside a budget for SEO, SMO and PPC as well. Before marketing and promotion, they should also ensure that their websites are responsive and functional.
What do you think are the biggest killers of growth from a web design perspective?
When your business starts blooming and your client base increases gradually, you will definitely need more employees. And in today’s market, the toughest job is to find a good, hard-working and skilled employee. And when you don’t find those people, your growth takes a hit.
Secondly, the unemployment conditions in countries like India, China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan have given rise to freelancers who are destroying the industry. Websites that used to cost $1,500 are now being developed by these freelancers for $50. It’s a fact. These freelancers are not only disappointing customers in terms of quality and service, but are also ruining the growth of the entire web development industry.
How important is SEO to the growth and success of an organization today?
Due to increasing competition in every sector, the web is getting crowded each and every day. As such, it becomes very difficult for an organization to have a sound online presence. But, with the help of SEO, they can gain enormous visibility of their business and can make a boom online.
SEO is important also because traditional marketing like email newsletters are getting spammy every day. About 90 percent of people including me, mark email newsletters as SPAM without opening it.
Also, when searching content over search engines, people often just check the top five listings or sometimes the top 10. Hardly any move to the next pages. So, SEO is also important to stay in top SERPs.
How have SEO practices changed in the past five years?
There has been a drastic change in SEO algorithms in past few years. Right from Penguin, Panda, and Humming Bird, the SEO techniques have now been changed completely. But, CONTENT was king, is king and will remain king throughout the journey.
What SEO best practices do you coach your clients on?
Usually our clients hire us for SEO on a monthly basis. We get them ranked most of the time but as you know there is no surety about anything; we sometimes fail to deliver results within stipulated time. Being out of budget for the next month, the client pauses his website’s SEO. But, we tell them to at least keep their website updated with new content from time to time. We suggest they post one article weekly on their blog. This helps to maintain and improve their current positions.
What bad SEO habits should organizations kick?
I can see that still a lot of freelancers and SEO companies are using the old traditional strategy for link building. They are still spamming web link directories and bookmarking sites with automated tools. This can be very dangerous. Never go for paid links or paid articles like guest blogging. Just be natural.
Any final pieces of advice on building knock-out websites that will ensure your business grows?
The first and foremost advice is to build a responsive (device compatible) website. This is because in the world of smartphones, a majority of traffic comes from mobile and hand-held devices. If your website is not responsive, you are going to lose customers.
The second most important thing is to optimize your website to load faster even over slow internet. You can also introduce two versions of websites, like one for high-speed internet and other for low-bandwidth connection. Facebook cares about its customers, therefore they launched Facebook and Facebook Lite. Google values its patrons, therefore they have two versions in Gmail i.e. Standard & Basic HTML. This way you won’t miss any customer from whatever internet connection he is coming from.
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