Raio Creative, Author at Raio Creative

November 10, 2020July 10, 2024

Top 3 Reasons Why You Must Secure an SSL Certificate

SSL Certificate Rundown

You read our last post about the importance of small businesses getting online and getting a well-functioning website. Now no matter who you’ve decided to go with for hosting, hopefully, you’ve enabled it with an SSL certificate. If you haven’t, this is the post for you.

What’s an SSL Cert? Well, simply put, it’s a bit of code embedded into your web server that allows for secure communications. When a visitor hits your website, it connects with their web browser and enables an encrypted connection. As you might have guessed, this is much more favorable for everyone involved than an unencrypted connection. Here, we’re going to keep it short and go over what we feel are the top three reasons these are so important without going too far down the rabbit hole.

Security & Identity

Ok, we cheated a little… That’s two things. But they do go hand in hand with one another. As a business owner with a website, it’s crucial you keep your site secure. Once an SSL is activated, every bit of information on your site will be encrypted, which ensures that some nasty hackers cannot come along and steal or access any of the information. This is because the SSL creates unique encryption for the data that can only be unlocked by a specific recipient.

We say identity because anytime someone is activating an SSL, they must go through a validation process by a third-party Certificate Authority (CA). In this process, the CA must verify your and your organization’s identities, and once it does, your site is given accreditation. This eliminates what is called phishing, and ensures viewers that they are actually viewing the correct site, exposes fraudulent ones, and thus improves your reputation and identity. There, now you’re showing your viewers its really you, and keeping their info secure at the same time. Which leads us to our next point…

Trust

Do you often work with people you don’t trust? Hand out your credit card numbers, let them watch your kids, give them your house keys? Probably not… But your viewers are going to feel the same way if an indicator saying “connection is not secure” pops up in their web browser before they even hit your landing page. Here is a fun fact: 85% of people avoid sites that are unsecure (GlobalSign). This is the simplest and most obvious reason it’s so essential to get your site fitted with one of those fancy padlocks like you see above in your browsers address bar.

See it?

Pretty cool huh?

You feel safe?

You bet you do.

Viewers who visit your site knowing their information is secure are infinitely more likely to do business with you and visit your site again. Do you plan on accepting payments through your site? You need an SSL cert. Why? Having an SSL cert also is one of the key components of making your site be PCI (payment card industry) compliant. And if you plan to accept payments through your site, this is quite literally a must.

SEO

Good old SEO. If the above reasons aren’t enough, this one’s the kicker. In 2014 Google updated its algorithms to directly favor sites utilizing HTTPS and SSL certificates. And in 2018, they set a requirement for sites to have these, flagging any site that doesn’t, and throwing a warning message to any viewer attempting access. Now thats gonna hurt if you’re missing one… If you’d like to read more about what google has to say about making your site more secure and favorable, we’d recommend this page here.

SSL Certificate Conclusion

So if you haven’t already, get your site set with HTTPS and SSL. They’re honestly very affordable, and will pay for themselves in no time. Many hosting providers will even include them in their services. As a matter of fact, we even do that here at Raio. With SSL and HTTPS included for anyone who signs up to be hosted on our web servers. If you’d like to learn more about that, as always, give us a shout.

September 16, 2020July 10, 2024

Why Small Business Websites are More Important.

Let set some facts straight

56% of people say they don’t really trust in a business that doesn’t have a website. (The Bauen Group). And with over 2 billion people buying things online, that means there’s over a 1 billion people who don’t trust you because either your website looks and performs like trash, or worse, don’t have one at all.

Thats a lot of people

That’s more people than everyone in the United States and China put together actually…

So why is it that 46% of small businesses still don’t have a website even though 92% of them feel having one is the best digital marketing strategy? (Clutch).

Honestly, we have no idea… But what we do know is that you don’t want to be one of those businesses. You don’t want to just have a Facebook page. You want a website. Not a sloppy one either, but one looks and performs awesome for your audience. Because when your website performs well and makes people smile, they’ll be happy to work with you.

If you’re really good, maybe they’ll even tell their friends about you. Or better yet, leave you an awesome review on your google account. Because reviews matter too… If you didn’t already know, 55% of people research reviews before making purchases… And surprise! Nearly that same amount will also check out (and judge) a companies website while looking at those reviews (KPMG). But how much do they judge you based on your website you ask? 75% of people admit to judging the credibility of your business based on your websites appearance alone. (Kinesis).

Meanwhile, you might be sitting over here with no website and no reviews… Is the 46% of businesses from earlier convinced yet? We hope so.

Small businesses: Facebook pages are not enough

And we hope we’ve convinced you of that by now… Because you know what else you get when you have a legitimate website?

A domain.

A domain that you can call your own.

Why is that good? Well besides having a nice “.com” or “.io” extension at the end of your domain name, it will make you look far more professional and credible to everyone who see’s your site. It improves your SEO standing and allows you to migrate in the future if you need to as well.

Simply put, It makes you legit.

Plus, besides making you feel too cool for school right off the bat, you’ll feel even cooler when you get some professional-looking emails with your company name for the email domain… And for that, your customers will think you’re pretty cool too.

In the Raio blog, we’ve talked about email and hosting domains before in this post: “Get the most out of your email and hosting domains“. But be sure to check back, as we’ll likely visit this subject again in the future, because there’s nearly always more to talk about.

So… Are you a small business and still need a website?

If you’re a small business who’s been thinking of getting a website, or even a seasoned vet who just needs to update that old website you can’t even remember when you got, give Raio a shout… We’re happy to help you get a slick and modern website that will blow any Facebook page out of the water and make all your business friends jealous of all that new business you’ll be getting

August 26, 2020July 10, 2024

Why your Bounce Rate needs to be better

As a disclaimer, if you don’t already have Google Analytics enabled, do so now. It’s free and is amazingly helpful when you need to measure and improve different aspects of your business and website like bounce rate. Got it installed? Continue on!

What is Bounce Rate?

A “bounce” is defined as a single-page session on your site. It happens when a single request to the analytics server is made, but the user exits the site before making any further requests. Your “bounce rate” is determined by the total number of “bounces” divided by the total number of sessions on your site. Simply put, it’s the percentage of instances people don’t explore your site and everything it has to offer… Sounds kind of lame huh?

This is generally something you want to minimize provided your site is more than one page. Which in that case, a high bounce rate would be expected and be completely normal. However, for most of us, that’s not usually the case.

Why Should I Care?

The bounce rate is a way to guage user participation on your site. When somebody “bounces” off of your site, the session duration will be equal to zero. This is because the server had no way of calculating the time the user was on the site because it received no further requests from the user (learn more about how Google calculates session duration here). As this analytics tool, it also helps diagnose user interaction. It’s your way of seeing if users are finding what they need on your site.

Well then, how do I lower my Bounce Rate?

There are also different reports and different ways to perceive your bounce rate as well. Such as; which channels, which source/medium pairs, or which pages specifically, are causing your bounce rate. If you see any of these as the cause, then you may need to review your content and marketing efforts to make sure they align or ensure that your users are having an easy time seeing where you want them to go next on your site.

Then, of course, there is your overall site bounce rate. If there’s no clear issue and the problem is more widespread, you’ll need to re-evaluate your site entirely. Make sure the language you use, the colors, media, calls to action, everything is all readily available, functional, visible, and easy to use.

So go, check your analytics, clean up those loose ends, and get users clicking everything in sight! If you want to learn more about Google Analytics, check out this blog post on our site about GA as well as Pop up Blockers:

Important Market Resources: Google Analytics & Pop-Up Blockers

Need More help?

If you would really just prefer to hand off getting a lower bounce rate to the pros, give us a shout here at Raio and we can help get you on the way to having users that never want to leave your page!

August 17, 2020July 10, 2024

Get the most out of your email & hosting domains

Email Domain & Reputation:

Raio always highly recommends using Google or Office360 due to the complexity of spam filtering, encryption, and domain reputation. It is becoming more and more common for domain spoofing, and using a few “free” email addresses allows for that to happen much easier. In addition, using services like microsoft/360 or Google’s G Suite automatically injects a higher level of reputation into your domain. This helps immensely with SEO, spam filtering, etc. As a startup, where you will be sending emails to new people, this is extremely important, and is something that you should not spare the expense on. Simply put: you get what you pay for with email. And in all honesty, this is the primary reason Raio Creative does not do email hosting.

Email Integrations:

Using a mail service like Google and Microsoft is going to give you a lot more flexibility with digital marketing, SEO, emailing, etc. These companies are already so vast that they already have all of the best integrations. Tools like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and others will be very important for your success of your business.

Need Hosting? Raio Can Help

Raio Creative provides a price match (or even better if it helps) hosting service for our clients. To accomplish this, we utilize our own infrastructure that’s already built into the sites we create, as well as Amazon Web Services (or AWS ). There’s also no need to worry about reliability, as we do auto-back ups regularly and everything we make is totally transferable. In addition, we’re able to manage all the DNS email domain stuff for you; all you have to do is sign up and pay for the Google or Microsoft service and provide us with the information when it asks to set up the domain.

Thats it. Easy peasy.

August 10, 2020July 10, 2024

Important market resources: Google Analytics & Pop-Up Blockers

As part of any digital marketing strategy, knowing who visits your site, from where, and when is always a useful piece of information to have. That’s where knowing your most important market resources comes in. Google Analytics provides a great and free service that can be integrated to achieve this (see https://analytics.google.com/). Once an account is setup, just go to:

Admin > Property > Tracking Info > Tracking Code

From this page you should see a Tracking ID in the form of UA-123456789-1 as well as a small code snippet that can be placed inside the <head></head> section of each HTML file of your website. Note, however, that some pop-up blockers will block requests to the google analytics cloud services (e.g. www.google-analytics.com). Therefore, this could be a source of confusion as to why Send test traffic is not working. So, when configuring and testing an initial GA integration, be sure to shut off pop-up blockers such uBlock Origin.

Google Analytics is just one of the simplest tools we use at Raio Creative to provide effective digital marketing. From Google Analytics, we can better pick out tag-words, trends, and demographic targeting for your ad campaigns, email marketing strategies, and social media posts!

Most of these tools are easy to set up and use on your own – and you can save a lot of money if you do. But, it is time consuming and tedious. That’s where Raio Creative comes in – we manage all that for you and more affordable prices than the typical digital marketing agency (and we don’t hide the toolsets we use like they are magic or something!).

Keep checking back with us at https://raiocreative.com/blog/ for more helpful tips on maximizing your business!

Author: Raio Creative