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Cybersecurity remains a constant threat to businesses, but the COVID-19 pandemic has shed new light on cyber threats. As companies were forced to modify their operations swiftly in response to the coronavirus outbreak, hackers found new opportunities to gain access to in-house systems and servers. As a result, a significant number of businesses have been the victims of cyberattacks in recent months and many may still be unaware that they’ve been affected. 

As threats evolve and emerge, it’s vital that businesses implement new security protocols to combat them. This means staying up to date with the latest cyber threats and accessing advanced security measures to keep your data and systems secure. To get a head-start, take a look at these top tips to pandemic-proof your business’ cybersecurity now:

1. Identify Cloud Vulnerabilities

In response to the global pandemic, millions of businesses introduced remote working arrangements. To achieve this, a significant number of firms made hasty transitions to the cloud, often accelerating their planned transition phase to respond to environmental demands. Although cloud computing offers many business advantages, it’s vital that business owners recognize the vulnerabilities that are present. 

Providing effective security protocols are enacted, the cloud can be a secure place to host platforms and store data. However, businesses will need to decide which security measures are right for them and ensure that they’re introduced companywide. 

2. Offer Secure Digital Services

Increasing demand for online services and digital customer care is forcing businesses to consider new initiatives and experiences. Omnichannel customer service is increasingly popular as users expect a seamless, cross-device, and cross-platform experience, for example. 

Businesses will need to increase their range of digital services in order to meet the demands of their target audience, but they’ll need to do with cybersecurity in mind. By providing IT staff with training opportunities, such as the ITIL certification, or working with third-party, specialist IT service providers, companies can ensure that they’ve got the expertise required to develop effective cybersecurity strategies. In addition to this, companies will be able to implement new digital services in a way that complements their existing online presence. 

3. Educate Your Staff

Human error remains a major issue in relation to cybersecurity breaches and the increasing use of social engineering means that many firms remain vulnerable due to a lack of awareness amongst staff. Your employees are a critical line of defense when it comes to protecting your organization from cybersecurity threats, so don’t overlook the role they play. 

By educating staff about the different threats they’ll encounter and teaching them how to spot the signs of an imminent attack, you can ensure that they’re able to respond appropriately when a cyberattack looms. As a result, you can safeguard your systems and your data and mitigate an attack before it takes place.

Making Cybersecurity a Top Priority

Cybersecurity should always be a critical issue for businesses across all sectors. As we continue to adjust to a ‘new normal’ in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s vital that companies make cybersecurity a top priority. 

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Running an online business is difficult at the best of times; but during a global pandemic we have to up the ante when it comes to our digital presence and capabilities. From setting up your office at home to employing people remotely – there are many elements to consider and ways to make your business succeed during these times. 

Today we want to talk about some of the ways you can improve your online security this year even at home and ensure that your online business prevails. 

Install dedicated servers 

The first thing to consider when running a business at home and remotely is to have dedicated servers for your operations. Servers can be overloaded very easily with a lot of activity and when you have people accessing it from many different locations it can be difficult for it to cope. Install dedicated servers for your business and also ensure that your servers are protected and private to those in your business. Protect your assets and data and keep everything in one secure place. 

Choose better passwords 

One of the most important things you need to do as a small business owner is force your workers to choose strong passwords. There should be no names, birthdays, pet names or anything that can be easily guessed by hackers. Use a service such as LastPass to generate random passwords with lots of letters and numbers as well as special characters and make sure everyone has their own LastPass account where their details are stored securely. You can allow access to certain people in the business and ensure that only those who need passwords will have access to them. 

Choose authority levels 

As well as having authority levels with passwords for accounts, you can also have levels of access for documents and files such as accounting or employee details. These can be password protected and accessed only by those who NEED access. This is an essential thing to do because if you allow access to all company files for everyone who works for you, people could use this as a way to get to their coworkers and it can cause some serious problems. 

Reduce application usage 

Applications such as email, account management, CMS, CRM, photo editing and more are great for business. However, when opening yourself up to hackers these can all be dangerous as they put your information in places where they can be accessed. For example if Adobe was hacked and account details were stolen; your bank details could be taken and used. It is important to only sign up to applications you need, and once you finish using one – delete your account and details. 

Keep everything locked 

It is important to always lock your computer when you walk away from your desk. This is a practice that can be done in the office as well as at home to avoid people getting access to information they shouldn’t. 

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Online retail has been going from strength to strength for many years now, while, unfortunately, bricks and mortar stores are finding business increasingly challenging. The COVID-19 pandemic has seen internet sales skyrocket as shoppers have turned to e-commerce to purchase goods while the stores were closed. It is plain to see why online shopping continues to grow in popularity when you can pick from millions of products worldwide and have them delivered directly to your door.

Now is the time for e-commerce stores to enjoy a boost in success. Hopefully, you will be experiencing an increased demand for your products and an uptick in sales on your website. If this isn’t the case, and your conversion rates are not as healthy as you would like, why not try to implement some changes to capitalize on the increased demand for online shopping?

Website Health Check

Before you start to introduce changes, it is helpful to assess where you stand right now. To ensure that your website changes provide you with a healthy return on your investment, you need to know the breakdown of vital stats such as the number of page visits your site receives and, of course, the conversion rate. Once you know this information, you will be able to figure out the areas that need the most improvement.

SEO

Before you even begin to think about conversion rates, you need to attract a healthy number of visitors to your website. Effective SEO is the tool that will help to increase your web presence by boosting your search engine rankings and getting your business seen by your potential customers. SEO requires specialist knowledge to achieve results, so hiring an SEO expert such as PK Seo is a wise idea to ensure that your business gets noticed and for its rankings to be improved.

Product Descriptions

While shopping online is super convenient and offers an excellent range of products, there is one distinct disadvantage. When you shop online, you cannot physically hold the products and examine them in person. To overcome this issue, you will need to ensure that your product descriptions and product imagery are as straightforward as possible and contain all the relevant specifications. Having a comprehensive product description and high-quality photos can play a crucial role in helping to convert customers.

Detailed Delivery Information

Providing clear, but detailed delivery information is needed to make it as simple as possible for customers to buy from you. Having delivery and returns information readily available on your website provides potential customers with the reassurance that they can buy with confidence from your store with no nasty surprises such as expensive delivery charges.

Chat Bots

Chat bots are becoming increasingly popular and can offer a highly effective method of increasing conversion. A chat bot can help to reduce the number of abandoned baskets your company has by providing website visitors assistance before they navigate away from your site. This can help to increase sales and give your conversion rates a healthy boost.

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The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc with most businesses. The pandemic has posed countless challenges and it can feel exhausting trying to overcome each one as it’s presented to you. Now, running a business has never been easy. But right now, it can feel like you’re constantly treading water to stay afloat. The main two problems that most businesses are facing is that people either don’t have the money to spend with their brand (through job loss, reduced working hours or reduced salaries) or simply don’t want to spend money on any non essential goods (as people want to save in case they lose their jobs, face reduced hours or have to agree to reduced salaries). Right now, you may not be able to generate significant sales and profit, no matter how hard you market your brand. But this doesn’t mean that you simply put your business on hold for the foreseeable future. Instead, you’re going to have to maintain customer interest and customer relationships so that people will be the first in line to buy from you when they do experience better financial times. Brand awareness and brand engagement are going to prove key to your business’ success over the upcoming months. Here are a few steps you can take to keep your company in the back of people’s minds until the time is right!

Entice Sales

Of course, you may need to generate some sales in order to create sufficient profit to keep afloat. To achieve this, you’re really going to have to entice consumers. This may include doing things that you wouldn’t usually. Significant sales tend to be the best way to get even reluctant people to part with their cash. Sure, this means you won’t make as much on your merchandise as usual. But it means you will generate something. Just make sure there’s still a sufficient profit margin to make it worth it!

Continue Sending Marketing Emails

You need to continue sending engaging content in your marketing emails. Marketing mails are literally designed to keep your brand in the back of consumers’ minds and are often successful at this. Rather than sales based mails, really focus on pure useful content. This will prevent people from being scared away by the concept of having to buy something and will encourage them to simply engage with your brand and see it in a positive light. Emails can be encouraging and direct people to your site’s blog. This way, you get people onto your site where they can then go on to browse other areas, but will feel like they’re doing so of their own accord, rather than being pushed straight to product pages.

Engage on Your Website

Have fun elements on your website that will keep people on your website. A Virtual photo booth is a good idea. People love taking pictures of themselves and editing them. The photobooth allows them to do this and can encourage them to share the pictures they take (with your branded logo added) with others, then encouraging others to visit your site too. Getting people engaging with your site makes it more likely that they will then take a look around your products and potentially make purchases. At the very least, it gets people to create positive associations with your brand, making them more likely to purchase with you in the future.

Maintain an Engaging Blog

As we’ve briefly highlighted earlier, you may want to direct people to your website’s blog. Blogs are extremely important nowadays. Not only can they help your site with SEO optimisation, but they can deliver genuinely useful content to your potential customers too! Make sure to fill your blog with regular, useful content. People may become regular readers, which will make visiting your page a part of their regular routine. They’ll enjoy your content, creating positive connections between your business and them in their mind. It also encourages them to browse your goods regularly. This can boost sales and see you generate more profits!

Of course, there are countless other things you can do to drive brand awareness and brand engagement. But hopefully, the above digital options can easily be carried out during these unprecedented times and can help to keep your brand in the back of customers’ minds when they’re unlikely to buy. This is all so important to keep in mind as we advance towards a recession – people having positive associations with your brand could really help your company to survive the upcoming months!

If you have a start-up, you probably have a website. If you have a website in 2020, it needs to be optimized for search engines to achieve success. Google and Bing’s algorithms now make it very hard for a completely new site to rank among competitors on the search engine results page (SERP) without first being perceived by them as trusted. This is even harder if your website impacts viewers’ money or life, such as if you’re selling a product or service. So, if you’re a start-up with a website, here is what you need to know about SEO.

Google’s Starter Guide

Google has an SEO guide for websites that need Google Search to survive (i.e., any website that doesn’t specifically reject Google). This guide clearly states that the best way for a website to be featured on their SERP is by clearly benefiting their users. They outline that any SEO you undertake should be with the philosophy of making the user experience better.

The first thing they ask you to check is whether your site is already showing on Google after its launch. At this point, you should double-check that you have a robots.txt page, as if you have just launched, it can help Google’s (and other search engines’) ‘robots’ crawl through the internet and add your page to their directory.

They specify that your website needs to be secure, serve high-quality content to users, and have content optimized to be fast and easy to access on all devices. The 4^th paragraph of Google’s guide is effectively a heads-up. It asks you if you need an SEO expert and tells you that doing so can save time and implies that the complex nature of SEO means there is a lot for a newcomer to cover. They recommend that you start off by getting an expert to audit your site, something that leading SEO companies typically include in a package. For example, Click Intelligence offers site auditing available in a custom package alongside content generation, pay per click strategy, PR outreach, and a lot more.

Google’s guide then proceeds to cover a lot of technical information, which can be overwhelming for those new to SEO, but is recommended for anybody looking to get a comprehensive understanding of the processes involved. However, they jump straight into the technicalities of SEO without outlining the importance of something else first. That something else is demographics work.

Proper Demographics Work

If you are significantly down the road of your start-up launch, you have probably conducted demographics analysis of your target market. If not, please understand that this is a vital component in selling products and services to both businesses and direct to consumers. When you start your SEO strategy, you will need to refer to the analysis you have conducted, as everything about your brand should be tailored to those to whom you wish to sell.

When you’re planning your SEO, you need to remember that the whole point of the exercise is to think of who you want to be searching for you and attempt to enhance your visibility to them. It can be worth it, at this stage, to conduct analyses of your competitors’ audiences, too. Really flesh this out – who are the users and how do they think, what do they want from a service, how do they search, on which devices do they search, etc. This analysis will help you understand that your audience will not search for your start-up by name almost all the time when you’re starting out. Instead, they will find your start-up by searching for a need they have that needs to be fulfilled. How do you tailor your SEO for them?

Keywords

Keywords are a foundation of SEO strategy. To successfully implement SEO, you need to understand the key terms that searchers are looking for, and tailor your site to include them in such a way that a search engine determines your site as valuable for those searching with your chosen keywords.

There are several free tools that can help you research keywords that you think might be valuable to your SEO. It’s recommended that you explore keywords as much as you can – expand on possible phrases and analyze where these search terms are active (which sites and which locations). Keywords can be short-tail or long-tail. Short-tail keywords are more general and shorter, e.g., “chocolate,” and long-tail keywords are more specific and tend to be longer, e.g., “best chocolate recipes.” Short-tail keywords are much harder to rank highly on the SERP with, so its recommended when you’re brainstorming keywords to choose a few short-tails but at least five long-tails to expand on each short-tail keyword you choose.

If you’re stuck with building your list of keywords, try a simple process with a complicated name: pattern recognition through stems and qualifiers. Take a short-tail keyword and apply different qualifiers to turn it into a long-tail keyword. Examples of these qualifiers are:

1. Relevant adjective – best start-up
2. Location – start-up London
3. Brand – Nike start-up
4. Product spec/feature – Student’s start-up
5. Product Type – SaaS start-up
6. Intended use – Part-time start-up
7. Comparison – Start-up vs corporation
8. Action request – buy start-up

Once you have developed a list of keywords, you can start to think about where you include them on your site. Then, you need to think about your content.

Content Marketing – The King

The importance of content has become a cliché in online marketing and SEO, but it is so for a reason. You need high-quality content that can take the form of a blog page, videos, pictures – anything that your demographics will willingly consume with interest. Content needs to be factual and enticing, and is important in the eyes of Google, as it gives you some authority within your niche. Factual, well-researched posts that are 100% original and inform readers about a specific problem and potential solutions are highly recommended, as they not only position your site as an expert, but can attract backlinks.

When people share your content online in blog posts and other pieces of content, they may choose to link back to your site to demonstrate their point. This establishes your site as helpful for other people, and search engine algorithms observe these backlinks and are more likely to position you higher up on the SERP, as they can see that your site is trustworthy and provides value. Backlinks have to be genuine; they can’t just be hacked by creating a series of blogs and copying and pasting content with the addition of a link to your site. When they work best, backlinks are from high-quality articles themselves. Sites that master content marketing generate 500% more leads, have 434% more pages on the SERP, and 55% more traffic, according to Semrush.

Taking care of your SEO on a regular basis involves a lot of content generation, as your site will need to stay fresh and relevant in order to generate genuine backlinks. That shouldn’t be the only thing you maintain with your SEO efforts, though. The world of SEO is ever-changing and is rife with major revolutions that can see a high-ranking page wiped from the face of the SERP (as was observed in the infamous Google Medic update).

If you feel you have the basics of SEO down, you should regularly audit your site to make sure that everything is working as planned – and stay up to date with SEO news, as any bit of leaked information from Googles’ search engine algorithm department can help to boost your site’s rankings.

Online shopping is on the rise in the Philippines. Out of the 76 million active Internet users in the country, 70 percent are online shoppers. There are plenty of reasons that many Filipinos are choosing to shop online nowadays. It’s convenient, they have more options, and it’s cheaper. With the quarantine restrictions in the country, it’s much safer to have products delivered to your doorstep compared to the traditional way of shopping.

Still, there are a lot of issues with online shopping that have not been addressed. One of which is the fact that not all internationally-based online stores directly ship to the country. However, that shouldn’t stop Filipinos who want to shop in the U.S. and ship to the Philippines. Here are two reasons that they should.

It’s Cheaper (and Safer) than Unauthorized Local Resellers

Local resellers are people who claim to have had international products shipped from abroad and are now selling them locally. You could choose to buy from them as they have the products on-hand and will take less than a few days to ship your product to you. But here’s where you may lose out in terms of money and safety.

If the product is genuine, then the price of the product should be higher than the price it’s listed online. Sellers sell to make a profit, so they’re not going to sell it at the same rate it’s listed. They’ll be raising the cost to cover the expenses of shipping, customers, and the others they’ve incurred to start their selling business. Then, they’ll add a mark-up for their profit.

If you find a seller willing to sell it below or at the online price, that is when you should be wary about the product’s authenticity. Fraudulent sellers can make you believe you’re buying an international product when you’re actually purchasing a dupe. In 2019, over 3.90 billion pesos worth of fake goods were seized by the Bureau of Customs. For example, if you know that Kylie Cosmetics’ Koko K Lipstick Kit is sold at $26, don’t believe local sellers offering the same kit for 100 pesos.

In short, if you don’t want the added costs and the lack of assurance of buying from unauthorized local resellers, you’re better off buying directly from the online store.

Not Everything Is Available Locally

The Philippine market is very limited to what’s popular or what entrepreneurs believe will sell to a huge niche. As a result, some of the things you like may not be available for sale locally, so you either have to settle for what’s available.

Of course, shipping internationally is not always easy. If you’ve ever tried buying a product from Amazon or any other U.S.-based store, you might see notices that say they don’t ship to the Philippines. That can easily be remedied with shipping services that serve as “your” U.S. address and ship your products directly to you without the added taxes and miscellaneous fees other shipping methods provide.

Shopping directly from international online stores gives you peace of mind knowing you’re buying the genuine product and having it shipped safely directly to your home. That may not be possible with all online stores, but luckily many shipping services can help you receive and deliver U.S.-based deliveries and ship it to your home in the Philippines.

If you run a business and you want it to be successful, you have to make sure that you are going to have a website to back it up. A website is actually essential in ensuring that you are keeping the public face of the business how you want it to be, and yet it can be challenging to ensure that you are doing this right if you have never had to look into it before. In particular, your website provides a fantastic opportunity and challenge for branding your business, something which is always important but especially so at this current time. If you are wondering how to keep your business alive at the moment, you are going to find that getting the online branding right is hugely important.

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Let’s take a look at how you can get your website just right so that it is really serving your branding mission as best as possible, and so you can keep running your business as successfully as possible online.

Get The Branding Right First

Before you do anything to the website, you have to make sure that you are actually in a position where you are happy with your branding, and that is something that takes a great deal of time in itself. If you are not happy with the branding, it doesn’t matter what your website is like – it’s just not going to work when you apply it to the website. At the moment, we have a unique challenge to try and brand our businesses in the face of the current pandemic, and it is something that you will probably be spending a lot of your time on. What are the values that you want people to associate with your brand? How are you going to get that across in a simple piece of branding? These are the things you need to think about upfront.

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Image-Led Website Branding

It’s important to remember what a visual medium a website is. Even though you can introduce other elements, it is always going to be primarily visual, and you need to therefore ensure that you are drawing people in visually first and foremost. If you fail to do that, then your brand is just not going to be recognised, and you are going to find that your website is failing to do one of its primary tasks. Being image-led is something that you are definitely going to want to focus on. That could mean hiring a professional corporate photography team to take photos of your building and your office and so on – once they are able to do so safely and with social distancing in place – so that you have a more professional image of your business on the website, or it could be a simple fact of improving the way the website looks generally. A messy website is going to reflect badly on the business in many ways, so this is hugely important to bear in mind.

Your URL

It might sound strange, but it is actually also hugely important that you manage to find a good URL for your business’ website. This should be as close to the public trading name of your business as possible, or at least something very closely related to it. If you are struggling to find something suitable, it is not unheard of to centre the name of a business around the chosen URL that you manage to find, even if that seems as though it should be a little strange. It is a common way through this issue, and it’s something that you should consider if you want to keep that unity of branding strong.

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Focus On The Voice

Your brand should have a voice, or else it isn’t going to seem like a strong brand. But that voice also needs to come through in the website as well as possible if you want to make sure that it is really doing its thing, and it’s something that you can easily do as long as you are careful about how you write the words on the page. These words need to fall in line with the overarching vision you have of your business. If the images are right, but the text feels off, then your business is going to struggle for it, and people will trust the authority of your website much less too.

As long as you make a point of focusing on these things, you should find that you can keep your branding going strong even during these strange times.

Businesses across the world are still reeling from the COVID-19 virus and the lockdown it has precipitated. They’ve had to completely reassess their operations, enabling their employees to work from home where they can, and placing them on furlough when they can’t. Because of the sweeping disruption to global logistics and supply chains, business has slowed down considerably, even for the lucky industries that have managed to remain active during the lockdown. However, whatever the size and nature of your business, this is no time to rest on your laurels. A proactive approach is more important than ever if you expect to remain operational long after the lockdown is lifted. It’s time to look at the opportunities afforded us by the new, more relaxed pace of business.

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It’s time to invest in growing your brand and your audience. Here’s how…

Invest in new leads

Even if you’re only able to operate in a limited capacity at the moment, this is absolutely the right time to lay the foundations for a grand resurgence when the lockdown is lifted. One possible advantage to this lockdown is that it provides the opportunity to engage with new prospects in a way that you may not have had the time to do when you had your hands full with staying on top of your operations.

Perhaps this is a good time to invest in some new lead lists. Start working on some dynamic and engaging email marketing copy that will encourage them o check out your brand. Even if you aren’t able to get your product or service to market right now, you can still start building value in your brand. Which brings us to…

Generate valuable content for your existing followers

Many businesses are using this time to double down on their content marketing and generate more high quality, valuable and practically useful content for their followers. This is your opportunity to showcase your knowledge, expertise and experience for existing customers and new prospects alike. It’s an opportunity to help them address problems or pain points that they may experience while on lockdown. The more value they perceive in your brand, the more value they’ll perceive in your products or services. Even if they have to wait a little while before they can avail themselves of what you offer.

When it comes to building positive perception of your brand in a meaningful and engaging way, it’s pretty difficult to top content marketing through blog posts, videos, how-to guides and infographics. It was important before the pandemic, and it’s arguably even more important now.

Incentivize social proof

Finally, in times of crisis, consumers may be slow to trust. Many will have taken a financial hit by the time the lockdown is over. As such, we can expect consumer confidence to be pretty low. Nonetheless, if brands invest their efforts in building trust now, they can expect to reap the rewards later. As such, now’s a good time to start incentivizing customers to rate your business and leave reviews online. Gathering as much of this social proof as you can will help you to increase your value proposition and ensure that your brand is synonymous with quality and trust.