Best tools to integrate into your website

When you integrate tools in your website, it can make both your, and your client's, lives just a little easier. While there are too many options to integrate into your website to list here, we'll address just a few.

Payment Gateway Integration

Whether you sell your products or services through your website, or just want your clients to be able to pay with a credit card or electronic fund transfer, you’ll need an organized and integrated payment system. This will provide your customers with a simple and secure method for paying for their purchases.

Payment gateways are secure because they're encrypted, so only the customer and the company are able to access relevant payment information.

Through organized invoicing, Sevell + Sevell has unique links on each invoice that takes someone to a payment page specifically for their invoice. Below is a screen shot of the page someone would link to to pay their invoice. That page is linked to the payment gateway Stripe.com (kinda like PayPal, but better). That way someone can put in their credit card and it's linked to our company bank account.

Other common payment gateways to integrate include PayPal, Square, and Braintree.

Shipping Gateway Integration

If you're shipping you products, it would be wise to integrate a USPS shipping calculator so customers see exactly how much it costs to ship a purchase.

Email Newsletter Services

Email newsletters are a tried-and-true method of digital marketing. Whether you have a physical storefront, or do all your work through your website, having a consistent digital presence for your customers can be powerful. It ensures your business has consistent communication in a way that's convenient for your customers. While they take time to set up, they're very inexpensive to send.

But did you know you could integrate your e-newsletter's sign up form with the master email list on MailChimp, HubSpot, Constant Contact, or Campaign  Monitor? Doing that will free you up from manually copying and pasting email addresses of those who sign up for your newsletter.

Google Services Integration

Google has a number of services that can  integrate into your website. For instance, Google Calendar can clearly display any event your company has planned and even allow your website’s visitors to sign up for them. However, you should update that calendar regularly, otherwise your website can seem neglected. Another service you can integrate into your website is Google Comments.

Strategic Organization

According to search engine optimization best practices, the most effective method of organizing your website is "content grouping." Think of your website’s pages as items on a restaurant menu. The most intuitive way to organize all of these items is by grouping them into relevant categories. The pasta category will contain spaghetti and carbonara while the hamburger category would hold the bacon burger and Impossible burger. This is a good parallel to how you should organize your website.

Let’s take the example of a business that offers both landscaping services and property management. If their website was well organized and integrated, they would display landscape maintenance and landscape design under the landscaping services tab. Meanwhile, the property management tab would handle inquiries about rental spaces and take repair requests.

The more pages you have that focus on your specialties, the better chance you have of Google displaying not only the link to your homepage, but to  the individual pages as well. This gives you more "real estate" on Google's search results page, as well a direct links to other pages in your website (as the example below shows).

Content Grouping helps with SEO

Grouping content in this manner can easily improve organic traffic to your website through two main benefits. First, it will make it easier for Google’s spiders to crawl, meaning you could potentially rank higher on Google search result pages. Secondly, your website will be easier for potential customers to explore. Improving your website’s usability and navigation can only improve people’s impression of your company.

Of course, there' scores of other things that determine how well your website will rank in Google, and every little bit helps.

If you'd like to learn more about making the most of your website, contact Sevell + Sevell today.

This blog is a guest post by Ivan Serrano

Special thanks to Ivan Serrano for his expertise is writing this article.