Entrepreneurs around the world got quite the shock with the COVID-19 pandemic; it stopped many economies right in their tracks, introducing uncomfortable fear and uncertainty into the world’s business circles. But now, as the pandemic starts to loosen its stranglehold on the world, business owners are faced with a different challenge: how to start up again.
In the best of times, starting or maintaining a business is far from easy, but now we live in a time when nothing is all that certain. How will the economies of the world recover? What are the best practices to safeguard against something like this ever happening again? Should business owners even bother trying to prepare for something like it? There are many questions facing business owners right now, but all is not darkness; there are still plenty of ways to help your business in the coming months and years. Here are a few ways to kick-start your business for the next few years.
Get Into SEO
The pandemic pushed an already digitizing marketplace further online, and now the acronym everybody talks about is SEO, and with good reason. You can fix up your online presence all you want, but if customers never get to see your site, none of it matters. Everybody competes to get people’s eyes onto their site, and the way to win that competition is to optimize your web presence to hit certain checkmarks for the algorithms of major search engine.
Sound easy? It can be, but SEO is a highly competitive world; you’re going to be going up against everyone in the world who wants your share of the pie. This means that SEO becomes a game of who can stay on top. You’ll need to be working hard to get this powerful tool to work for you, but if you do, there isn’t another business in the world that can beat yours.
Clean Up Your Website
One of the most obvious moves you can do to prepare your business for the future is to update its website. Web design isn’t everyone’s forte, but using websites is, and nobody likes a poorly set up website that you can’t navigate or find anything on. If your website is old or just straight up badly designed, you will almost certainly lose customers, and more and more of them as commerce moves even further online.
Cleaning up your website can mean a lot of things, and every dysfunctional website is dysfunctional in a different way, but there are some core tenets to keep in mind. First, make sure you aren’t confusing your UI (user interface) with UX (user experience); a pretty website does not necessarily mean a satisfying one. Another is not to fear empty or white space; though it can seem like the right move to put more things on your site for your customers’ eyes to get caught by, having too much might be worse than having too little. Following these tips and focusing on how a site would make a user feel should lead you to a great website in no time.
Clean Up Your Backlog
Every business owner has something that they’ve put off for too long. For many, this winds up being something hugely important, like tax forms, or something like your website that has a direct impact on your business. Now is the perfect time to deal with that nagging problem that has been hanging over your head; most global economies are still getting their sea legs again, so there should be a little more time than usual. And, if you get your big looming project done now, you can focus on the bigger picture.
The great thing about being a business owner is that you never have to be alone; you can always get outside help for the bigger problems. Tax problems? There are swaths of accountants and bookkeepers who are trained specifically to help people who have fallen behind. Legal trouble? Ask yourself, “what kind of lawyer do I need?” and go find a specialist who will fix you up nicely. You may be tempted to not fix your problem because it’s been so long already, and it hasn’t come back to bite you. But the longer you wait to fix something, the more chances it has to get you, so you’re better off fixing it now.
Conclusion
The pandemic has created a lot of uncertainty in the business world, but entrepreneurs and business owners still have the agency to make their business succeed. They have to think outside the box, come up with solutions that are aware of both the current global situation and its potential future, and execute those solutions with confidence. If you are worried about your business’ future after the pandemic, take this opportunity to get working on it now; the worst thing you can do, after all, is nothing.
