Top 3 Focus Areas for Business Success in the New Year

Tired of those end-of-year articles that give you a 50-point checklist for business success? So are we.

Instead of tossing another overwhelming planning guide your way, we've narrowed our focus to three items. No grand strategies. No complete overhauls. Just three critical areas you can tackle immediately:

• Maintain ADA compliance: ADA-related website lawsuits are up. We'll tell you how to meet ADA requirements and avoid unwanted surprises from the Department of Justice.
• Optimize your SEO strategy: Too many businesses max out budgets on unnecessary ad spend when they could be driving organic traffic with a winning SEO strategy. We’ll show you how to cut needless spending.
• Remove negative reviews: Defamatory reviews are a reputation killer. We'll tell you how to boost positive reviews that build consumer trust while making damaging ones disappear.

Ensure Your Website is ADA-Compliant

Federal law mandates that websites, like brick-and-mortar businesses, comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). To meet requirements, your website must remove barriers for users with vision, hearing, and mobility impairments.

Unfortunately, many business owners either assume their website is ADA-compliant or do not take non-compliance risks seriously.

The reality? ADA-related lawsuits jumped from 2,314 in 2018 to 4,220 in 2023, and the consequences are steep:

• First offenses begin with a $55,000 Department of Justice fine
• Subsequent offenses rise to a $110,000 fine
• Attorney fees begin at $5,000, even if you settle out of court

The upside is our team makes ADA accessibility simple with:

• A free website audit to assess your current status
• A one-time set-up to bring your site up to standards
• Ongoing management to ensure you stay compliant as requirements evolve

Adapt to the Latest SEO Trends

Google’s AI tools are reshaping how users search for information. And to stay visible, you must stay competitive. If you don’t, you may be:

• Excluded from Google’s AI Overview feature, which increases visibility and can drive more organic traffic to your website
• Losing users who prematurely abandon your site because it is not mobile-friendly
• Missing out on traffic generated by voice search—users who increasingly rely on voice commands to search for information

The WISE SEO team keeps you competitive by focusing on three key opportunities:

1. AI-Ready Content

To increase the odds of being included in AI Overviews, Google must be able to crawl and index your website. If it can't, the search engine will not understand your content or know if it is useful to users. Our team will optimize your site structure and meta tags so that Google can find, understand, and pass on your content to users.

2. Mobile-First Performance

Over 60% of search traffic comes from mobile devices. To ensure a better browsing experience for mobile users, Google now prioritizes evaluating the performance of your mobile site—not the desktop version. And if your mobile site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, your ranking will suffer.

By scheduling a free website audit, our SEO team will not only determine consistency across all devices but also identify missed opportunities to improve mobile performance and search rankings.

3. Voice Search Optimization

Voice search is exploding, with Google Assistant users growing from 85 million in 2023 to a projected 92 million by 2025. As more and more Americans speak their searches, businesses must be ready—otherwise, they will not be found.

Our content marketing team is helping clients by building content around topics users frequently search for. Additionally, we’re adopting a more conversational tone using long-tail keywords that mirror how voice users speak.

Building an Online Review Strategy

As consumer data suggests, online reviews matter now more than ever:

• 89% of consumers check reviews before making a purchase
• 66% of Americans say reviews are their #1 decision-making factor
• 49% of consumers rank reviews as a top-three influence on purchases
• Reviews are now the second most trusted source of information—right behind search engines

As important as they are, many business owners take a passive approach to getting positive reviews and managing defamatory ones.

Make 2025 the year you turn it all around by:

• Downloading our free guide, “Building an Online Review Strategy” (scroll to the end of the article to get your copy)
• Asking happy customers to leave positive reviews shortly after completing projects or reaching milestones
• Sending gentle nudges, reminding customers to leave a review
• Responding to all reviews, offering gratitude, solutions, and apologies when appropriate
• Showcasing positive reviews on your website and social media channels
• Enlisting our team to remove defamatory and fake reviews (we have a nearly 100% success rate)

Make 2025 the Year You WISE-Up Your Marketing Strategy

These three focus areas will certainly help you set a strong foundation for 2025. But you don’t have to tackle them alone. By partnering with our Inc. 5000 award-winning team, you’ll gain access to proven strategies that drive real results. So let’s talk strategy. Get started by booking a session with our CEO Patrick Dillion today.