Whether you are a small restaurant, painter, own a retail store, or have another type of small business, a great digital presence is essential for your company’s success. As a business that has worked on building or marketing over 100 small business websites, We know what it takes to create great business websites that generate revenue.
If you are looking to create a new startup website or make your current site more effective, here are 5 key steps to getting started and helping your small business website compete effectively in the online marketplace.
1. Prominently display a clear description of your business
It is important to let people know who you are and what you do right away so they don’t feel confused when they visit your small business website. Make sure your main homepage banner (also known as a “hero image”) and subsequent banners are visual representations of your services, and also that you have an introductory text blurb near the top of the page that describes who you are and what you do.
Additionally, make sure both your main and footer navigation menus have "About Us" page links easily accessible so people can click them and read more about your business in-depth.
2. Create an interesting, memorable, and engaging website user interface
We always go back to the Nielsen Norman Group standards listed below and we also understand that a great UI should reflect the personality of the brand to stand out from the competition and provide users with a delightful experience.
- Learnability: Can the user complete their tasks with little difficulty?
- Efficiency: Does the interface allow the user to complete tasks promptly?
- Memorability: After leaving a website, how likely will the user be able to remember how to use it the next time they visit?
- Errors: What steps does the interface take to lessen the chance of user error, and how do they let the users correct an error?
- Satisfaction: Does the user enjoy interacting with the design?
3. Optimize your small business website for search engines
Here are 8 steps you can implement to optimize your small business website for search
- Nail down the problems you solve for your customers in blog posts.
- Fix your technical issues; broken links, speed, and duplicate content.
- Optimize your pages, by perfecting tags, meta descriptions, and internal links.
- Optimize your google business listing, it's free and easy to update.
- Find out what your competitors are doing and do it better.
- Get links from local websites in your local area.
- Make sure you incentivize or request reviews from your customers.
- Mix paid search with organic to start rolling
4. Regularly create and publish quality content
Here are the steps you can take to create content regularly and always have a fresh stream of ideas for content.
- Consume a lot of content within your niche
- Reply to blog posts within your niche, and or quora questions
- Repurpose your existing content, by either transforming video into blogs or vice versa.
- Read books and magazines in your niche and publish exciting facts
- Hire a content writer, and always remember content never expires and might bring traffic for the next 5 to 10 years.
- Maintain a content publishing calendar.
- Curate content from other websites and link them to your post.
5. Implement a website maintenance plan
A website maintenance plan is a plan you set for yourself to review content you previously created and repurpose it. This includes reviewing your analytics page and making adjustments based on that. Creating blog posts on a regular interval, and also updating your customers/newsletter of the current state of the business or the new features.
When creating a content management calendar you spend some time with your content writer deciding on various topics, deciding on when certain topics should be drafted and scheduled. The more you get into the habit of organizing and scheduling, the better will be the inflow of ideas.
Conclusion
If you implement all this advice in your small business there is a 0% chance you don't generate revenue or calls. As always if you want professional web design, digital marketing, email marketing, and content writers, signup and get a quote today, or call us at +1 (214) 267-9676.
Thanks for reading!
