E-commerce has generated over 1.8 trillion dollars of revenue in 2019 alone and it’s expected to grow over 10% per year. What does this mean? Well for one, there’s plenty of room for your small business website to grow – if you know these small business website tips.
Creating a website that takes you further along your business goals isn’t as easy as it may seem. From domain hosting to SEO to user experience, there’s a lot of things to consider if you want a successful launch. To make the process easier, here are 10 small business website tips to help jumpstart the launch.
10 Crucial Small Business Website Tips
Are you eager to create a website that serves your business? Do you dream of an online site that converts viewers into paying customers? If so, pay close attention to these ten website design tips for your small business website!
10 Small Business Website Tips To Grow Your Online Presence
- Secure a Domain Name that Suits Your Business
- Equip Your Website with Strong SEO
- Make Sure Your Website Has a Call to Action
- Ensure that Your Content Provides Value to Your Viewers
- Be Intentional about the Website Hosting Platform You Go With
- Optimize Your Website’s User Interface Process
- Be Consistent with the Content You Put Out
- Take Insight from Analytical Tools
- Draft and Update a Maintenance Plan for Your Website
- Simplicity is Key
1. Secure a Domain Name that Suits Your Business
One of our most important small business website tips is to find a domain name that’s unique to your organization. While there is an unimaginable number of domain names that are already taken, there are still so many options for your business.
It’s important to pick a domain name that aligns well with your business. Not only does this help people find your organization online via search engines, but it also helps with natural growth as people will more likely click on your website
Most companies use their business name as the domain name because this is intuitive and makes it easy for customers to find you online- consider doing this yourself to increase natural site traffic.
2. Equip Your Website with Strong SEO
SEO is short for search engine optimization. The language of SEO can sound confusing to people who are unfamiliar with optimizing websites for search engines but don’t worry. If it feels like too much for your business to take on at the beginning, consider hiring an SEO professional.
Yoast is a WordPress plugin that can aid in your website optimization, whether it’s for SEO or readability of your website. Many digital marketing agencies would love to assist you with SEO for your small business website!
3. Make Sure Your Website Has a Call to Action
A major influence on the success of SEO is the content on your website. It is absolutely necessary that your website contains a call to action. Whether you say “Contact us today!” or “Call us for a free consultation!” you want to encourage your audience to engage with your business. That is the very first step of any sale, after all.
Netflix has 2 large and bold CTA centred in the middle of their website, encouraging visitors to engage with their site and give their service a trial run.
4. Ensure that Your Content Provides Value to Your Viewers
When you put out content that not only relates to your business but also provides value to your audience, people will recognize your small business as a company with a lot of credibilities.
Whether you have in-house writers or you outsource your content creation to freelancers, the key is to upload high-quality content to your viewers and ensuring that it fits in well with your small business website design. Tone and voice are everything, so make sure the content matches the vision of your business!
5. Be Intentional about the Website Hosting Platform You Go With
From Shopify and Squarespace to WordPress and Blogger, there are a number of options when it comes to choosing a hosting site.
Many of these websites offer different functionalities and are geared towards different purposes. It’s important to do your research before committing to a platform. For example, WordPress is amazing for small businesses that want to sell intangible services, whereas Shopify is an incredible platform for e-commerce companies. Be sure to do your research before deciding on a platform!
6. Optimize Your Website’s User Interface Process
Once you select a hosting platform, start working on the presentation of your website. If the home page of your small business website is hard to navigate, or just confusing in general, people will click off of the site.
User Interface and User Experience are both essential elements of small business website design. Instead of losing possible clients to your competitors, optimize the user interface of your small business website.
7. Be Consistent with the Content You Put Out
Valuable content will always outperform blog posts and articles that do not offer any insight to your readers. But content with value only matters if it is published on a consistent basis!
Whether you upload a blog post every single day, or you send out a weekly email, make sure you stick to a content schedule. This also helps your viewers know what they can expect from you.
8. Take Insight from Analytical Tools
No matter which hosting site you elect for your small business website, the platform will have some sort of analytics tool. While the data points can seem complicated at first, trust us when we say that you won’t know what you did without them once you get the hang of the tools. Analytics help you see where you are excelling and where you could improve, which is the key to growing as a business after all.
Google Analytics is a free tool that analyzes all of your web site data while giving you realtime and monthly reports so you know exactly where to make improvements. These small business website tips won’t be of much help if you don’t pay attention to the data.
9. Draft and Update a Maintenance Plan for Your Website
Launching a website for your small business is one thing, but the maintenance that a website requires is a whole other ballpark. Bugs or glitches that your website has may not be apparent to you or your website developer when you first visit it and only become noticeable when users point it out. Managing dead links, misleading page directions or images that don’t load are all categorized under website maintenance.
When you set out to create a website, be sure to have a maintenance plan in mind as well. This tip ties into consistency because without a plan for maintaining a successful website, you’ll start to see a decline in website functionality in little to no time at all.
10. Simplicity is Key
Launching a business website for your start-up is no easy task, but try not to complicate the process for yourself. This can happen really easily if you let yourself think that you have to have everything figured out before launch day.
Have a plan for your small business website design and keep it simple. Think about your product/service offerings and your brand personality and try to translate that into a website. Even if you don’t have a plan, you’ll find yourself learning along the way, so start with what you know! It is better to launch a website and improve from there than to never create one at all.
Key Takeaways For Small Business Website Tips
At the end of the day, the more intentional you are with your website, the more authentic you will appear to potential customers. There are many different ways to optimize your small business website, and a majority of the techniques require careful deliberate planning.
From enhancing your SEO techniques and curating valuable content, to being consistent and analyzing your data, a well-designed website will make all the difference for your small business.
