9 Website Building Tips for Small Businesses
If you own a company, you must have a website. It will not only give your company a more reputable and professional appearance, but it will also boost your chances of attracting internet clients and producing more sales. But how can you gain clients when there are so many rivals on the market? You’ve arrived to the correct location if you’ve been wondering.
We’ll provide nine small business website building strategies in this post to assist you beat the competition. We’ll talk about how to choose a great domain name and keep your customers happy. We’ll also go through the benefits of having a website and the components that should be included. Let’s get this party started, shall we?
Benefits of Having a Website for Your Small Business
The number of people purchasing digital goods is increasing. Over two billion individuals will have made internet purchases by 2020.
This just emphasizes how important it is for your company to have an internet presence. Let’s look at some of the benefits of using the internet:
– 24 hours a day, 7 days a week Visitors may shop and place purchases on a website at any time of day or night. They are also free to peruse your catalog at any time;
Higher margins due to lower expenses – An internet store is much more efficient than a physical store. A brick-and-mortar company requires an average of $50,000 to start. A domain registration, platform subscription, and other essentials cost roughly $500 for an online business.
Global exposure – Geotargeting, for example, has made it simple to reach out to worldwide audiences. You may target adverts to particular geographic areas to make them more relevant to locals.
Multiple sales channels – Promote your items on other platforms like Facebook Shops and Instagram Shopping to reach consumers across social media and increase sales.
Use technologies like Google Analytics and Hotjar to track information and data from consumers.
A small company website must include the following components.
Make sure to include the following aspects in your small company website so that it is ready for the world to view.
Copy that is readable
It’s critical that visitors and prospective consumers understand what your company does and how it may benefit them. For example, the main banner of online design tool Canva asks, “What will you create?” and includes clickable symbols for presentations, social media, and videos that illustrate their goods and services.
Details about the business
Include the following information: location, hours of operation, a brief description of the company, connections to other websites, social media accounts, and other contact information. This not only helps visitors learn more about your company and make well-informed judgments, but it also develops credibility.
Navigation that is easy to use
Use a well-known navigation menu so that people can easily navigate your site. You may also make it sticky so that you can access it whenever you want. Consider adding a search box to help visitors locate what they’re searching for more quickly.
Call-to-action buttons that are prominently displayed
The call to action buttons on your website are links that direct people to your conversion objective. As a result, ensure that the design is distinctive. Use a different color and a larger size to achieve this. If done correctly, this will capture the attention of visitors and enhance conversion rates.
9 helpful hints for creating a website for a small company
It takes more than simply putting your goods or services on the internet to create a small business website. It entails establishing an effective online presence in order to give your clients with a smooth buying experience. This section will go over nine strategies for creating a fantastic company website, from picking the correct platform to locating the most important marketing tools.
1. Get a suitable domain name for your website.
For small enterprises, having a good domain name is crucial. It serves as a visual depiction of your brand, allowing visitors to quickly grasp your industry. Make certain that the domain name is appropriate for your company. Those that are interested in your niche will be able to locate your company quickly by using appropriate search engine searches.
Milk Makeup and Away Travel are two outstanding examples of businesses that use phrases and keywords to describe their services. In addition, since it is one of many ranking indicators, a meaningful domain name might assist attract more visitors.
Consider following these techniques in addition to putting a relevant term in your domain name:
Keep it short—no more than 15 characters or three words—to make it easier to recall.
To prevent misspelling, stay away from numerals, hyphens, double letters, and special characters.
Easy to pronounce – Make sure your brand is simple to spell and remember.
2. Select a platform that is appropriate for your project.
The platform you choose to develop your website is essential to your company’s success.
A website builder – a platform for creating websites without any technical experience – is a terrific alternative if you want to put it up quickly and start selling right away.
Website builders, in fact, provide free hosting and pre-made layouts, allowing you to concentrate on expanding your brand. It also has pre-built pieces that make it simple for users to customize their website.
In order to help your small company flourish, make sure the website builder has the following features:
Responsive design – This is crucial since an increasing number of people are accessing the internet through devices other than their phones, such as tablets and other portable devices.
SSL certificate – To minimize data breaches and other criminal actions, it’s essential to safeguard your website with security fixes while operating a company.
Payment gateways – Make sure it accepts a variety of payment methods so clients can effortlessly check out;
Bandwidth and storage – Look for a site builder that provides limitless bandwidth and storage so that your company can withstand traffic spikes as it expands.
Integrations – Check to see whether it connects important technologies like Google Analytics and Live Chats, which may help your company expand.
3. Pay attention to your clients.
Customers who are happy are the lifeblood of every firm. In fact, 72% of consumers are likely to tell six or more others about a favorable experience. Unhappy consumers, on the other hand, are more likely to tell fifteen or more others about their bad experiences.
Consider these strategies to boost client happiness to stop this from damaging your business:
Create a client persona based on data and research, which is a semi-fictional portrayal of your ideal consumers. Use this data to concentrate your company’s efforts on the correct customers.
Create a user-friendly website that is simple to navigate, has a consistent appearance, and takes a reasonable amount of time to load. Consider discovering your consumers’ pain spots when browsing and making tweaks to better understand which areas to enhance.
Inquiries should be answered as soon as possible. Customer satisfaction may be improved by responding quickly. They may choose to hunt for another provider if you wait more than an hour to respond.
Review, testimonials, and user-generated material are all examples of trust factors. To gain trust and increase sales, this is essential.
4. Include sites that are related
It’s time to begin adding pages to your small company website after selecting a platform, obtaining a domain name, and ensuring that your clients are prioritized.
Include these critical pages before establishing your company website to ensure it seems professional and trustworthy:
This is a sneak peak at your company — A good homepage should include a title that characterizes your company, a short description of your goods or services, and a statement about how you might assist prospective clients.
About page – This is where you go into greater detail about your firm, including an overview, staff bios, notable honors and accomplishments, and how you differ from other companies in the same field.
Include ways for folks to get in touch with you on your contact page. Social media accounts, email addresses, phone numbers, and business hours are just a few examples of crucial contact information.
This is where you put information about the services or goods you provide. Include photos, clear and succinct descriptions, and other pertinent information, such as product availability, color and size choices, and advantages.
Customers’ most commonly asked inquiries are answered on the FAQ page. This will save you time by eliminating the need to answer the same questions over and over again, as well as any uncertainties that a client could have.
5. Make the webpage your own.
Begin by selecting the appropriate theme for your website. Consider a theme with lots of white space and sans-serif font options if you want to achieve a clean and contemporary tone, for example. This look works well with Gust and Mina.
Building a strong brand identity is one reason to personalise your website. This distinguishes your company from the competition, allowing consumers to recognize it more easily.
Aside from the topic, pay attention to the following elements:
This distinguishes you from the competition and raises brand awareness. Consider enlisting the help of an expert to design a logo for you. If not, there are free logo generators available to assist you; this relates to the layout of your website’s elements. Avoid clogging up your web page with extraneous information and things.
To maintain uniformity, stick to a three-color color scheme. One is the main color, with the others serving to balance it out.
For the headlines, subheadings, and body paragraphs, choose up to three typefaces that compliment one another; this part contains photographs, graphs, drawings, symbols, and screenshots to help you better explain your argument.
6. SEO-optimize your website
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of techniques that aid in the visibility and ranking of your website in search engines. Because 93 percent of online encounters begin with a search engine, and most internet users don’t go beyond the first page of search results, this is critical.
However, including SEO tactics into your small company website may assist in improving ranking, online exposure, and discoverability. As a result, your website will see an increase in visitors and income.
Let’s look at some of the most effective SEO strategies for growing your business:
Conduct keyword research – Include relevant and specialized keywords to improve your search engine rankings. To get started, try using tools like Ahref or Google’s Keyword Planner.
Prioritize site speed – This is crucial since the time it takes for your site to load has an influence on your Google ranking;
Tags, pictures, and phrases should all be optimized to the best of your ability. To help search engines understand what your content is about, use keywords in these components.
Create meta descriptions – This element provides information about your page to visitors before they even arrive. Your meta description may increase the click-through rate of your site if it is well-written.
Internal linking is the technique of connecting to other pages on your website. This demonstrates to search engines how your site’s pages are linked.
Aside from the methods listed above, blogging is another excellent technique to improve the SEO of your company’s website. Consider writing high-quality, keyword-friendly content that are also helpful to readers.
7. Maintain the safety of the place.
Cybercrime is on the increase, thus website security is essential for small companies. Cybercrime-related security problems are expected to cost $6 trillion annually by 2021.
Malware, phishing, and DDoS are among the most prevalent types of assaults. It’s vital to implement the following security measures to prevent these actions from hurting your company:
To prevent brute force assaults, create strong passwords that include random characters, digits, capital letters, and are lengthy.
Regularly update your website — To prevent malfunctions, bugs, and security flaws, keep your website up to date with the newest upgrades.
Keep frequent backups of your website so that you can restore it if it is hacked.
Anti-malware software should be installed – Web scanning, DDoS protection, and malware detection and removal are all capabilities that may help safeguard your company website.
Install SSL — This software encrypts all data sent between your website and the user, making it impossible for hackers to read.
Securing your website will not only prevent it from malicious assaults, but it will also improve your chances of ranking better in search engines, since Google favors secure websites.
8. Make checking out as simple as possible.
The average cart abandonment rate is 69.57 percent, indicating that the vast majority of users do not finish their purchases. Unexpected additional prices, members-only checkout, and a long checkout procedure are some of the most typical difficulties, while the causes vary.
Consider the following methods to help you reduce cart abandonment:
Display other prices up front — Aside from shipping and taxes, inform buyers whether there are any additional expenses to anticipate at the conclusion of the process.
Allow one-time visitors and first-time buyers to purchase without having to create an account;
Limit the checkout flow to no more than five pages – A long checkout procedure exhausts prospective clients and discourages them from completing the transaction.
Include a progress bar — This feature informs buyers how near they are to completing the purchase;
Allow modifications to be made from the cart page — Include buttons for adding, removing, and modifying product variants like color, size, and number.
9. Grow your company using marketing tools.
Digital marketing tools, in addition to the items on your website, are vital for growing your company and outperforming competition.
In fact, 63 percent of all shopping trips start online, with 2.14 billion individuals anticipated to purchase online this year.
Use the correct tools to acquire insight into what your audience is searching for to remain ahead of the game. You’ll be able to make better judgments and develop more successful marketing strategies this way.
Small firms should have the following marketing tools:
Google My Company is a free tool that allows you to promote your business and have it show in Google Search and Google Maps. To assist prospective consumers in making a quicker decision, provide crucial information such as operation hours, website, phone number, and menus.
HubSpot — A customer relationship management application that includes live chat and lead collection forms.
MailChimp — A marketing automation platform that assists with customer experience management, scheduling, and improvement. It, for example, delivers a welcome message to new subscribers in order to foster connections and includes product suggestions based on the customer’s browsing history.
BuzzSumo is a content marketing solution that uses statistics to track growth potential. To find out what’s hot in your business, go through the themes, trends, and forums.
Buffer is a social media marketing platform that allows you to monitor your social media performance and better plan campaigns. From a single interface, you can plan and post content for Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Conclusion
If you want your small company to be successful, you must have a website. With more and more companies coming online, it’s more important than ever to have a small company website that can compete.
The following is a summary of the advice given in this article:
Purchase a relevant, easy-to-spell domain name that incorporates a keyword;
Look for features like limitless bandwidth and storage, payment choices, and interaction with corporate tools when choosing a platform.
Prioritize your clients by promptly answering to concerns and developing a user-friendly website with simple navigation and a rapid load time;
Add useful pages — The homepage, about page, and contact page are all must-haves.
Customize the website — Pay close attention to the site’s logo, color design, and typography.
Use SEO to your advantage. Boost organic traffic by using keywords, prioritizing site performance, and optimizing content and tags;
Install SSL certificates, use anti-malware software, and frequently update your website to protect your site from cyber threats.
Reduce cart abandonment by disclosing additional fees upfront, allowing guest checkout, and keeping the checkout process to under five pages.
Invest in marketing tools like HubSpot, Buffer, and MailChimp to help you grow your company.
There you have it: nine pointers to assist you in creating a website for your small company. Hopefully, you have found this information useful. Best wishes for your travels!
