Web Design for Small Business
Nowadays, a small business without a website is lacking a crucial piece of its go-to-market strategy. Where do customers look to find information about your products? They look online. So not only does your website need to be relevant and appealing, it must also be found in search engine rankings. Search Engine Optimization for small business is just as important as it for large marketers. So before you build a new website, or revamp the one you have, plan for some of the key elements below needed in web design for small business:
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Relevance – Not only must your website effectively market your business, but it must be relevant. This means understanding your audience and speaking to them with words and imagery that they can relate to. Your website visitors must picture themselves engaged with the product or service. For example, a yoga website that wants to draw in yoga beginners should not be showing images of instructors or teachers in impossibly difficult yoga poses. Images draw customers into the site both from a visual and search perspective. In terms of copy, it must be written to both inform, but also draw search.
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Design – Beautiful websites are desirable, but again it’s about building a design that appeals to your specific customer, and prompts them to contact or buy from you. The focus should be on marketing your business, not on a flashy design. Flashy or busy designs do not show up well on a mobile device, and it is common for most websites to now be receiving 50% or more of their traffic from a mobile phone or tablet. Websites must have a clear, simple design that focuses on drawing visitors into the website and getting them to the right place within the site.
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Clear Call to Action – Every website should have defined goals. What do you want visitors to do? Contact you to buy your goods or services? Have them buy products? Learn about product and service information? Whatever those goals are, a clear call to action is required to accomplish these goals. You need to immediately tell website visitors what their next step is, and what is in it for them if they take it.
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Fresh Content – Every website that I have redeveloped had stale, dated content. Many business owners figure that they can put up the basic content and project accomplished. On the web, content quickly grows stale, and it’s so important to keep it fresh. A website is an ongoing project, and a marketing channel that must be continually supported like any other. This can be done via blogs, ongoing Questions and Answer columns, articles and new photos. Don’t take the easy way out and just insert links to outside articles – this does nothing to attract searches to your site. It also says that you have nothing original to say. At the very least, include articles written by others with the proper attribution and permission. Every website for small business should include a plan for ongoing content.
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Search – steps #1 through 4 above are key contributors to search engine optimization. You want and need your website to be found online. If your website is properly optimized for search, at least half your website traffic will come from “free” sources like Google, Bing or Yahoo. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The exact weighting of factors that drive search is not public information, but we do know that lots of good, informative content containing relevant search “keywords” is a good thing, along with all of the necessary title, description and image tags, which are pieces of software designed to help the search engines find and classify your web pages. The number and types of links to your site from other sites are important, as they are an indication of your popularity and relevance. Website usability and navigation are also factors; a website that takes forever to load (due to too-heavy images) is dinged by the search engines.
A new site can take months to be fully found, indexed and ranked by search engines. Even then, depending on the amount and type of competition out there, it may be difficult for your website to be easily found for certain searches. Paid search and social ad campaigns can be excellent ways to drive website traffic and build awareness, particularly when your site is not easily attracting traffic on its own. Paid search is not just for big, national, marketers; small businesses can effectively use it by targeting the area around one's business.
