How to run businesses has changed over the years, and many small businesses now embrace having an online presence. Many have hired in-house web developers or outsourced them to build their websites to make them compete and get more customers, which will increase revenue. Apart from revenue, they get more brand recognition and attract new clients. The process of developing a small website is now easier with powerful content management systems like WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace.
Having a website is not enough, owners must implement several small business website tips to help them get discovered by more clients. By following the website design tips for small businesses below, there are higher chances of having a successful business website. The article will cover some of the best tips small businesses should follow to be successful.
Tips for a Successful Small Business Website
1. Implement SEO practices
Search Engine Optimization involves optimizing your small business website to appear on your search engines when visitors search for certain services and products. There are several search engines to optimize your website, you must implement the practices on all of them. Proper SEO improves your ranking on search rankings, leading to more results visiting your results and increasing the conversion rate.
You can either employ an SEO specialist or choose to work with agencies that offer SEO services. Best SEO tips for small website owners include:
- Performing proper keyword research. Go for keywords that are easier to rank, relevant to your business, and have low competition. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, Ahrefs, Lowfruits, and Spyfu.
- Write better quality content that is well optimized, uses the right keywords, and has a relation with your visitors.
- Work on other SEO elements like URLs, header tags, short paragraphs, etc.
- Write better and short meta descriptions to show little snippets to your customers when they search for your website.
- Implement off-page and on-page SEO
- Optimize your images by adding alt text and ensure your images are small and load very fast.
- Implementing the above small business website tips will have an impact on your business and make you attract new customers, leading to more revenue.
2. Add Social Proof
Social proof is where you show your credibility and trust by displaying different information from past actual customers. The best ways to achieve this include the following:
Including customer testimonials, both text and video, from your past happy clients.
Integrating all reviews from other sites like Google My Business, Facebook, Reddit, Yelp, etc.
Share all your accreditations, awards, and certifications on your small website to show how good you are with the type of business you deal with.
3. Buy an SSL certificate
Buy an SSL certificate and install it on your website. Several service providers provide cheap SSL certificates, and it’s your chance to choose which one to work with according to your budget. Having the certificate secures all your connections between the client and server during communication. It protects all sensitive data, i.e., financial information and personal details, from hackers who try to have unauthorized access.
Search engines like Google listed having an SSL certificate installed as one of the factors to rank higher on search results. Their browsers, like Chrome, even warn visitors when they are about to visit a website without an SSL certificate due to the possibility of losing sensitive data to cybercriminals.
SSL certificate promotes trust amongst your customers and enables you to get more customers from search engines. It increases your revenue and has a bigger impact on your small business.
4. Include Call To Action
Call To Action (CTA) enables visitors to take action on your page. You must include it throughout your website. Ensure they are clear and you use simple language for every website visitor to understand and take action. Commonly used examples of CTAs include contact forms, newsletters, downloading file buttons, and making a purchase.
To have better CTAs, there are several steps that small business website owners can implement:
- When dealing with contact forms, ensure it takes less time to fill the form. For example, you can include a few details like full names, email, and phone numbers to make the process faster.
- For buttons, ensure to use contrasting colors to grab the visitor’s attention fast and make them take action.
- Performing testing by using different phrases on the call to action. It will show which one performed well and stick to it, for those with low performance, you can drop them.
5. Ensure it is responsive
There is an increase in mobile device users, which forces small business owners to ensure that their website is accessible on all devices by making it responsive. There are several ways to ensure you have a responsive website using the right fonts, simple layout, optimizing images, etc. In case your website is mobile unresponsive, you will lose customers as you will rank lower on search engines.
6. Implement Easy Navigation
Have a good page hierarchy to enable the users to navigate your website faster, helping them get the required information about your business. Ensure you have the most important pages, i.e., homepage, about us, services, contact, pricing, etc. Ensure the visitor finds the pages easily and faster, and every page has a link that directs the visitor to the homepage.
If you have more pages or categories, you make them fall under the main pages. Ensure the visitors do not struggle when they look for your content. It also helps search engines understand the structure of your site and rank the pages in the search engines.
7. Follow the Best Design Practices
Following and implementing the best design practices is one of the best website design tips for small businesses. It involves dealing with user experience, readability, colors and fonts, animations, accessibility, etc.
Many small business website tips ensure you have the best website. The practices are as follows:
- Ensure you create a better user Experience (UX) by ensuring all the fonts are readable, you use short and engaged content, and proper spacing between the content.
- Implement white space on some parts of your website where there is no content at all. Making it empty makes it easier to read content, and it improves the overall visual appearance of a website, giving you a clean website.
- Implement a color scheme to help you have consistent colors throughout the pages. When visitors realize you use the same colors, they get a better impression of your small business and take longer time on the page, leading to more conversions.
8. Improve the Page Speeds
Ensure the page loads very fast to help you retain visitors to your page and increase conversion. Search engines also favor websites that load faster and make them rank higher in search results, leading to more traffic.
There are several ways one can implement to ensure that their small business website loads very fast. It includes optimizing your images, choosing the best hosting provider, reducing the number of plugins if using a content management system, etc.
Owners can conduct tests using free tools like Google Pagespeed Insight to see the speed results and implement the recommendations as advised by the tool. You can perform tests using different websites and see how the website loads.
Conclusion
The article covered small business website tips that help owners unlock their opportunities and get new customers. Any type of business requires a website from e-commerce and brick-and-mortar business. The tips apply to any type of website, whether new or existing and after a while, you will notice changes in traffic and revenue. Some owners find it tough, especially those doing it for the first time, but the results will pay off if you do a great job.