10 Things your Small Business Website Design Needs
Is your small business website design effective in converting traffic to sales? Is it keeping your potential customers engaged and getting them excited about your business? Or is it little more than an online placeholder.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that it is now more important than ever to have your business online. 88.1% of internet users ages 14+ will browse or research products online. You heard right 88.1%! That is huge. Everyone is now connected to the net 24/7 with smart phones, tablets and laptops.
Today’s consumers demand a web presence but its not only that, they demand an exceptional web presence. You have to stand out from the crowd through great small business website design and easy to use website features.
And that brings us to this
10 things your small business website design NEEDS
- Professional Design
Sloppy or homemade looking websites turn customers away. A clean pro web design can make your small business look more like a small corporation.
- Private Domain Name
Even if you use wordpress.com, investing in a private domain name can have huge benefits. It tells your customers you are serious about your small business – it makes you more trustworthy and above all google loves it. Online, google is king.
- Include customer testimonials
A lot of small business owners think that having testimonials on your website is showing off. It is! And that’s the point. Your customer is searching for a reason to use your service, a reason that sets you apart from the rest of the crowd. An amazing testimonial can be the straw that breaks the camels back. In my research, a testimonials page is always in the top 5 most viewed pages for a small business. The more the better.
- Be Secure
If you collect credit card information on your website, you owe it to your customers to use secure payment methods. Hacking of credit card information on your website can be a business killer. Especially if the media gets a hold of it. Make sure you comply with all credit card regulations in Australia. For extra security you should use an SSL cert. This is complicated to implement so make sure you use professional for this.
- Use the 5 second rule
Your small business website design needs to pass the 5 second rule. By this I mean, when a user comes onto your website, in 5 seconds they need to know exactly what your website is about and exactly what you want them to do. So if your business sells brownies have a combination of great brownie pictures with large call to action text. MY AWESOME BROWNIES then a big button BUY. You can’t argue with that.
- Keyword Research
Every website needs to be planned out and part of that planning process should be identifying keyword phrases that a customer is most likely to use when searching for your product or service on search engines. Now im not going to explain how to do this here but if you want to learn more on this important step search how to do keyword research on google. Or click that link.
- Fresh Content
Updating your website regularly keeps users and search engines happy. As a minimum, a small business website design should include a blog post at least once a month. If you want to market more aggressively than once every 2 weeks or every week will give you great results.
- In-depth About Us Page
Regularly the second most visited page on a small business website is the about us page. People want to learn about who you are, your experience and where you’re from. Make sure you tell your customer how awesome you are and great you are at service/product. Include a professional photo of yourself.
- Simple menu
Make sure your main menu is simple and user friendly. Try to steer away from trendy renaming of standard pages. For example, lookbook instead of gallery. You may understand what it means but chances are a customer using your service for the first time may not.
- Plan Plan Plan
Even though I have been creating small business website design for a long time, I still start all my websites with a simple sketch on paper. I draw out the hierarchy of each page on the website and then general layout of each core page. Home, Services, About Us, Contact, Blog page.
Follow these 10 small business website design tips and you will be converting traffic into sales in no time.