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Any type of business today requires a professional website to help grow its audience and achieve success. If you are a small business owner, this applies to you too.
Having a great website will allow you to position yourself and your product or service on the market and engage with your target audience more effectively.
If your goal is to create a new website or improve your existing one, here are 10 essential steps that will help you achieve it.
1. Choose the right domain name
First impressions do matter, so make your domain name catchy, clear, and memorable. This helps attract and retain your audience, as well as contribute to your search engine optimization (SEO) if you include both a keyword describing your business and a geo-location: for example, “www.NewYorkPhotographer.com”.
The key is to make your domain easy to spell and short, without any numbers or hyphens. The name should reflect the type of business you are in. If you are a photographer, make sure this is included in your domain name.
When choosing a domain extension, always opt for .com if possible. Depending on your business you may, however, also want to choose .edu, .org, or .gov.
Your address should be as broad as possible, so you can use it as an umbrella term for potential future services or products that are more specific. For example, if you sell natural soaps, your domain name might include the word “cosmetics” instead of merely mentioning soaps.
Now, since many interesting domain names are already taken, you might need to buy one from its owner. If that is the case, do your research on domain prices and make a reasonable purchase.
2. Obtain a proper website host
Every website requires technical support in form of technology and servers. The right hosting company will provide you with that.
There are shared and dedicated web hosts. Shared web hosts are less expensive, but your business will have a server shared with other business websites. If your budget can cover it, a dedicated web host will allow you a private server and a quickly-loading website.
A few great options for web hosts you can check out are Dream Host, A2 Hosting, and WPEngine.
3. Include a clear description of your business
It is essential for your website visitors to immediately understand what your business has to offer. Therefore, make sure you state your vision, mission, and philosophy underlying your work. Your homepage and “About Us” section should be used for that.
Nowadays, it’s more than ever important for customers to relate to the story behind a product or a service to become loyal to a brand and ultimately promote a brand themselves.
4. CSM implementation is a must
A content management system (CSM) helps you maintain and manage your digital content. Based on your specific needs you can choose a CSM that best works for you.
As a small business owner, we suggest you opt for CSM which is user-friendly and falls within your budget.
Some CSM platforms to consider are:
- WordPress: free, flexible, and extensible, although not entirely secure
- Drupal: fewer plugins than WordPress, but more secure
- Joomla!: better SEO and security than WordPress
- Squarespace: faster to master, with a monthly or annual subscription, but fewer extensibility options than others
- Wix: even easier to master than Squarespace, and more user-friendly as well
5. Find an appropriate e-commerce platform
If your business includes online sales of goods or services, your website will require an e-commerce platform allowing your users to make financial transactions with your business.
Depending on your business model you may choose:
- Shopify or Shopify Plus, and have a separate e-commerce account to which you can link from your website)
- WooCommerce, to help you transform your WordPress website into an online store
- Business Squarespace, which offers SSL security, SEO, a free domain, etc., but is found to be less user-friendly than Shopify and less flexible than WooCommerce
- Wix, which requires a Wix account upgrade and subscription to Shopify
If you are not sure what your particular business needs, feel free to consult some of the web design companies in UK and receive useful advice.
6. Create an engaging website user interface
To attract and retain your website visitors make sure you implement engaging aesthetics to encourage interaction.
This will require making use of eye-catching graphics and clear fonts, fast webpage loading optimization, and implementation of components you find appealing when researching your competition.
You should also research your target audience to learn their expectations and needs. Creating an exquisite user experience should be one of your highest priorities. Therefore, you ought to make it easy for your website visitors to contact you by incorporating clear call-to-action buttons and visible contact information.
7. SEO for small business websites
As a small business, you need to make sure your website ranks well to be discovered easily during online searches. To allow search engines to “crawl” your website, make your website design and content reflect quality.
SEO can make or break the amount of traffic on your website and it includes keyword research, keywords use, optimal website code, fast loading, SSL security allowing online privacy, a mobile-friendly website, high-quality backlinking including social media links, positive online reviews, and internal website links connecting your content.
8. Offer quality content regularly
This is another way to improve your SEO. Search engines make note of useful and well-presented content rewarding it with a high ranking.
Your brand is built through such quality content published regularly as it encourages your customers to stay tuned and follow your activity. To stay consistent, introduce a content calendar and schedule your posts in advance.
9. Make use of analytics
To keep up with how well your website is doing in terms of site performance and traffic, employ analytics. These can inform you of the number of views your pages are getting and the number of your website visitors on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. You can also monitor how much time visitors spend on your site, bounce rate, crawl errors, and more.
To track your analytics you can employ Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or Bing Webmaster Tools.
10. Have a website maintenance plan
Once you create your website and launch it, it’s not over. What you still need to keep in mind is website maintenance.
Your goal is to have the website rank high in search engines and therefore it needs to be maintained and secured. The content should be relevant and updated when needed and any technical issues should be dealt with immediately.
Conclusion
Creating a website for your small business is one of the most significant steps in allowing your business to thrive. With a well-designed website offering quality user experience and content, your brand is more likely to become recognizable and popular. Therefore, investing effort in building a website will most certainly pay off.
