A Good URL

Your URL, or website address, needs to be something that’s not too long and is easy to remember. If someone sees it in your marketing materials like the mail, newspaper or on your work vehicle but can’t recall it when they get to a computer or can reach their phone, then you will have already lost them as a customer.

Even though there are quite a few domain extensions out there now, it’s best to pick one of the most common ones as people are much more familiar with them. Our recommendation is to stick with .com, .net or if your site is non-profit .org.

We recommend avoiding punctuation in your URL name. Things like dashes, while making domains easier to read, can become confusing to remember correctly and really hurt your search engine rankings. In order to make those URLs easier to read, just capitalize each new word on your promotional materials.

Leave numbers out of your domain name. These can also cause confusion and SEO issues.

Who You Are

Make sure that all your important information is “above the fold” meaning a visitor doesn’t have to scroll to see who you are, what you offer and how to contact you. All of that data should be there for them when they first hit your site. A simple, clear design, not cluttered with a lot of extra text or images will help. Quick loading images and easy to read text will keep visitors on your site longer as well.

Easy Site Navigation

if people can’t find the information they need quickly and easily on your site, they are more likely to move on to your competition. Having a clear top navigation menu with easy to access, clearly titled sub-links helps your visitors find what they need to on your site, fast.

Easy Contact Information

Having a great website is useless if a visitor can’t easily find out how to contact you. You should have multiple ways for prospects to follow up. 

• Putting your phone number where they can see it
• Creating a Call To Action button for them to engage with
• Visually showing your address in a map, for local customers
• Providing a contact form 

Actual Testimonials

your previous clients are your most valuable selling point. Potential clients look at your history to see if they can trust you with the service they need. Reading amazing reviews of your business can influence potential customers into taking the next step and contacting you. Good reviews have a cascading affect in that not only do they stimulate new client growth but propagate your good name across multiple platforms on the web. 

There is a deep psychological effect taking place when visitors come to your site and read glowing reviews. While you could fill pages and pages of your website with words about how good you are, people tend to invest much more weight into what others think of you instead. One or two great reviews are better at convincing people to work with you than paragraph after paragraph about how good you are.

Consider including your testimonial client’s pictures, if they are willing, and or linking to their social media accounts. These extra steps will go a long way to showing they are true customers.

If your service or services can be shown to “improve” something, like in the remodeling business, then adding before and after images to your testimonials are a huge benefit to showcasing your work.

Frequently Updated Content

It’s no secret, the more relevant content you have on your site, the better your organic SEO will be. One way to increase this is by adding a blog to your site and posting to it at least once or twice a week. The next time your site is crawled by the search engines those new pages will be archived and their content added to your site info on their side for indexing purposes. If you are consistent, this will pay off in the long run as more and more of your content is shown in search results. This doesn’t mean write anything you want however. You should only write about subjects you are knowledgable in and that your clients want to read. Another great thing about a blog is you can add relevant information to your website yourself, have a web professional do it for you or a combination of both.

Good, Secure Hosting

The best site in the world is useless if it’s hosting server is frequently down or unsecured. Users trying to reach your site will give up after about three to five seconds and move on. If they do get to your site but it has been hijacked by hackers, their first impressions of you could be extremely detrimental to your online reputation. Make sure you are hosting your site with a company that has secure, up-to-date, servers.

On Page SEO

There are many ways you can increase your search engine rankings within the code of your site itself. Specific tags within HTML, help sites like Google decide how to rank your pages. Putting the wrong data in these tags, or worse, not including them at all can have major effects on potential clients not finding you. Broken links, bad or minimal content and non-relevant keywords are other reasons you might slip in your search rankings.

Mobile Friendly Design

According to CIO Dive, 70% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices. If these sites do not display correctly or fail to load, they can sour the viewer’s experience. Search engines have become aware of this and are now penalizing sites that are not mobile compliant. How many times have you pulled up a website on your phone only to have to side-scroll or zoom in to see everything. A properly built mobile site should display the information you need, such as contact information, clearly.

Professional Images and Video

Grainy pictures or images that take forever to load can damage the web user experience making your site look unprofessional or unresponsive and down. Use high-quality, properly web formatted images so that your site looks great and loads quickly.

Host your videos on a video sharing site like YouTube or Wistia and use their embed code to display them on your site. Not only do those sites have the tools to convert your videos to web readable formats, they can track things like number of views etc.

Analytics

I can’t stress how important analytics can be in making your business successful. Think of them as a kind of map for finding out how to get to where you need to be by looking at where you’ve been. Without them, you are kind of like someone wandering around in the dark without a flashlight. You may get to your destination eventually but the process may be long and painful.

Analytics can tell you a lot about how your site is performing. Who your visitors are, how they are getting there, what pages they are staying on and how long are just some of the things analytics can show you. Knowing these things can help you adjust your website so that more people convert to sales which is your ultimate goal.

Final Note

A lot of work goes into building and maintaining a website properly so that it helps your business grow. At Websmith Design, we can help by taking the guesswork out of this process for you. Let us focus on providing your business with a professional, search engine and mobile friendly site capable of converting prospects to customers and freeing you to focus on running your business.

The post 9 Things Every Small Business Website Needs To Have appeared first on Websmith Design and Optimization.

Here are just some reasons not to use an online website builder for your business

• Limit on pages
  • many online web builders only allow a certain number of pages on your site, under their free plans. This can create issues down the line with limiting landing, info pages and SEO.
• Limit on features
  • Many sites have only a few features available on their free plans. Paying for additional features can become pricey as you get farther involved.
• Not fully mobile
  • while some online web building tools are becoming more mobile friendly due to Google’s changed algorithm requirements, they are still limited in what they can do in this area.
• Can have slow loading speeds
  • These tools can have a lot of additional code associated with them which can cause them to take a longer time to load in browsers. As reported on Marketing Dive, according to Google, 53% of mobile users will leave a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. This means that the best looking site on the web doesn’t matter if everyone leaves it before its done rendering.
• Website elements can look off
  • Sometimes things just don’t line up making them look broken or off. Shifts like this can even make the meaning of your content change unintentionally leaving your visitors confused or in extreme cases, upset.
• limited template selection
  • many do-it-yourself web building sites have only a few templates for any specific business niche yours might fall into. You are limited to using what they have available, swapping out colors, text and images.
• Learning curve
  • Even though many online web builders are intuitive with drag-and-drop features, there is still a learning curve to using their system. This can change as well as they add / enhance features, remove functionality or reconfigure tool placement as they continually develop their software.
• Search Engine Optimization can’t be fully utilized
  • There are specific customizations to SEO and Analytics that these online web building sites can’t do. If you can’t, nor would you want to, get to the underling code files to make these modifications then you can’t benefit from their added value.
• No site personalization and limited branding opportunities
  • Since things are templated, you are extremely limited on personalizing or branding the site to fit your business.
• Doesn’t look fully professional
  • There is the risk that your business site might look very similar to a competitor’s site since you are both using the same templates etc. This can confuse potential clients and muddy your brand.

Reasons to hire a web development company to build your website

• They will work with you to realize your vision
  • A good web development company will partner with you to ensure that the message you are conveying is what you want.
• Add additional content / make suggestions so your site is seen by more people
  • They know what works and what doesn’t and can help build a site that includes all of the right pieces so that you get noticed.
• Can use advanced SEO, SEM and Analytic techniques
  • They build everything from scratch so they have full control over everything. This helps a great deal in specialized search engine optimization, keyword analysis and social marketing your site.
• You own your site
  • When complete, your site and all it’s content belong to you to do with as you wish.
• Handle security and upgrades
  • A good web development company will handle all the back-end server things that could potentially become a major headache when doing these yourself. No need to wait on a phone for support or check warning messages for an emergency patch when they can handle that for you.

Technology and search engine criteria are changing faster all the time. It can be overwhelming to build and manage your business website on top of running your business itself. Having a professional, well designed and developed website built for you that shows your potential customers what you offer and how to contact you increases your chances of getting new clients. Sites that take a long time to load, are poorly designed or are not easily findable get pushed to the back and don’t get noticed. We can help your customers find your business. Give us a call today.

The post 10 Reasons to not Use an Online Website Builder appeared first on Websmith Design and Optimization.