Like any small business, making your mark in your industry and engaging with your target customer via your website is a primary goal. However, considering the realities of budget constraints, it is crucial to invest in your website design wisely because certainly, your website is the first impression a customer will have of your business. An average user will leave your website without even navigating it if they find it inaccessible or unprofessional. The good news is you can find tips on Small Business Website Design here, and you most certainly do not need a huge, expensive agency to make your business website engaging. Here are our five top tips for designing websites for small businesses.
1. Choose the right domain name
Your domain name is your business’s website address, or the URL customers enter to access your website. Make sure your domain name is catchy, memorable, and doesn’t contain numbers or hyphens, making it forgetful. Since it’s all in the domain name, small businesses need to ensure that it is easy to spell, precise, and uses a well-recognised extension, eg “.com” instead of “.net” or “.org”, etc., unless it is required by the business.
2. Show your story
It is extremely important to show your story to customers so they can connect with it and become community members. Make sure you specify what product/services you offer, your history, and what you do clearly on the front page or an additional “About Us” page, which can describe your business in a nutshell to people visiting it for the first time. You might also want to include internal links that can help explore your website in-depth.
3. SEO & Webmaster Tools
SEO helps users locate your website more easily on search engines and can help you reach your target audience(s). The pre-requisites are to have relevant keywords embedded, quality backlinks, positive reviews, social media connections, and a mobile-friendly website design. Webmaster tools like Google Analytics can help you track the record of visitors on your site and their frequency, bounce rate, views per page, time spent by users on your content which can support your SEO rankings.
4. An accessible design for shopping
In case you also intend to sell goods to customers via your website, make sure that the e-commerce sections are accessible and visible. However, to create more credibility in your business’s transactions, you can use popular platforms like Shopify, Wix, and WooCommerce.
5. Create Consistent & Engaging Content
A final tip is to create quality and engaging content consistently. This is important for two reasons. Firstly, it helps improve your SEO rankings when your content is not static, and secondly, with frequent updates, customers land on your website more consistently. If you are lacking content, posting quality testimonials regularly can help.
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