Small Business Website Design

Small business owners face several challenges towards succeeding on the web. Aside from building an effective website, one of the challenges of owners of small businesses is that there is simply too much to do every day in terms of running a business. There is little time available towards managing and promoting your own small business website.

Many small businesses come to this realization after purchasing a cookie-cutter website from one of the many do-it-yourself website builder services. What they get is a website. It’s probably mobile friendly. But that’s all it is. Such websites lack any personality or branding and usually gets little or no traffic. And no leads or inquiries to speak of.

Most small businesses at some point or the other buy a domain name and get some form of a website up. And that is the end of it. If people do not already have a business card or know of the business by name, they probably will never find the business.

Having an inactive and infrequently updated website is a very low standard for a highly useful tool that could possibly be your best sales asset and could produce more sales than your best salesperson. To get the best results from a website, you need a carefully crafted look and feel, a precise message and information that is easy to digest for the visitor.

A website must inspire confidence in you as a company and allow a visitor to contact you easily. A website must appeal to your target market. For example, if you intend selling specialized insurance products on your website, do not create a website that appeals to a younger market. Your website should be information rich and easy to read with more of a focus on specifics rather than on pictures. Your website should convince the educated visitor that you know what you are doing while at the same time convince the casual visitor or the researching customer that your firm could be a possible fit.

Think about it. Would you not voluntarily pay more at a fine restaurant just because their décor and service appears to be better than a cheaper restaurant? The same concept applies to the business of building websites. First impressions matter a lot.

The next pieces of the internet marketing puzzle are to ensure that the website is search engine optimized so that you have a good chance of appearing in search results for targeted searches and all avenues to reach your business website via multiple avenues such as a social media sites, are exploited.

Many small businesses (and some large ones) build a website and forget about it for months. This is simply counterproductive. What you need is a constant trickle of content on your website that interests search engines and which targets relevant visitors. For example, if you are a sports instructor – you need a strategy to produce a regular stream of useful content that in time, creates a constant stream of organic traffic to your website. Content which is useful and which people tend to share with others who may value such content is gold in terms of generating viral traffic for your website.

All of this takes time. And most small business owners simply do not have the time or staff to dedicate to this activity. We create custom website management packages for small businesses where we agree on a set fee and set number of hours of services each month where we produce content for you, promote your website and perform all security related maintenance tasks for your website on a set schedule. In addition, we send you a high level monthly reports with metrics for you to see the traffic and various traffic related statistics to your website.

Why is there no one-size-fits-all solution for all small businesses? One would think this would be the norm considering how many web service providers offer a menu of web services packages. But it is simply not realistic and usually a waste of money.

Consider this: How many hair salons are there in your city? How many pizza shops are there around you in a 5-mile radius? How many automotive body repair shops are in your city? The answers all differ and usually is dependent on the number of people in a geographical area that can support a business.

Competition online, with respect to small business websites, is directly proportional on how many possible customers there are in a geographical location, the value of each customer to the business and how many such service providers there are. For example, plastic surgeons, attorneys, small business factoring service providers belong to highly competitive industries with respect to online competition. A business owner in competitive industries needs to put in exceptional effort for getting targeted traffic and leads from their website. This could include organic traffic and purchased traffic simply because leads in these industries are exceptionally valuable.

So how can a one-size-fits-all solution work for all businesses? A better answer is that one must study the competition to figure out what the best online business strategy can be and how to best fund the resources required to execute on that strategy.

Finding the ideal solution towards exploiting all the marketing resources that the internet has to offer, is to partner with the right web services company who are consultative and data driven in suggesting solutions tailor-made for your business. Contact us. Let us set up a time to talk first and understand your business. And maybe we are the right fit for your business. It is crucial that there be a meeting of the minds before there can be any partnership.