Having a website is the beginning of a digital race.
Are you a start-up and have a small business that you have always dreamt of growing big?
If yes, you can do so successfully by laying the right foundation stone.
Getting an official website built is the right way to start.
But, a lot of small-business owners want to know how to build a small business website.
Given here are a few experts’ proven tips for building an effective business website.
Whether you are a freelance photographer, have a retail store, or have started any other small business, you can create a great-looking business website with equally good User-experience by following these tips.
1. Make a Mobile Responsive Site
The first and foremost requirement for a business website is its mobile responsiveness.
Owing to the growing number of mobile users, a lot of people access their sites on mobile phones.
As per a study, people spend more than 5-6 hours on their mobile phones every day and love shopping from their mobile devices. So making a site mobile is not a matter of choice for a business, especially a small one but a need.
Moreover, a negative mobile user experience has an adverse impact on Search Engine Rankings as well.
If a potential customer landing on your website finds your website difficult to navigate through mobile phones, they will simply leave your website.
Your Search Engine Ranking will be affected automatically with this kind of User-experience. When you are difficult to be found through a Google Search, your ranking suffers.
2. Make Your Website Easy to Found
This is one of the simplest tips for building an effective business website.
Your efforts should be directed towards making your website quickly found on all the major search engines. You should begin with buying a domain that matches your company name or describes your business anyway.
Inserting a keyword in your domain name is a good way to make your website found easily on Search Engines.
Your aim should be directed towards incorporating the best SEO practices, paying heed to Keyword Research, content marketing and paid advertisements for a better Search Engines Rank.
You can consider using the help of web development, SEO and branding professionals to create appealing websites.
3. Your Contact Information Should be Visible
Having a business means getting more and more people to contact you.
If you have a business that depends on people contacting you frequently, you cannot ignore this.
Your contact information (address, number and other things) should be clearly visible.
Putting that information right on the Home page above the fold is always better. This will enable you to render a good customer-care assistance whenever needed.
If you are using Social Media to connect to your visitors, you can put social links on your website’s header or footer section.
4. Decide What You Want People to Do
Though it may sound pretty simple, it is one of the most crucial steps to follow to build your business website.
What do you want people to do? You want them to get in touch with you, buy products or services from you, book an appointment, subscribe, or register.
This will help you decide what call of action should be there on your website.
5. Choose a Domain Wisely
Your domain name is the most crucial thing that decides the success of your website.
It is the front door looking at which visitors enter your site, so you need to choose it very wisely.
It should be relevant to your business, memorable, short and easy to spell. You need to avoid hyphens and numbers and make the domain SEO-friendly like this www.buckhingamcookery.com or .co.UK, or .in according to your geolocation.
Your website address should contain a keyword as well as your Geo location.
Do not book a domain name like .biz that looks spam. .Org is suggested when you are an organization.
If you are wondering how to build a website from scratch it should begin with an appropriate domain name.
6. Find a Stable and Secure Hosting
Some web agencies render you this service along with getting your website build.
However, buying your domain name from a stable and secure hosting service provider is always better.
There should be a reliable hosting service provider you can contact in case of any issues with your website, server or database.
You need to check whether you are provided with stable and secure hosting.
7. Carry Out SEO Audit Before Following SEO Practices
SEO is utterly important, and your website cannot be a success without it.
It is good to conduct research beforehand to find out what people like on the websites like yours, what they dislike and how your website can be ahead of the competition.
8. Take Care of the Content
Content is the king that reigns the Search Engines, they say and rightly so.
Once you implement CMS or Content Management System like WordPress on your site, you can be rest assured of getting your content managed easily. Get a blog section for your business website to keep posting useful and engaging content there.
Google loves content and posting useful content with the right set of keywords will help you get noticed by Search Engines which helps you in getting ranked.
If you do not know what makes a good website then just keep in mind that a well-written content goes a long way to make any website successful.
Apart from the regular blog posts, you should aim towards posting high-quality content in the form of slideshows, testimonials, short videos etc.
If you want your website to be shown on the top searches, you need to keep the content of your website fresh.
9. Webmaster Tools Should be There
Google Search Console and Google Analytics are the most powerful tools which enable you to analyze traffic and keep track of your website performance.
With the help of these tools, you will be able to get real-time updates like a number of visitors to your website, number of types of your page or an article on a page viewed, average time spent by the visitors, backlinks, loading time of the page and several other insights.
Check out your website regularly for broken links and bounce rates with the help of these tools.
10. You Need to Have a Website Maintenance Plan
When you know how to build a website from scratch, you should focus on regular maintenance because your website needs to run at full capacity.
You should aim towards minimizing its downtime as this gives a very wrong impression on the visitors and push them away whenever a link directs them towards a page informing that site is not functioning.
Apart from that, you need to run security scans from time to time to detect any type of malware or security threats.
You can also make use of performance data to fix any type of errors or warnings. Last but not least, you should use split testing to know if certain other versions of the website are performing better.
Bottom Line
A professionally designed and developed website is utterly important for your business success.
If you are a start-up and planning to take your business to the next level, you need to begin with having a business website.
However, if you do not know how to make a small business website, you can keep in mind the above-given tips and then hire a professional expert to get your website built and maintained.
