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5 Things to Consider When Designing a Website for Your Small Business

5 Things to Consider When Designing a Website for Your Small Business

If you run a business, particularly one that is online in nature, chances are that you would like to see more traffic for your website. Generating more traffic for your website is a crucial part of putting yourself on the map as a business. The more people who see your website, the more likely it is that they will purchase a good or service from you. However, generating traffic and maintaining customers is a process that must be considered with care. For the majority of people, there are certain things that they look for when deciding if they want to interact with your website or not. In this guide, we will address a few key ways to leverage these expectations in order to draw in more traffic.

"If your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, you are missing out on customers"

1. Gaining more website traffic is a matter of appealing to potential visitors. An effective  and fast website design is undoubtedly at the base of this. A well-designed and speed ready website is perfect for drawing in visitors. Your site speed is everything. Website visiters want instant results and if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, you are out of luck and will get the dreaded back button from a visitor which will hurt your bounce rate ( an important metric that google uses) and overall will hurt the chances of you showing up at all with google. Having a good design once they get to your website will look credible enough for people to trust that they can explore your website without risking any harm to their devices. A major element of effective web design in this capacity is built around having an aesthetically appealing design. Make sure you have a secure site as well. You need a SSL so that anyone that visits your site is sure to feel safe that their information isn’t going to be taken or hacked. Overall, you want your website to look nice so that people will want to explore it.

 

Don't get the "basic" SEO package, you need a pro that can get into the back end of your website and update every bit of data to pull customers to your website.

2. In addition to aesthetics, effective website design is dependent upon content and behind the scenes coding as well. A great way to gain more website traffic is through the use of search engine optimization or SEO. This is extremely important for your business. It is the basis of getting found online. Yes, you can throw up a website with WIX.com or any of the other big box stores, and they will give you a basic SEO set up, but to really soar with your company, you need a pro who will research your market, your customers and what the best optimized keywords/content is that will get you found. This process involves using the correct kind of words for your industry. Long-tail key words are the best and focus on more distinct and specific targets. This is what gets you found on google. Through the use of targeted keywords, you can more effectively climb the ranks of major search engines in order to bring more traffic to your website. In addition to using targeted keywords in the actual content on the website, you can do coding on the back end that will also improve how well your website interacts with the criteria being sought by search engines.  Specifics to this are updating the meta tags but also the actual content in your website, your H1 and H2 titles, your actual URL. All of these things need to be optimized and working together. They paint a picture for google to serve up your website when a keyword is typed into the search bar. It is great for helping you to ensure that your website comes up when people look for products or services that are comparable to what you offer. When more people see your website in search results, they will have a much higher chance of considering your website and services.

 

You have to be everywhere, all the time. You have to stay relevant in order for google to serve you up to the internet searcher.

3. Most people think that there is a difference between effective website design and affordable website design, but the truth is that there is . You pay for what you get.  At the end of the day, you can get a beautifully designed website at a reasonable price from a reliable developer or big box company, but do you really get the details behind the design and the mathematics that really make your website work? No, You need a pro to not only make your website look pretty, but you need to be found. You need detailed SEO work done for on page and off page SEO so that you are relevant to your market and your customers will find you. In addition to SEO, you need a off page plan including social media, blog post and constant information being fed to google so your business stays relevant. If you do it yourself of hire someone, THIS IS A MUST! You have to be everywhere all the time. Don’t hesitate to explore your options and find one that works for you.

 

In the end, improving your website traffic should be a business goal at all times when it comes to drawing in more customers. We live in a world where people generally won’t even enter a brick and mortar store without running a web search on it first. If you want to truly advance your social real estate and put yourself on the map, be sure to embrace effective website design to show your customers a brand that they can trust!

 

If you want some additional information on how to create more website traffic, let us help you!

 

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