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Doesn’t matter which industry you are entering, a great website is an essential tool for your company’s success. This is your connection to the vast and connected online marketplace.
As a webmaster who has worked on building or marketing over 50 small business websites, I know what it takes to create a great and engaging business website. If you are looking to build a new startup website or make your current site more effective, here are 10 key steps to getting started and helping your small business website compete effectively in the online marketplace.
01. Obtain a good domain name
Your domain name, also known as your website address, is often the entry point to your site. It is important that it makes a good impression for usability purposes, as well as for search engine optimization (SEO).
- Make it easy to spell.
- Keep it as short as possible. Easier it is to remember and type.
- Try to always make it a .com domain name, unless it is more appropriate to use extensions such as .gov, .edu, or .org.
- Avoid numbers and hyphens. They are hard to remember and less elegant and less memorable than word-only domain names.
- Ensure it is memorable.
- Make the address broad to facilitate future growth. For example, Amazon.com instead of BooksOnline.com.
- Research – Google it to see if a similar website address already exists online, and search on USPTO.gov to make sure it does not contain any registered trademarks.
- Check if the price is right.
- Create an SEO-friendly URL. When appropriate, try to come up with an SEO-friendly website address; ie, “www.LasVegasElectrician.com.”
02. Secure website hosting with good tech support
A website host (or sometimes referred to as a website hosting provider) is a company that offers the technology and services necessary for a website to be viewed on the internet. You connect your domain name to your hosting provider so that when users visit your website address, they are shown your website that you store on your hosting account.
Hosting services can cost anywhere between $2 to $100+ per month, depending on the kind of technology and support you choose.
Shared Server Hosting
“Shared server” hosting is more affordable and appropriate for startups, although there are some downsides – Shared hosting means you are sharing a server and its resources with other customers, which can make the performance of your site suffer.
Dedicated Server Hosting
Once a company is well established they should more to a “dedicated server” hosting plan, the most expensive option – dedicated server plan means that the physical server machine is entirely dedicated to your site; therefore, all the resources are yours and it is more secure than a shared hosting plan, as long as the technology is optimal.
Virtual Private Server
“Virtual private server” (VPS) hosting plan which offers the best of both worlds. A VPS is one machine that is partitioned to act as multiple machines, which gives it a similar affordability to shared hosting, with similar security and performance potential as a dedicated server hosting plan.
- Make sure the hosting company has a phone and/or chat support so you can be helped quickly if you have a problem. Support is key in keeping your site up and running smoothly.
- There needs to be an easy to use server interface like cPanel to access your server.
- Check to see what kind of server security is in place on the server you are considering. You will want to be able to access your server via Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). There should be daily backups being made of your server contents. There should also be an easy, one or two-click method to install Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.
03. Clearly display a description of your business
It is important to let people know who you are and what you do right away so they don’t feel confused when they visit your small business website.
Make sure your main homepage banner (also known as a “hero image”) and subsequent banners are visual representations of your services, and also that you have an introductory text blurb near the top of the page that describes who you are and what you do.
Additionally, make sure both your main and footer navigation menus have “About Us” page links easily accessible so people can click them and read more about your business in depth.
04. Choose a good content management system
A content management system (CMS) is a software program or application that is used to create and manage digital content.
A good CMS will help you maintain your site, and you don’t need much technical knowledge to use it. You should choose a CMS that is designed for your unique needs; different systems are used for different reasons, such as user-friendliness, extensibility, and budget.
WordPress
WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS. It has a vast, active support community and many useful plugins to extend the functionality of your site. WordPress has no monthly fees and is easy to install – only custom plugins are priced accordingly. I normally recommend that small businesses use WordPress to create their websites, due to its flexibility and extensibility.
HubSpot CMS Hub
HubSpot CMS Hub is a fully integrated content management system that is specifically designed for marketers and business owners. Because it is built on top of HubSpot’s CRM platform which includes all sorts of marketing automation, sales, service, and operations tools, CMS Hub is an ideal solution for growing businesses as well as large enterprises looking for an all-in-one system to manage their website. Their drag-and-drop editor, built-in SEO tools and contact attribution all makes it easy to create and optimize your web content.
Shopify
Shopify is another all-in-one hosted CMS platform. You won’t need to buy hosting, install any software, or manage things like updates and backups. It has a straightforward drag and drop interface. It supports in-store sales, which is great if you have a physical store as well as an online one. The main con is that your costs can end up quite high, especially if you want to add lots of third-party apps to your store.
Squarespace
Squarespace is a service you subscribe to monthly or annually that makes website and blog creation an easy “drag and drop” experience. It includes website design, development, software maintenance, metrics, domain name with annual purchase, SSL security, 24/7 support, and unlimited bandwidth and storage hosting all in one package. If you are on a tight budget, need a simple and beautiful site, but cannot afford a website designer, this is a great service for you.
05. Choose a good e-commerce platform
If you plan on selling goods and/or services through your website, you will need the right technology to do so. (If you do not currently sell anything, you may want to consider doing so since e-commerce could potentially increase your profits.)
If you decide to allow users to financially transact with you online, you will need to choose the right platform for your business model.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the world’s most popular e-commerce platforms—it can turn your WordPress website into an online store. Like WordPress, there are many plugins available, and it attaches to WordPress, which makes it extremely flexible. There are many free and premium themes pre-built for WooCommerce.
Shopify
Shopify is a cloud based e-commerce platform that allows you to create and customize an online store, and to manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping. It is not a WordPress extension like WooCommerce—it is a standalone platform that is hosted on the Shopify server—so if you have a main website, your e-commerce site would technically be separate from that.
Squarespace
Squarespace has an e-commerce subscription option, so if you chose Squarespace to build your site and have very simple e-commerce needs, you can choose this route. Business Squarespace charges a transaction fee, but this can be bypassed by upgrading your subscription to a basic online store.
06. Create an interesting, memorable, and engaging website
Make sure your small business website interface leaves a positive impression that drives results. You can do so by implementing the following suggestions:
- Use beautiful graphics and easy-to-read fonts.
- Make sure your graphics are compressed and optimized for fast loading.
- Research the competition to see how they have designed and optimized their websites; implement similar components that will work for your small business website.
- Research your target audience to see what they want from your site and make it easy for them to accomplish it.
- Stay consistently on brand throughout your website design.
- Design an intuitive navigation system which allows users to get to the pages
they need quickly. - Publish easily accessible contact information.
- Incorporate obvious call-to-actions (especially “buy now” buttons).
Create pages that are standard for small business websites, such as:
- Home / Landing
- About us
- Products / Services
- Sitemap (for SEO purposes)
- Management team
- Contact us
- Terms of use (T’s and C’s)
- Privacy policy
- Pages relevant to your specific small business
07. Optimize your website for search engines
SEO is a set of practices you apply to your website to ensure search engines index and rank your website appropriately and then show it to search engine users. Once your website is “crawled” by search engines, it competes with websites that have similar content. The better your website design and content is, the higher your site will show up on search engine result pages.
SEO is an extremely important ongoing process that can mean the difference between showing up on the first page of search engine results pages.
SEO mainly includes the following practices:
- Keyword research and implementation
- Optimal website code
- Fast loading speed
- Being secure and having an SSL certificate installed; SSL is the standard security technology that ensures data passed between web servers and browsers remains private
- Having a mobile-friendly site
- Existence of high-quality backlinks (links on external websites with related content) that lead to your site
- Having lots of positive reviews online (Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.)
- Using internal links throughout your site to keep people clicking and reading
- Using social media to link to your site (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.)
08. Regularly create and publish quality content
Both content quantity and freshness are important to search engines, so it’s important that you create a plan to publish quality articles and/or blog posts on your site and on external sites that link to your site. If you want to rank highly in search engine results and encourage people to return to your site again and again, you will have to update your website with new and relevant content as frequently as possible.
In addition to static page content and articles, a great form of content to post on your website is testimonials. Asking for testimonials from your customers and then publishing them on your website is a great way to post fresh, high-quality content on your site that makes your small business more attractive.
09. Install webmaster tools
Make use of vital data to help you analyze traffic and site performance by installing Google Analytics and Google Search Console (both preferably via Google Tag Manager), and Bing Webmaster Tools.
These tools can be used to track the following types of information:
- Daily, weekly, and monthly visitors to your site
- Number of views on each page of your site
- “Bounce rate”—the percentage of users who come to your site and leave after having only viewed one page
- Average time spent on site by visitors
- Crawl errors on your site
- Broken links on the site
- Keywords that lead users to your site
- Backlinks to your site
- Web page download time
- Other information that can help you enhance your SEO
10. Implementing a website maintenance plan
A website shouldn’t be created and then allowed to grow stale. In order to have a successful website that ranks well in search engines and doesn’t get hacked, you need to make sure it is properly maintained.
Conclusion
As you can tell after reading this article, creating a great small business website may not be as simple as you first thought. However, if you follow the steps set forth in this article, your small business will have an excellent chance at succeeding in the online marketplace.
Ready to get started with your very own website?