There are a lot of critical elements that go into creating a small business website – often details can get overlooked in the early stages as you’re focusing on building your business. Here’s a list of the main things to remember when you’re setting up your new small business website.
Choosing a domain name for your small business website
What is the first thing you do when you visit a website? If you guessed typing the domain name into the address bar, you’d be wrong! Before you can even type the domain name, you need to remember what it is!
Choose a memorable and relevant domain name is an essential first consideration when creating a website for your small business.
Find a domain name that is short, concise, and represents your brand.
Make sure that you’re using an extension that is most relevant to your type of business. “.com.au” domain names are more widely trusted amongst Australians over a “.com” domain.
If your business operates internationally, you should consider using the most relevant domain in each country your serve.
Make it clear what your small business does!
There’s nothing worse than landing on a webpage… and not really knowing if the business is able to provide the specific service you’re looking for.
Make sure your website’s copy is clear and to the point. And ensure that all the critical information about what your business offers is easily findable and readable in a prominent part of your website.
Mobile Friendly UI
About half of all web searches are performed on a mobile device. Having a pretty desktop website is great and all, but if your mobile site is lacking, you’re going to have problems.
Prepare to be hit with an SEO penalty if your mobile/tablet website isn’t adaptive. Google and other search engines are able to test the readability and adaptiveness of your website, and if it fails the test, your website is less likely to be ranked in search.
But why would they do that? It all comes down to giving users a positive experience. If users can’t use your website easily on their phones, they’re going to get very frustrated and leave your website feeling disappointed.
Creating a small business website design that is responsive is critical to maintaining a presence in local search results, and can be the different between customers choosing you over a competitor.
Local SEO for your small business website
How many searches are related to local information? Stats say that about 46% of searches are seeking localised information. That’s a lot of searches that your business could be ranking for – so it’s incredibly important for your website (on-page SEO) and other online profiles (off-page SEO) to be optimised for providing the latest and correct information to search engines.
Make sure that Google and other search engines are able to determine your location, and you’re much more likely to appear in localised search results.
Ensure that your phone number, email address, and physical address are up to date (and consistent) both on your website, and on other online directory listings. The more places that Google is able to determine and validate your information, the more confident it will feel in providing that information to search users.
Think about maintenance
What is the best website backend setup for small business? It is a much debated topic, and everyone will have their own opinion about this.
In our own website design and development, we use WordPress. We use WordPress because it’s highly flexible, reliable and easy to use and maintain.
If you need to make any tweaks or changes, it’s simple enough to do yourself. Publishing new posts and pages are easy once the design is set up for you.
Some say there’s a bit of a learning curve with WordPress (which is true), but once you have a good grasp of the most commonly used features, it will be very easy to maintain your small business website.
Think about growth
As your small business grows, does your website grow with you too? A major driver in our decision to use WordPress for our own website projects, is the fact that it is infinitely scalable with no extra fees. Whether your website has 10 visitors or 1000; 1 product or 50 – there’s no additional fees to pay.
A common complaint I see from others using Shopify and Squarespace (and others) is that as their business starts to take off and they add more products, they get hit with bigger and bigger bills. Hardly seems fair does it?
For the most sustainable option for your small business website, we recommend WordPress despite the initial learning curve.