Growing a small business starts with ensuring that you build strong relationships right there in your locality. It is imperative that your prospective clients get an excellent first impression of you, so they will like and trust you.
The person or company a consumer chooses to purchase from is usually more than just an afterthought. Most people generally research a business that they plan to buy from. Your online presence, like a physical storefront, creates an impression in the minds of your potential clients. Unfortunately, many small businesses, don’t invest a lot of time into increasing their online visibility.
Research may turn up a few online reviews on sites such as Yelp. However, most times their businesses are not listed with Google My Business, their Facebook page is almost non-existent and often times they don’t even have a website.
Growing a small business starts with ensuring that you build strong relationships right there in your locality. It is imperative that your prospective clients get an excellent first impression of you, so they will like and trust you.
Below are a few of the keys to creating a local website to aid the growth of and help your small business flourish.
Draw attention to your contact information
The contact information of the business should be located that customers are likely to see it, whether they are looking for it or not. When your contact information is visible in more than one place on your site creates the impression that you are open and readily accessible, should your customers require information or assistance. When persons are making purchase decisions, they are assured in knowing that you are available if they need anything.
Your readiness to be contacted, also serves as a form of quality assurance. If you are not willing to share your direct contact information you create an impression of doubt about the legitimacy of your business in the minds of your customers.
The extra effort that you put in to be accessible is also recognized and rewarded by search engines. Search engines like Google have been seen to give a small boost to those businesses with their contact information placed on the homepage, especially when that same contact information is also visible on online directories.
Remember your target market
When building your site, you need to bear in mind who you are making it for. When purchasing your service or product, your customers will have to navigate through your pages, images, and choice of words.
Whether you are selling cars to the general public, packaging material to a local manufacturer or childcare products to parents, you have knowledge of your products, business, and jargon that your prospective client likely does not. If you immediately jump into talking about the pistons on an engine to the general public, you will lose them.
True, using the jargon does make it seem like you know what you are doing. At the same time, the customer really does not need all that information to come to an informed decision.
When your prospective client visits your website, they would like help to solve their problem. They have placed their confidence in your ability to take the information that they have provided you with and provide a solution that is tailored to them with the personal touch small businesses are noted for.
You also need to think about how your site is designed and the way in which your users will experience it. Be sure to factor in the impression that the website creates on your target market when designing with your locality in mind.
Avoid a site that creates the impression of a corporate level business as individuals may be intimidated or come to the conclusion that you are high priced. Instead, ensure that the language and funnel used moves prospects along to the section of the site that they need so they can obtain the information to deal with the problem facing them.
Cater to mobile devices
With the ever increasing pace of life, likely, a large number of your clients will be viewing your site on the go. Mobile devices are the media of choice to do this. Keeping this in mind when designing your site will mean that it will be responsive; that is changing the content to allow ease of reading and navigating minus the extra scrolling and resizing on any device that they use.
Asking your prospective clients to zoom in and out of pages and interact with tiny navigation buttons and links may be asking them to find some other business that is more convenient.
To keep your expense and effort within reason and practicality, you need to think about what would be most important to a client that chooses to view and interact with your site using a mobile device.
If you are a local restaurant, mobile users of your site would not need such information as your company history or your vacancies on the fly. However, they would likely need to information on your specials and general menu. Contact information is also among the things that any site needs to have readily available to mobile users.
Small and medium-sized businesses are lagging behind where mobile websites are concerned with nearly 95% not having a mobile platform. This represents an area where SMBs can get ahead and improve to stimulate growth and foster trust.
Keep your site content fresh
A lot of the online marketing done by small businesses is like a nine-day wonder. The enthusiasm to keep the website and social media page content fresh can wane after a while. Allowing the website design and language to become stale creates the impression of a business that is dated and behind time.
Let people see what working with you will be like. You want to create the image of being established and professional however you also want your prospects to see that you are able to relate to their problems and why it matters to them.
Better than any jargon, maintaining fresh web content relating to the problem(s) that your prospects face, helps distinguish your business as having the expertise and being able to furnish solutions.
When they see you address the problem, they become aware that they have access to resources locally to answer questions or provide some other assistance.
You are also able to use your web content on social media. Based on your prospects’ interactions, you can determine what is best to drive your ads. You may also be able to get a mailing list or just create a repository for those persons who need just need information.
Keeping your site fresh requires effort but it keeps your business current and is crucial to growing a local business.
In conclusion
There are many other things that you can factor into your website design. However, this list represents a good starting point on the essentials when getting your website designed. When hiring a website developer, these should be high on the priority list of keys to your website’s success.
