Your Web Site for a Small Business

Your Web Site for a Small Business

It is critical to include a website in your marketing plan because it allows you to broaden your target audience to include anybody who has access to a computer and the internet. According to Statistics Canada, in 2003, about 60% of Canadians had access to the internet at home, and around 8 million had regular access to the internet from someplace, whether it was at home, at work, or at school, according to Statistics Canada.

And that's just for the country of Canada. Sales of ecommerce products in Canada were $7.2 billion, yet we barely grabbed 4% of the worldwide ecommerce industry! In order to contact some of those internet users and to get a portion of the $7.2 billion spent on e-commerce, you must first figure out how to reach them.

To begin with, you must construct it.

The first step is to create a website for your business. If your firm already has business cards and stationery, it's advisable to base your website design on such materials as much as possible. Branding is aided by the use of a consistent corporate identity and website.

I like websites that are basic, have a simple style, and are easy to navigate. When building a small company web site, my first priority is to create a clean, basic layout with attractive images, a balanced style, and pleasing color choices. Make sure you only utilize visuals sparingly and that they are optimized for your website since internet surfers have short attention spans. If your page takes too long to load, people will abandon it.

The navigation should be simple to identify and use, and it should be consistent from page to page across the website. I've been disappointed with more than one website because I couldn't locate their navigation menus readily.

Small company websites are dynamic and constantly evolving. They change throughout time. You have to start somewhere, and creating an introduction website is perhaps the most straightforward option. Five pages are basically all you need to get started. You can always add pages later if you want to. The most essential thing is to simply go ahead and do it—to take the jump and put yourself out there.

You may have five pages, including an index or home page, about us, services, contact information, and a site map. The index page serves as your landing page for visitors. Although it is customary for its design to be a bit more elaborate than the others, this is not always the case.

I prefer to design using CSS (cascading style sheets) rather than HTML (hypertext markup language) since it is just simpler to develop a web site and update its layout with CSS rather than HTML alone. A modification to a CSS sheet affects all of the pages on your website at the same time.

The most important thing is to have good content.

The creation of content should begin as soon as your site is finished being created. Having a beautiful site with high-quality material is crucial, but having a beautiful site with low-quality content is even more so.

Your small business home page presents you and your company—who you are and what you do. It serves as an introduction to your customers. The "about us" page is often used to provide more information about who you are than is provided on your home page, while the "services" page provides more detail about what you do. Given that your site only has five pages, you might ask why you would bother with a sitemap. However, sitemaps assist search engines in finding all of the pages on your site.

When it comes to material, more is better, but only up to a point. It is important that your webpages be content-rich and educational, but they must also be relevant to your small company's operations. If a visitor can't figure out what your web site is about in a matter of seconds, they may abandon it.

The internet was created primarily for informative purposes, and that is still the case today. People have attempted trials with copywriting that is comparable to direct mail sales letters on a number of occasions, but they have always failed. It seems that individuals use the internet mostly for information gathering rather than for any other purpose. Knowing this will assist you in writing pages that people will want to read and share with others.

Getting people to come to your site

You could simply go with your instincts and start writing, but hold off for a moment. You must do some preliminary study before proceeding, or else your website will not appear high enough in search results to be discovered. It's impossible to explain everything about search engine optimization in this short essay, but among other things, search engines identify your pages depending on the phrases you use in your content.

So, assume for a second that you're sitting on the opposite side of the table from where you are. If you were a customer of your own company, what terms or phrases would you use to search for your company's product or service on Google? Inquire with friends and neighbors about how they would go about searching for your product or service.

When you've come up with a few ideas, run them through a keyword suggestion generator to see how they perform. You may also use that feature to recommend words and phrases that are similar to your own. Afterwards, determine how many results there would be if you searched for that particular keyword. What you want to do next is filter down your options to the terms or phrases that are most often searched for but that provide the fewest number of results.

Remember that most people don't go beyond the first three pages of search results for any given search phrase, so if your company isn't included on the first three pages, it's unlikely that it will be seen at all. If there are millions of hits for your term, it's possible that you only need to narrow it down a little further.

Consider the following scenario: you own a small business consulting firm that specializes in communication for small businesses. In fact, searching for the phrase "communication" is essentially meaningless since there are approximately 2 billion matches for that word in Google search results. In contrast, just 974 items were returned for "small business communication."

That's a lot better, but how frequently is that phrase searched? Approximately ten times every day, according to WordTracker, it is looked for. We're doing well, but I believe we can do better. What about "consulting for small businesses"? That phrase is searched for 261 times every day, and there are 373,000 results returned for it. According to several experts, that might be the most effective main phrase for a small business communication consulting organization.

What you want to do is create your content around the words and phrases that you've selected. You don't need or desire many—three or four will do very well.

Getting people to come back again and again is a difficult task.

Getting users to return to your website time and time again is a very straightforward process. Maintain the vibrancy and freshness of your material, ensure that it is useful, and add to it on a regular basis.

I hope you come to the conclusion that your small company needs a website. It's the most effective technique I've found to reach a larger number of people with relatively minimal financial expenditure.