We'll teach you how to create a small business website that gets the right visitors, get the right content, and make more leads.
Marketing & Strategy
How to create a small business website that fits your company goals & latest marketing requirements?
Implement the following tips to make sure your visitors get your messaging & USP right.
Treat your small business website as a funnel to get leads from each page.
Your small business website is a great leads & sales generator machine. The times when you could put your company info and expect conversions are gone.
Today 8/10 people make buying decisions online. Your competitors optimizes their business websites to make visitors know what they offer and why they should take action now. They treat their websites as funnels to convert more. If you do not do this, you lose.
Formulate your primary offer to convert visitors into leads.
Figuring out the one and primary offer is the best way to make your site clear to visitors and convert them into leads. If people consider the primary offer, they are more likely to agree to other services you provide. One beautiful site + one primary offer = more leads & sales.
Set up small business website goals to track & improve growth.
Would you start your business without planning your expectations & strategy? I hope you don't. Your business website is the business instrument for increasing revenue. Consider designing price, maintenance & hosting costs, improving your content, fixing broken links, and converting efficiency with realistic expectations.
Don't rush into the taking your business online & designing website by yourself. The website's existence would not make you more money. Instead, get a free digital marketing & website review, and our team would be able to help you formulate your needs and expectations and answer all the questions you have.
Here are some great examples of proper small business website goals:
- Appear on top of the 1st page of search engines.
- Engage & educate site visitors
- Increse brand awareness
- Get more website leads
- Increase brand awareness
- Increase sales
- Recruiting (HR)
Write blog posts to generate and increase website traffic.
There are 2 ways your website can get site visitors. It's advertising or making the content easy to find. Advertising can get results right now, but it's not a profitable option. Also, once you stop advertising, the traffic disappears. You need a cheaper & more automated option. It's blogging & search engine optimization (SEO).
Once you create an SEO-optimized page or article with internal and external links, you will get traffic for ages.
The more optimized pieces of content your small business website has, the more and more interested visitors you get. The more internal links you put into your articles, the more time they spend on your website browsing, increasing the chance of being converted.
Combining the content so it supports your primary offer and other content, you are multiplying the chance of converting visitors into leads.
Also, 8/10 people got to your website searching on the internet, are already warm or even hot leads. Advertising gives you a chance for 2-3 out of 10 people to click and visit your website. Make a blog, increase website traffic, and attract only qualified traffic.
Share a lead magnet in exchange for visitors' contact info.
What will you do with those visitors who are not ready for your primary offer? To not lose them, place a secondary action right by your primary offer and lead to your lead magnet.
In short, let it be a simple and valuable PDF helping your potential customers close some objections and lead to your primary offer. This lead magnet allows you to get your visitors' contact info, start email marketing campaigns, always be heard by your potential customers, and finally close them when they are ready.
Some examples of great lead magnets:
- Download your whitepaper
- Sign up for the webinar
- Get your free Ebook
- Download productivity templates
- Sign up for a free trial
- Subscribe for personal trainer videos
Remind your leads about your offers with email marketing.
Most of your small business website visitors will not close with your primary offer immediately. Some are still considering and researching. They will love to keep you in mind for later if you have clear messaging on your website. Give them this option. Allow them to subscribe to the monthly subscription.
Prepare 2 types of email marketing campaigns: sales and nurturing. A sales campaign is most useful when visitors download your lead generation PDF file. Nurturing campaign should be started for those who subscribed to your monthly newsletter.
Each one allows you to be not forgotten by your interested visitors. Email marketing helps your warm visitors be closed at the time when they are ready.
Connect Google Analytics to track your small business website efficiency.
Google Analytics is the primary tool that allows you to track performance and improve the efficiency of your website. There you can see what pages are most visited, what buttons they are hitting, how much time they spent on your pages and the percentage of those who leave. Google Analytics allows you to have accurate data to find weak spots and improve what's good.
Design
How to make a website for a small business that not only market you well, but also gives the good user experience to a visitor?
Implement the following tips to increase visitor's time on page & reduce leaving your website rate (bounce rate).
Plan website page structure to make browsing easy.
When users visit your site and lost, you will never have a chance to make him lead. Don't mislead your visitor and learn what the top 6 critical business website pages are.
Your homepage is a hall with doors to all other pages. Yet, most of the time, your home page should be a user friendly landing page promoting your primary offer, just mentioning some other content if it's critical to advancing your primary offer.
Start each page with a sentence about how it helps visitors.
Does the “Blog” or “About Us” title tell much? While your visitor understands where he is, it's unclear what interest he can find there. Be clear & straightforward. Consider “Weekly news, helping you take care of your pet” instead of “Blog.” Consider “ The story that enabled us to help hundreds of homeowners get rid of the pests” instead of “About Us.”
Keep your top navigation clean & user friendly to guide visitors.
Using 5 or more main links in the top navigation of your business website will confuse your visitors and will not let you lead your visitors' attention to the places you seem crucial.
Always have a primary offer link in the top navigation of your website to ensure your visitors always have a chance to check out the offer.
Place a newsletter form in the footer to always be able to get visitors' info.
If the visitor got to the footer, you have a good page. Yet, don't miss the chance to get the contact information of the interested visitor. Always have newsletter form in the footer to stay in touch with warm visitors.
Use the most contrasting button to lead only to the primary offer.
The average website visitor spends 54 seconds on a page. Teach your visitors that the most valuable content is behind the stylized button. Make sure it's a rule on your own website. Don't confuse your visitors or risk loose leads.
Don't use more than 2 colors to make website browsing easy.
You might want to add more colors to help your visitors see the importance of some specific elements on the page. But instead, most likely, you confuse them. It's the case where you should get the help of a web designer.
There are more vital visual elements than a color that helps your visitors to stay focused. Some are contrast, spacings, size, proximity, imagery, animation, interactivity, and more.
Sometimes visual changes are not enough, and you need to change the entire content on the page to simplify it. Again, don't rush with colors. Ask your visual specialist first.
Offer secondary action with the primary offer to engage visitors more.
When your visitor is not ready for the primary offer, help him with your lead magnet. Put a link to it right by your primary offer button. As a result, you combine “Primary Button” with “Secondary Button.” Use this combination on each page.
Ask for the business directly & clearly.
You will have visitors ready to take action to buy your product or services. Don't lose these people with passive, shy, smart, or fancy calls to action. Those people are ready to have business with you, and you?
Examples of a direct call-to-action button:
- Book a Call
- Buy Now
- Get a Quote
- Add to Cart
- Get a Free Trial
- Download Playbook
Development
How to create a professional website for a small business that fits all the tech & search engine requirements?
Implement the following tips to make sure search engines will promote you on the top on search results.
Choose the website system, considering your time & needs.
Are you planning to scale your website to get the most out of it and beat your competitors? If so, you need a website system that fits the following criteria:
- Stable & secure hosting
- Lightweight code & fast loading
- SEO friendly
- Fast & easy content editing
- Fast & easy design changes
- Supports blogs
- Able to scale up to online store if needed
- Bonus: ease of moving to WordPress if needed
We recommend choosing Webflow website builder since it fits all the criteria listed above during the first years of your digital marketing.
Purchase hosting that allows to scale and be always online.
Webflow hosting, content management system & website builder is what your business website is needed at the start as a hosting provider. Yet, when your business is scaled up, you might need to develop a custom solution for your website beyond basic business website needs.
If you need an advanced online store with detailed statistics or a complex blog, like Forbes, USA Today, and even Medium, here comes the hosting provider you can trust and build an WordPress website to customize this CMS.
You can learn more about online stores here.
The reason to switch to another hosting provider to create WordPress website is the more reasonable price on a bigger scale & unlimited website system scalability. Imagine it like a vehicle for your business. You don't start with a tractor-trailer truck; you choose a pickup at the beginning.
Search Engine Optimization
Use top keywords in your niche to attract qualified visitors.
Keywords are the bridge between your website and the searcher's intent. You will not get visitors by writing your content solely from your experience. You must perform keyword research beforehand, find top search queries, and base your content on these words.
Typically, you start with 30 keywords and optimize each page/article/post to these keywords. There are a lot of advanced tools like Semrush and Ahrefs for these needs.
Still, to start digital marketing for a business website, we use, therefore recommend Ubersuggest, which is almost 10x cheaper than other tools. Remember, the content on your site starts with keyword research. That's how you'll get qualified visitors.
Optimize Google My Business to let searchers find you faster.
About 9/10 people start their search journey to their need from Google. Are you listed there? Google's feature allows you to have a listing of your business on the right side of Google search results and can take the full height of the screen.
Google My Business (GMB) allows your potential customers to get essential business information and trust you. You can list your client's reviews and ratings, answer the most common questions, record your locations, socials, and website, share pictures, and mention posts that are crucial to building trust.
Nowadays, GMB is an essential tool for businesses that will acquire more leads and generate more sales.
Make page titles 60 characters long for good search results.
Make your titles 60 characters as maximum. In fact, you want to grab an internet user's attention instantly. You must understand that pages and their titles appear not only on the website.
Google search results, Twitter, Facebook, and many other traffic sources limit title length. If you ignore it, people will not be able to read your title.
Important Questions
How soon will a business website show results?
If you follow our recommendations, and each aspect of the website is done, you can expect significant results on 2nd month.
What is a good ROI for a business website?
The average visitor-to-lead conversion rate is 3-5%. Yet it all depends on the industry you are in. The focus should be on clearly understanding your funnels, which does not end with conversions alone.
Should I buy website maintenance?
It's necessary to improve your site performance & efficiency. Creating new pages and optimizing current layouts is where you need qualified web design & development support.
How much should a small business website cost?
It depends on your needs. If you consider your website an instrument to grow your business, then you need a service that includes site creation, digital marketing & maintenance.
An excellent small business website costs start from $2,500 to $10,000. And monthly digital marketing, SEO optimization, website content marketing & maintenance cost start from $2,000. Note: the main purpose of any site maintenance is to get it to the top of search engine results pages.
Should I choose any other website builder, or stick to WordPress website?
Despite Wordpress website builder is the most popular website building platform, today's market offers a wide variety of website builders which also offer web host. Many website builders are best in creating simple websites.
Yet, even if you need a simple website, we recommend you to focus on your site strategy & things like website name, website address while web design, development & web hosting services delegate to professional web design agency.
We recommend choosing Webflow as your starter website builder. Among other website builders, Webflow is pretty fast & simple in providing small business websites of any kind.
Can I make my own website for free?
Sure, you can build a website with many website builders. Yet, again, it's not about having a domain name, website address, content management system CMS a few pages like home page, contact page, and having your info and business name there. It's about your business needs & goals. Your small business website should increase you sales & leads, which requires monthly adjustments & content creation.
How to choose a web design agency for a website development?
The short answer will be:
- What do you need from your website?
- Decide on your budget, considering monthly services.
- Check web design agency portfolio, results & testimonials.
- Contact them to understand what they can offer.
Conclusion
So, how to create small business website for your online business?
You need to use a lot of marketing, design & development strategies. If you plan to grow your business, you have no option but to hire an agency that can handle all website marketing tasks and track your website performance.
There's a general ballpark of a 3-5% visitor-to-lead conversion rate, but it may depend on your industry. Is it worth the effort? We hope you see now that it is a rhetorical question. Nowadays, a small business websites & constant digital marketing is a must for your small business to get significant leads, this is why your business grows. Otherwise, you just lose the competition.
