If you’ve made the excellent decision to get your small business online, you need to know where to start. Small business websites can be just as powerful and popular as websites for larger corporations. You just need to know which features result in higher traffic and engagement.
It doesn’t matter what industry your website serves. There are a few basic features that every website should have, regardless of its content. Read on to find out more and make sure that you’re making the most of your small business website.
Accurate NAP
NAP stands for Name, Address and Phone Number. Your website should have the same NAP as your Google Business Profile and any directory listings. Consistency is key, as conflicting information can confuse search engines and result in less trust in your business. It’s also important that users are able to contact you through the correct channels. You could miss out on a new client if they’re trying to contact you through an expired telephone number!
As well as making sure that your information is the same, it should also be displayed on your site as text. If you present your address and telephone number to users as an image, search engine crawlers won’t be able to read the information. This results in search engines having a much more difficult time connecting your website data to directory data online. Consistency equals credibility when it comes to NAP for small businesses.
A Way For Customers To Reach You
Now that you’ve got an accurate phone number on your site, you need to make it easy for users to call. Setting your phone numbers up as links isn’t a difficult task. You can also do this for email addresses, so users are only a click away from opening their mail client to send you a message.
A big reason for this being important is that the majority of users will access your website on their smartphones. Clickable numbers mean that they are one tap away from dialing your number. If users need to leave their browser or write down your number so that they can dial it, they’re more likely to get distracted or look elsewhere. Another benefit is that you can set up tracking on your contact links. This makes it easier to see how many users are making telephone enquiries after accessing your website.
As well as phone and email, users should be able to get in touch using a contact form on your site. These usually forward messages directly to your email inbox. It’s much easier and faster for users to fill in a form on your website than it is for them to open their email client and message you.
Service Pages
If your website doesn’t inform your users about what you do, it’s unlikely to build trust or help you gain new clientele. The best small business websites will have detailed pages about every service that they offer. These serve to explain what you do, how you do it and why your customers should choose you.
If the services that you provide are distinctive and different, you’ll need a separate page for each one. However, if you have lots of very similar services, you may want to put some on the same page. If you have lots of pages with very similar content, this could be interpreted as being spammy by search engines. You’ll know which pages might be best combined into one when you’re writing your content. If you find that you’re repeating yourself, those services should be grouped together on the same page.
Search engines such as Google value content that’s helpful. It’s no use having service pages if they don’t give users enough information to make a decision. If you work in a niche industry, be sure to explain every detail clearly. The best way to write for websites is to make sure that it’s formal, yet easy enough to be understood by a fourteen year old.
Reviews
Every business will benefit from a reviews page. This is the place to showcase the glowing testimonials that your customers give your business. By integrating reviews into your website, you can curate the best ones to display proudly.
There are so many different places for reviews to be left. So it’s good to collect them all and have them in one place. Make sure to check your Google Business Profile reviews, your Yell page, any other directory listing as well as your Facebook and any other social media profiles.
What your customers have to say about you can be a deciding factor for new clients to choose your company. Make sure your website offers users clear and easy access to your reviews, preferably in the main menu. This makes it easier for new customers to find your testimonials, which could push them into converting.
Blog
Our final feature is a blog page. Blog pages offer many, many benefits. This is your chance to increase your content and go into further detail about the services you offer. Blogs give you more creative freedom than service pages do, and they can allow you to make a more personal connection with your users.
In addition, blog pages create more pages on your website. This is great for SEO, as it gives users more potential landing pages to access your website through search engines. Because blogs tend to go into finer detail than service pages do, you could catch new business through answering long-tail search queries.
For Small Business Websites, Choose Search4Local
If you’re looking to get a new website for your business, choose Search4Local. We offer all the features we’ve listed in this blog and more. Get in touch today to discuss your needs and put together your plan for your new website.
An Example Of A Successful Small Business Website
Four Elements Catering are a Plymouth-based culinary business who chose Search4Local to create their online presence. They’re a great example of all the features we’ve listed here. If you’d like to learn more about what we’ve done for them, take a look at our breakdown of their web design and SEO packages on our case study page.
