Top 7 Things Every Small Business Website Must Have

In this internet age, everyone wants to be a part of the online world. Businesses of all shapes and sizes want to have an online presence. Having a web address opens the gate to opportunities that, for the longest time, were only available to those with a huge marketing budget. So, if you are a small business owner and still conflicted about whether you should have a website or not, my advice — is just to get a website. See for yourself how much it helps your business.

Finally, you decided to take my word for it and build a website for your business. But wait, building a website is not just arranging a few blocks together and adding a few images. As a small business, there are a few things you need to keep in mind while getting your own website. A website with proper planning is how you make the most out of your website. Otherwise, it becomes just another random website that sits on the face of the internet with no purpose.

Here are the top 7 things a business website must have to be successful.

Top 7 Things Every Small-Business Website Needs

I have been building websites for small businesses for over 2 years now. There goes a lot of planning and thinking behind every website but as a small business owner, these are the 7 things you must consider before building your website.

1. Simple and Easy to Remember Domain Name

A domain name is the web address that people type in to get to your website. Like Google.com or Facebook.com or netflix.com. Your web address must be simple and easy to remember. The name should be easy to type in by the users. If you get an unnecessarily complicated domain name, it will only harm you, because we humans are lazy.

So, make sure your domain name is short and easy to remember. Also, always choose the .com extension if available. All of us are conditioned to type that extension every time we enter any web address.

2. A Clear Description of You/Your Business

If someone finds your website, they shouldn’t have to do some investigation to find what exactly you or your business provide. Your homepage should contain a clear description with images of your business. Also adding accurate and clear information helps in SEO. What is SEO you may ask? I will talk about that in a second.

A website with clear descriptions and images will instantly attract users and they may consider becoming a customer.

3. Add All Necessary Pages

Every business website must have these pages on its website: Home, About, Testimonial/Reviews, Services/Products, and Contact.

Let me explain what each page does.

Home: The homepage of your website is the first page that opens every time someone types your domain name. It is extremely important to have a homepage that reflects your business. Make sure to have all the necessary information that a user might look for on the homepage.

About: The about page is when someone wants to know more about your business. This page builds trust, and it gives a background to your business. Here you can share how your business started or maybe the humans behind the business. Everyone loves a good story and the about page is the perfect place for that. It is also one of the most visited pages of any website.

Services/Products: The service page or product page is where you showcase your products or services. If you are a product-based business, you might showcase some of your top-selling products or the kind of products you sell or manufacture. Similarly, if you are a service-based business, make sure to list all of your services in clear words. This page is very important as this page will tell your users if you offer what they are looking for.

Testimonials: Testimonials or reviews have become a huge part of our lives. People look for reviews while buying a pack of gum online, so when they are deciding to buy something from you, they need to be sure that you are selling what you are advertising. A testimonial page is how you build trust, and it also helps the customer to decide if they want to give you the business or not.

Contact: The contact page is another extremely important part of any website. A contact page is how someone will reach out to you if they have any questions or any special requests. Having an updated contact page with accurate information is a must. Your contact page should also have a contact form. This will also act as a lead generation form as every time someone fills up the form you will have their information which you can later use to run campaigns.

Apart from these 5 pages, depending on your business you might wanna create some other pages. No matter the number of pages you want to add, make sure to include these 5 pages on your website.

4. SEO

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. This means, optimizing your website and content for search engines such as Google and Bing. SEO is a huge part of every website building. Your website won’t do you as much good if no one can stumble upon it. As a small business owner, you must have a basic idea of how to optimize your website content to better suit search engines. In short, make sure to use the correct keywords your customers are typing while searching for similar businesses and use those keywords effectively in your title, description, and URLs.

SEO is a huge topic in itself, and it is almost impossible to write everything about SEO here. Please let me know if you want me to write a separate article on SEO for Small businesses.

5. Call to Action

A call to action is a way to evoke users to take a certain action. In your case, it could be to call you, book an appointment, or fill up a form. The whole purpose of a website is to make people take that action so that you can close them as a client or customers. A call to action tells the visitor what you want them to do with clear tones of command.

6. Mobile Responsive

Almost 80% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices. As a small business owner, you need to make sure that your future customer can access the needed information on their mobile phone. Making a website beautiful and functional on both mobile and desktop is necessary to run a successful website.

7. Visually Pleasing

Making a website visually pleasing is as important as making it functional. If your website is visually boring with no character at all, even though you might get lots of visitors, not many will stick around for a long to convert into a client or customers.

Conclusion

In conclusion, having just a website and having a website that will bring you customers are two separate things. You can watch YouTube videos and learn how to put together a website in a day or two but knowing what, how, and where to put on a website is a completely different thing. That’s why most small businesses prefer to work with professional freelance web designers to build their websites. Anyway, I hope I was able to shed some light on what top 7 things to keep in mind when you decide to build a website for your small business.

And in case all of these sounds very complicated to you and you wish to hire me to build a professional-looking website that will also generate leads for you, you can contact me. I have worked with small businesses in various industries, and I know what a business need.