In today’s world, the internet has become a place where people rush when they want to buy anything at any time be it day or night hours.
This trend has grown since the pandemic. Due to this, entrepreneurs have taken that opportunity and created small business websites.
Consumer habits and technology are always evolving which means you also need to improve your website every now and then. Relying on the same website you created five years ago is not going to provide you with the results you want.
You need to adopt the mindset that your website is like a continuous process. You have to keep optimizing and reworking your UX and UI to bring in visitors and convert them to customers.
I.Benefits of improving your small business website
1. It makes your website more persuasive
When you stay for a while without updating your website, your calls-to-action becomes outdated. CTAs are a very crucial part of your website because that’s how visitors can get in touch with you or even make a purchase directly from you.
When improving your website, make sure you check every page to see if your CTAs have a persuasive and engaging copy, whether they’re on-brand, if they highlight the USPs, if they’re easy to find and follow, and if they would entice a visitor to click. Ensure your CTAs are interesting, actionable, and unmissable to drive conversions.
2. it reduces the bounce rate
Improving your small business website makes your navigation design better so it positively impacts the user experience. For example, revisit your website and check whether your navigation disrupts or irritates the customer’s journey or whether getting to the checkout point is a struggle.
If your website doesn’t offer a great UX, then there’s a greater chance visitors will leave which is considered as a bounce by Google. A high bounce rate can have a negative impact on your rankings and future traffic.
3. Readdress how you communicate with visitors
The content in your website is as important as website design, layout, and UX. Visitors come to your website looking for useful information to them and so by improving your website, you have a chance to refocus on how you communicate with visitors. If your content was wordy five years ago you can tweak it to make it simple and more effective.
Your website content needs to leave an instant impact on the visitors since that is what will determine how effective your website is. Always make sure that your website content is interesting and relevant as you only have less than three seconds to leave an impression.
4. It helps improve user experience
This is all about your visitors’ experience when on your website. Improving your website gives you a chance to look at how easy your website is to use, how fast it is, how easy it is to find information, and how much friction is there when a visitor tries to complete the desired action.
II. Identifying Areas for Improvement
a. Analyzing current website performance
When talking about improving your small business website, the first thing would be to analyze the current website performance to know where there is a need for improvement.
You can analyze your website performance using tools like Google Analytics. Installing these tools on your website can help you uncover all sorts of useful data about your website. This data includes the number of page views, number of visitors, how long visitors stay on the site, traffic source, top content, search terms used to find your site, and conversions based on goals you set.
You will also need to do a speed test for your website. A website that takes a long to load makes users grow impatient hence causing them to leave even before checking your website. If your website is taking more than 2-3 seconds to load you need to improve its speed.
Some of the other things you need to test are readability tests, A/B split tests, mobile website tests, and SEO reports. All these data will help you know the state of your website and where you need to improve.
b. Identifying changes to make
After analyzing your website performance the data you get from the analysis will tell you what you need to change or improve in your website. For instance, if your website’s loading speed takes more than 2-3 seconds you will need to explore ways to improve it.
If your website content does not fall between 6th to 9th-grade reading level then you might also need to work on that although this will largely depend on your target audience.
III. Cost-Effective Strategies to Improve Your Small Business Website
a. Update the design
You have to update your website design after a few years to keep up with the ever-evolving technology. If your website is outdated your site visitors are more likely to think your business is not up to date too.
Updating the whole website after some time can be a good idea but if your budget or time does not allow for the whole process to happen, make sure you redesign the homepage to give users a great first impression.
However this does not mean you completely neglect other pages, you will still need to update them. You can hire a web developer to update the design for you or you can also do it by purchasing a low-cost template.
b. Improve website speed
The speed of your site directly impacts the google rankings and the general performance of your site. People what to find the answers they are looking for as fast as possible and if your site takes longer to load they might end up clicking on another website.
To improve your website’s speed you will have to fast test the speed using speed test tools.
c. Enhance the content
For your small business website to be competitive, it must give your site visitors a good first impression. The content on your website says a lot about your business’s mission, professionalism, and attention to detail.
To enhance your content, you need to sit down and outline some tangible goals. Having goals for your website content will help, measure how far you are from achieving them.
The best way to go about this is to take the time to determine what exactly you expect your content to do before you write (or rewrite) it.
Keep your site’s content short and sweet since no potential client would want to waste time reading flowery language just to see what your company does. Go straight to what your business does and how that will benefit a client.
Your website content should encourage a conversation with your client. This can be done by using a first-person narrative to share personal experiences and give the reader a sense of conversation. Encourage clients to take action such as filling out a lead form using a second-person narrative.
d. Utilize SEO
Good SEO optimizes your visibility online which means more people get to see your website. The more your online traffic increases, the better your chances to reach more customers from different geographical areas.
SEO works hand in hand with user experience to help your business build trust with your customers. If your customers have a positive experience with your business, you are more likely to get more web clicks which increase traffic and your SEO.
Below are ways through which you can use SEO to improve your site.
1). Use keywords
Make sure that you identify and target a specific keyword phrase for each authoritative content page on your site. Think about how a user might search for something online. For example, if a user is looking for information on how SEO helps your website they can search for terms like:
- How does SEO help my website
- How to utilize SEO to improve my website
- Importance of SEO to a website
- Why I need SEO
2). Have a link-worthy site
Make sure that your webpage is content-rich, authoritative, unbiased, helps visitors learn more about their interests, and is more likely to attract links from other websites which improves your SEO.
You can improve your authority and credibility by adding links within a text. Try writing out the name of the destination rather than “click here” since it has no search value beyond the attached URL.
3). Use alt tags
Describing your image and video media using alt tags or alternative text descriptions allows search engines to locate your page.
e. Make use of marketing automation
We can define marketing automation as the practice of utilizing software to automate repetitive marketing tasks. It can be to automate and streamline everyday marketing processes through email marketing, social media marketing, ad campaigns, and push notifications.
IV. Tips for Maintaining Your Website
a. Monitor website performance
One major thing that plays a big role in maintaining your website is monitoring your website performance.
The number one way of monitoring website performance is by checking page loading speed. Website users are more likely to abandon a website permanently if it loads too slowly.
Your website should not take more than 5 seconds to load.
Use page speed test tools to get performance reports for your website. These tools will give your website an overall page score and show you how long it takes for your website to load fully.
The faster your website loads, the faster your customers will be able to make purchasing decisions about your products or services and this can influence them to come back since they were satisfied. If your website loads at a low speed, then there is a chance of a high bounce rate, which can make your website fall in search engine results pages.
You will also need to perform regular SEO audits to help your website rank on search engine pages. Through that you get to analyze your competition, test your website speed, identify errors on your website, see the status of indexing and crawling, or check and fix broken links.
Audit results will help you understand issues on your website that need to be fixed.
b. Stay up-to-date with trends
As technology and consumer behavior are always evolving, so are trends. Keeping track of new developments in the world of online and website designs can help ensure that the website adapts to the change hence remaining competitive.
Success in a fast-moving market such as Web design and development means staying current with the latest trends. You can remain competitive by paying close attention to what’s happening in your business industry, watching what others do, and making notes on up-to-date expert analysis of the trends.
c. Keep content fresh and relevant
Your website content must be updated regularly to attract and retain visitors.
Having fresh and relevant content on your site helps attract more users. Ensuring you include the date of publication at the beginning of the blog will also help your customers find your recent content. This will also help search engines filter recent content when ranking websites.
You also need to make sure that images are placed properly in the desired design on the page. If your small business has discounts, deals, coupons, and special offers, they must be updated daily.
Update contact information, terms and conditions, current copyright information of your small business website, and disclaimers regularly.
V. Conclusion
As mentioned earlier, always think of your website as a continuous process since it needs to be updated and to stay up to date for it to serve your small business well.
The above information will help you improve your small business website on a budget but most importantly you will need to update your web design regularly, ensure your website speed is fast and make use of SEO to drive more traffic to your website.
The above strategies will help you ensure your website performs as required, which is a win for your small business.
Related: How To Choose the Right Website Platform for Your Small Business