Best Practices for Small Business Websites

5,000 Fans and Zero Sales

Are you sitting down? Good. Now take a deep breath, and prepare yourself for shocking news: everything you know about small business social media is wrong.

Whether you’re a lawyer, an accountant, or the owner of a brick-and-mortar shop, your company does not need 1,000 fans on Facebook. You need business—not Diggs, Likes, or Mentions. Friends and fans and followers are great, but customers are better.

So how should business owners use their time online? Forget social media (for now), and focus on creating an effective website that promotes your products and brings customers—flesh and blood people with money to spend—through your door.

Website 101: Content and a Call to Action

Can a website really win your business customers? Of course it can! And a messy, ineffective website can turn potential customers away just as quickly. Every hit is a potential customer, but in order to win over visitors, you need to make sure that your content is coherent and appealing.

Even online, content is still king. Sure you need design to dress your content up, and you need to make sure that a visitor can easily navigate from one piece of content to the next, but in the end, if your content isn’t up to snuff, none of the other stuff will matter.

First, focus on a call to action. If you aren’t leading visitors toward a single, specific action (buy this product, click this link, subscribe to our newsletter), then you are losing an opportunity. Traffic is important, but traffic is ultimately useless if your customers are simply scanning paragraphs of second-order information (“About Us,” “Who We Are,” “News”).

A call to action is the tool that helps you grab a visitor’s attention, and it lets you guide the conversation. Decide on a goal or action that you want to promote on your site, and let fashion follow function. Design your site around your call to action, and you’ll be sure to see results.

Nuts and Bolts

Make sure that your web address is simple, sensible, and easy to remember. A user should be able to type your web address into a browser or a text field without having to work too hard. In other words, avoid dashes, numbers, underscores, and other unusual marks.

A visitor who stumbles upon your website shouldn’t have to hunt around to figure out 1) who you are, and 2) what you do. Put your name and any essential products or services front and center. You can either create a banner that announces your brand, or you can create a separate landing page that acts like a welcome mat for new visitors.

Finally, make it easy for customers to contact you. No matter how wonderful your website is, the soul of your small business is still you, a human person who can answer questions, troubleshoot, and field comments or concerns from customers. Promote your phone number and email address everywhere you can, including in your header, footer, sidebar, and any About Us or Contact pages.

When in doubt, place yourself in the position of the customer. What information would you want to find? What questions would you have? What content would you like to see? Then… make it happen!