Websites are not optional for small businesses in this day and age. Here in 2019, consumers expect and demand decent websites for businesses they trust. Gone are the Yellow Pages and window shopping, and in their place are Google searches and customers who blindly follow Apple Maps from destination to destination. Why shouldn’t they? It’s convenient. As a business owner, you’re the one who is supposed to be making life easy on the customers.
You make (or, more likely, pay someone else to make) a nice website for your business. Now customers can find you easily online and are more likely to patronize your business, right? It all depends on the quality of your website. It’s all about how well it is written, how easy it is to access on different devices, and how easy it is to find in the first place. Here are three major mistakes that could be ruining your business’ website.
Poor web copy
A website is your chance to establish your brand, conquer the competition, and bring in customers. But your website doesn’t accomplish all of this by merely existing. It takes an engaging layout, compelling visuals, and — above all — great writing.
Writing in general, and copywriting in particular, can be easy to overlook. After all, can’t we all write? Without proper grammar and attention-grabbing calls to action, your website won’t do the job that you need it to. That’s to say nothing of keyword density and other tricky aspects of web copywriting. A good web copywriter is worth his or her weight in gold, so don’t skimp on this important part of your site. A best grammar checking tool can reduce your work.
Bad SEO
Yes, we said “keyword density” just now. A keyword or keyword phrase is anything that you think customers (or would-be customers) might be Googling in the hopes of stumbling across a business like yours. If your website doesn’t have those same keywords on it, then Google won’t offer your site in results of user queries.
Keyword density is just one aspect of SEO (search engine optimization). SEO is all about getting your website to be among the top results for search engine queries related to the work that your business does; for instance, if you run an auto shop, you’ll want people searching “auto repair” to find your website, address, and phone number. Google is clever about delivering local results to local searchers, so even local businesses should be focusing on SEO.
SEO can be tricky, though, explain the SEO experts at LinkGraph.io. SEO involves everything from the text on your website to the way your website’s code is structured (HTML has lots of SEO possibilities while sites built with Flash are more limited). Your best bet for improving SEO is to turn to experts for outsourced SEO and digital marketing services.
A broken mobile site
It’s great that your website looks fantastic on your computer screen Here’s the thing, though: A huge portion of the people who look at your website are not going to be using desktop and laptop computers. Instead, they’re going to be using mobile devices like tablets and (particularly) smartphones.
Those sorts of smaller devices don’t display the same sorts of websites as laptops and desktops do (or, perhaps more accurately, they don’t display them as well, and the results are very ugly and not at all user friendly). That’s why good web designers create mobile versions of their websites.
Does your website have a mobile version? If so, are you sure that you have set up your SEO correctly so that Google doesn’t mistake your entire site for duplicate content? This sort of thing can be tricky, so this is another situation in which you might want to call up a professional and make sure that the job is done right.
