Is your Website Actually Helping You Gain More Local Business?
Did you know that 85% of local services performed start with a local google search? A website can either act as a customer generating business tool or simply an expensive billboard that goes unseen. Most websites are unfortunately only offering basic business information, which google and social media do for free. The leaders in your industry have evolved their websites from a basic information website to a website with a higher purpose; to collect leads and convert visitors into new customers. Your website is one of many branches on your business’s “marketing tree”. Without it, your company will be missing out on a section of leaves.
Why Is a Quality Website Important For All Businesses?
It is a well known fact that people search the internet for businesses, products, services, etc. The days of relying on phone books or the yellow pages are long gone. If someone needs to find information, they are most likely turning to the internet to find it. When they search google for something that your company happens to offer you must make it a point to show up and show up and looking good. Remember, consumers only want to do business with the best!
Your online presentation is important because your website is the personalized impression you give potential customers. If they found you through a search or through a link on social media, your website will be the first point of contact with them. Your storefront, showroom, office, and customer area all look presentable, right? Why? Because you know customers will see it and form an opinion about your business based on it.
Think of your website as your digital storefront and potential consumers are looking at it and forming an opinions about your business based on it. 88% of consumer local business searches on a mobile device either call or visit the business within 24 hours.
What Makes Up A Quality Website?
A quality website is clean, well-organized, easy to navigate, clear, concise, modern, functional, branded, and motivates the visitor to take some sort of action. This action can be simply calling, emailing or scheduling a meeting or consultation. It is important to display information such as hours of operation, location, and contact info in plain site.
If you have social media profiles, having buttons linked to these profiles should be present so that visitors can follow your accounts. People want a quick solution to their problem and/or a quick answer to their question so make it easy for them to achieve that. They also want to look at something that is visually appealing. A quality website looks good in all browsers (PC, Mobile, Tablet.). You should browser test your website to make sure it looks right and functions properly across all browsers as more people are using mobile to access the internet than ever before.
A quality website is also well-polished. This means it has no spelling or grammatical errors, no outdated images or clip art, no 2005 web design traits, no blurry images, no loose ends. Your content needs to be complete and visually appealing. Fonts needs to match across the entire website and font color and size choices need to properly mesh. Using high quality images that resonate with your brand, videos or images of customers using your product or experiencing your service are proven to convert visitors at a higher rate than any other content you can display. 62 percent of companies increased their sales by designing responsive mobile platforms for their websites.
How Much Does it Cost to Build a Website for a Small Business?
The average cost of web design for small businesses can vary drastically according to the desired design and functionality of the site. If you are planning to pay a company to build you a website, you can expect to invest around $1,000 for a standard 5-page site. The company will work with you and take care of everything from configuring your domain name, linking it to a reliable hosting account, and building the website itself.
As the business owner, your only job is to give input about any subtle changes you would prefer to make along the way and confirm when the site has been completed. The average cost to purchase a domain name is around $10 dollars a year and can be purchased using namecheap.com. Hosting, which is where your website loads from, can range from around $100 and up per year and can become more expensive when your site needs more space, faster speed or more reliability.
What is the Best Website Builder for Small Businesses?
If you are thinking about creating a website for your business, we have you covered. We have used every website builder to date including wordpress, wix, squarespace and many others. We recommend wordpress for our clients for a plethora of reasons. In our experience, wordpress offers the perfect foundation of simplicity and functionality without being limited such as with Wix or squarespace.
When using wordpress you will have to first pick a theme to use for your website. A theme gives your a starting point with a general layout and color scheme that will attribute a unique feel to your site. A great website theme and visual theme builder that we recommend is called DIVI. DIVI enables anyone to drag and drop their website creation with the simplicity of WIX and Squarespace all while retaining the ability to make complex changes if necessary.
Most websites are run on the wordpress platform which means the support is the highest out of any other content management system (CMS) For instance just one of the Facebook support pages titled “WordPress Help For Beginners” has over 6.4 thousand members.
What is the Best Website Hosting for Small Business?
Website hosting can often become another decision that many new website owners will research for hours before making a selection. If you are paying a company to build your website then by all means let them take care of the hosting decision. As long as your website loads quickly, you are good to go! However, if you are planning to build your website yourself you will want to choose a good hosting provider.
In our opinion a poor hosting provider has slow loading speeds, bad customer service, and unfair prices while a great hosting provider has fast loading speeds, excellent custom service and prices that reflect what is being delivered. After trying all the most popular hosting providers such as hostgator, godaddy, bluehost, hostinger, etc our favorite and go to provider is Sitegorund. Siteground reigns champion for a few reasons such as being the fastest wordpress hosting provider, having the best live customer support with little to no wait times, and having a great price point as well. They also offer a free SSL certificate, free CDN for speed, and they offer an awesome plugin called SG Optimizer that helps to further optimize wordpress websites. Check them out here: We are proud to recommend them!
Final note: Keep in mind that most web design companies can fail to recognize a websites loading speed as being under their responsibility and only focus on the aesthetics it’s self. Make sure to choose a company who take loading speed into account when designing your website as there is nothing worse then paying to have a new website only to have it have a 8 second load time. Pages that load within two seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while pages that take five seconds to load have a bounce rate of 38%. This means that if your website takes 5 seconds to load you can expect more then a third of all people who click to visit your website to leave without clicking to any other pages.
To wrap up, your website can be a very powerful tool and we hope you enjoyed this post! Please feel free to share it to your social media accounts so that your business friends may benefit from this info as well!
Below are the resources we mentioned in this article.
–Divi Theme Builder from Elegant Themes
If you are interested in learning more, stay tuned and we will show you exactly how to your grow your digital footprint, increase brand awareness in a positive light and get more customers calling, emailing, and walking into your business than ever before. Digital Media Motion is a Digital Marketing Agency in Boynton Beach and serving clients nationally. Visit us here: Digital Media Motion.com
