Even the birds in the trees know that small businesses need websites. Without a website, it is as if your business does not exist these days. A website provides your business with an opportunity to attract new customers, promote your brand, discover new leads and avenues of making money and much, much more.
Unfortunately for a relatively large number of SMBs, they do not always handle their websites perfectly. In fact, they are quite prone to mistakes and today, we will be looking at the 5 most common.
1. Missing the Information – Usability Balance
A business website needs to provide information about the company. It needs to be very clear what the company is about, what it does and how it handles its day-to-day operation. It needs to provide information on both the company and the people who work for it.
That being said, it should never be too “crowded”, assailing the visitors with unnecessary information and features that will only serve to confuse them. People visit company websites because they need information or because they want to do something. They do not need to go through seven videos depicting your company’s earliest days before they can find out what you do.
2. Being Too Slow
People hate slow websites and this is particularly true for business websites which are supposed to be functional and navigable in a matter of milliseconds. This is why one of the worst website mistakes SMBs can make is not making their websites fast enough.
This often happens because of a lack of knowledge about hosting basics. For example, instead of going for shared hosting, they choose VPS or they do not bother to scale up as their website grows and the number of daily visits explodes.
Other websites are not optimized well enough, with unnecessary features slowing everything down and with various bad decisions further bogging things down.
3. Not Featuring a Blog
For some reason, many SMB owners do not think that their company website should feature a blog. Sometimes they do not have the time and other times they don’t see the point. There are even those SMB owners who think their industry is too boring for a blog and that they wouldn’t get anything out of it.
Nothing could be more wrong than this.
A blog is a great vehicle for displaying the expertise that your company possesses. It is a fantastic way to show to the world that your company is being led by visionaries and innovators. A blog is also a great way to reach out to your customers and potential customers, as well as a fantastic tool for bringing more visitors to your website.
4. Ignoring SEO
In a perfect world, you probably wouldn’t need SEO. The fact that you run a reputable business and that you provide a great service for your customers should be enough for everyone to find your website online. Unfortunately, we do not live in such a world and SEO has become a necessity for a commercial website.
This will involve a whole lot of work, from optimizing your website for search engines to doing some link building through guest blogging and other tactics. It will involve doing a bit of social media marketing and perhaps even some paid ads on Google.
The important thing is that your website ranks high in search engines and, as the way things are at the moment, this will involve quite a bit of SEO.
5. Neglecting Mobile Users
One of the absolute worst mistakes that SMBs make when having their websites designed is not thinking about mobile users. It has been more than three years since the number of mobile internet users has surpassed those who use desktop computers and the ratio will be going in the same direction for decades to come.
For some reason, many SMBs still have websites that are either totally unusable on mobile devices or that are sort of accessible. This is not good enough. An SMB website needs to be just as functional on a smartphone as it is on a desktop computer. This means that you have a separate version that is 100% usable on a mobile device and that does not take away anything from the experience.
Closing Word
If you are an SMB owner and you have just realized that you are making one (or more) of these mistakes, the important thing is that you are aware of it.
It is the first step in making things better.