Every day, we conduct audits of small business websites. From paint manufacturers to local restaurants, we have started to notice some common mistakes that many small business owners are making when it comes to their website. We know improving any website can feel like a massive undertaking. What big improvements are there to make that don’t have a high price tag attached? Plenty! Here are five low-cost ways to make your website more effective informed by other small businesses owners, just like you.
Keep Things Focused, Fresh, Informative, Relevant
Instead of a massive content overhaul on every page, you can easily make your website focused, fresh, informative, and relevant with a blog. Blogging is the best way to keep your content fresh and increase your web presence. Search engines are looking for websites that are active on any and every topic. If you invest some time into writing focused, informative, and relevant content on your particular topic, you’ll see your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) score rise.
Implement Google Analytics
This free service provided by Google allows you to track all sorts of information about how your website performs. With Google Analytics, you can find out how certain pages are performing and make changes to make them more effective. You can also track your visitor’s demographics, how long they were on the site, what pages they visited, what link they used to get there, and a whole lot more. At the end of each month, review your Google Analytics Reports to see what is performing well and where you have room for improvement.
Don’t Forget To Be Social
Take advantage of the power of your social media channels. Include links to your social media pages prominently. You’d be surprised how many small business websites we audit and discover they do not link to there social media anywhere! Include social sharing links on your blog posts and pages. Driving people to your social media pages will increase the chance that they’ll tell others about your organization. Keep in mind that your website is meant to be your strongest digital presence. It should serve as the one-stop-shop information source of your organization. If you are not connecting your social media channels to your website, how are people supposed to know you have them?
It is so important to use a mobile friendly, responsive web design. By far, website visitors are using a mobile device when navigating to your website. As of February 2021, mobile has taken the lead at just below 55% of the market, with desktop devices taking up 42%. To keep your website mobile friendly, you want to use a Responsive Web Design. A responsive website is a website that has been designed and developed to respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. This means that the website will respond (aka change slightly) to accomodate viewing on a mobile phone in the same way that it would respond to different screen sizes. If your website isn’t responsive, it can negatively affect the user experience of your website, resulting in more people leaving your site than staying and taking any action.
Ensure All Graphics Are High Resolution Graphics
Most mobile devices these days have what is referred to as 2x pixel density displays. Your website may look stunning on a computer monitor (1x pixel density display), so shouldn’t it also look equally as stunning on an iPhone or Android? To ensure that your images, graphics and icons look full resolution on 2x pixel density displays they will need to be sized at 2 times their intended viewing size and then displayed at half their actual size on a website. Websites that do not have high resolution images, graphics, and icons for 2x pixel density displays look unprofessional and outdated. Leverage the power of image optimization tools such as ImageOptim to crunch those images down to display high quality imagery at a much lower file size. You’d be surprised the amount of websites these days that aren’t yet doing this.
A final tip: Review your site on WooRank.com. WooRank is free to use one time and is subscription based after that. Use this tool to generate a report on how your site is performing. This report will tell you what you’re doing well and also give you detailed instructions on how you can improve. You will want to keep your score at around 70+ in order to assure that you are being indexed high in Search Engine Results Placements (SERPs).
