10 Things Every Small Business Website Needs

If you want a website that not only looks great but is also capable of generating new leads for your business, make sure your site has all of the following ten traits:

An Easy to Remember URL

You don’t want multiple dashes or numbers in your website URL. Instead, it’s important to have a simple address. Since you will say it over the phone and may put it on marketing materials like posters or even billboards, you want something that can be typed in without any issues. Ensuring your address is easy to remember is also why it’s best to stick with .com, .net, or in some cases, .org.

Clear Navigation

When it comes to navigation, simplicity is always best. You want to be sure that regardless of where someone is on your site, they’re only a single click away from your main pages.

A Clear Explanation of You and Your Business

People should know exactly what you and your business are about within a few seconds of finding their way to your site. Failing to include this information can cause visitors to lose trust and hit the back button.

Prominent Contact Information

When it comes to perfect website design for a business, your contact information needs to be readily displayed. Even if you’re hesitant to include a phone number, doing so will help inspire trust among visitors. That’s true even if they never call you.

Real Testimonials

Continuing the theme of ensuring that visitors to your site trust your business, you should have real testimonials that customers have sent you. If possible, include people’s pictures next to their testimonials. Another option is to link to their social media profiles.

Use Quality Pictures and Subheadings

Since online readers like to scan, be sure to break up any big chunks of text on your site by utilizing relevant images and informative subheadings.

Tell Visitors What You Want Them to Do

In order to convert visitors into actual leads, you need to tell them what they should do. So whether that’s submitting a contact form or giving you a call, be sure your site makes that desired action crystal clear.

Regularly Add Content

Whether it’s news updates about your business or informative blog posts, regularly adding new content will help you engage visitors and bring in more search engine traffic.

Take Advantage of Google Webmaster Tools for SEO

The best way to ensure your site is accessible and doesn’t have any SEO issues is to sign up for a free Google Webmaster Tools account. This will provide you with reports, as well as alert you to any issues that need to be addressed.

A Reliable Host

If your site is down, it’s not going to help your business. That’s why it’s vital to carefully research your options before committing to a specific host.

A Professional Web Design Company Can Provide the Perfect Small Business Website

If you want to ensure your website has all ten traits, your best option is to let a professional team create or redesign your website. By working with experienced professionals, you will get a website that’s fully optimized to generate as many targeted leads as possible for your business!

Do you need a better website for your business? Web Strategy Plus offers a free quote or consultation to help you identify the areas of your marketing plan that need improvement. Learn More

Why Your Company Needs a Social Media Policy

One of the best ways for companies to get more out of their social media efforts is to get their employees involved. Not only does including employees in social media make it easier to consistently produce content, but having multiple perspectives is interesting for customers and other individuals who follow or encounter your company on social media.

Although there’s a lot of value in including employees from all parts of your company in social media, this idea generally brings up the same concern. That concern is how can a company be sure that the employees who are communicating on behalf of the company will do so in a way that reflects the company’s brand and avoid posting things that could have a negative impact. Continue Reading...

Social Marketing Tips To Survive The Ever-Changing Facebook Algorithm

One of the biggest challenges of social media marketing is the constantly changing landscape of sites like Facebook. While it’s clear that social media is now a key component of the Internet and is here to stay, that doesn’t change the fact that individual sites are continuously changing everything from design elements to their core functionality.

Whether a site makes a change because they want to provide a better experience to users or simply because they’re trying to make more money, what matters to you as a social media marketer is staying on top of these changes and knowing how to adapt your strategy. Since Facebook has made algorithm updates a frequent practice, let’s take a look at four ways you can prevent even a major update from derailing your social efforts: Continue Reading...

Learn Why Your Business Should Utilize Infographics

Whether it’s through your business or personal social media profiles, you’ve probably seen countless infographics over the years. The reason that infographics are so popular on social media is because they possess multiple traits. Those traits include being attractive, grabbing attention, providing educational value and expressing creativity.

Infographics have become and remained so popular that there are critics who have said that this medium would fizzle out. But while Google did take action against unsavvy SEO providers that abused infographics to help build links, quality infographics that deliver on what they promise continue to be extremely popular on social media. Continue Reading...

6 SEO Tips and Tricks

One of the reasons search engine optimization is so challenging is because it’s a tactic that’s always changing. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, here are the SEO tips and tricks you need to know:

#1 Make Your Site Faster

Google knows that if a visitors has to wait forever for a site to load, it’s almost guaranteed that they’re going to abandon that site. Because Google doesn’t want to send visitors to sites that don’t properly serve their needs, Google has made site speed a major element of their ranking algorithm. Continue Reading...

Why Your Business Should Consider a Pay Per Click Campaign

When businesses think of strategies like social media marketing or SEO, they often think of them as all or nothing propositions. While it’s easy to understand why this mindset is so common, the reality of online marketing is that the best results generally come from utilizing multiple channels at the same time.

The Internet is a very busy place. Because there’s so much happening online, people’s attention is constantly being pulled in a dozen different directions. That’s why it’s usually not realistic to think that people are going to come across your business one time and immediately become a customer. Continue Reading...

5 Killer Content Marketing Strategies That Engage Mobile Readers

When people go online, there’s a good chance they’re doing it from a mobile device. Whether it’s on their phone while they’re out or using a tablet from the comfort of their couch, these devices are changing the way people of all ages interact with online content. What’s interesting about this behavior is it may not always be mirrored by the people creating the content that’s so often consumed on mobile devices.

Many content creators prefer to use laptops or even dual monitors as they create content that will be published online. While there’s nothing wrong with that type of workflow, it is important for creators and businesses to remember that the content they publish may be accessed on small screens with slower mobile connections. Continue Reading...

The 4 Best Social Media Marketing Tactics Businesses Need to Know

Over the last few years, social media marketing has gone from a practice that many people questioned the effectiveness of to something that businesses of all sizes view as essential. But just like other online strategies such as SEO, knowing that social media marketing is important doesn’t make it easy. Given that large platforms like Facebook and Instagram continue to change their algorithms, many businesses struggle to use their social reach to connect with the types of prospects they care about.

If you’re committed to finding success with social media marketing but aren’t sure where to focus your attention, we’ve put together the top four social media marketing tactics that will help you thrive: Continue Reading...

Facebook’s New Algorithm - What Does It Mean for Your Business?

In 2012, YouTube made a big change to their algorithm. That change was prioritizing time watched over clicks. The goal of this significant change was to reward creators who made engaging videos instead of those who were simply good at crafting “clickbait” thumbnails.

Over the last year, Facebook has received a lot of negative press coverage. Much of this coverage related to concerns about Facebook’s influence on the latest US presidential election. There have also been concerns raised that the content many people are consuming on Facebook is making them less happy. Continue Reading...

Instagram Marketing - The 5 Tips You Need to Know

Although Instagram is by no means a new social media network, its popularity has really exploded over the last couple of years. While the visual nature of Instagram makes it a no-brainer for fashion brands and other companies that sell products, this channel can also work great for countless other companies as well. From SaaS tools to service providers, the key to making Instagram a viable marketing channel is understanding what users want to see and how to connect with a target audience. So with those goals in mind, we want to cover five tips that will put your Instagram marketing on the fast track: Continue Reading...

B2B vs B2C Marketing: What Sets Them Apart?

In order to grow, both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies need marketing. While there is plenty of overlap between B2B and B2C marketing, being truly successful with either form of marketing requires several key elements.

To help ensure your company’s marketing is on the right track, we’re going to get to the root of B2B and B2C companies. We will then take a look at the specific marketing elements that are most important for each. Continue Reading...

Proven Ways to Increase Your Email Clickthrough Rates

Whether it’s your weekly newsletter or an email announcing a special promotion, the goal of most of the emails your business sends out is to get the recipients to click a link in the email and then take a specific action on your website.

The first step in this process is getting as many recipients as possible to open the marketing emails you send. Since there’s plenty of free information online about how to write great email subject lines, this post is going to focus on how to get people to click a link once they’ve opened your email.

Regardless of how well your current marketing emails are performing in terms of clickthroughs, here are seven different ways to increase that important metric: Continue Reading...

PPC Advertising Needs to Be Part of Your Online Toolbox

There are two common misconceptions about PPC advertising. The first is that it’s too expensive for anyone but members of the Fortune 500. While it is true that blindly diving into PPC can be an expensive mistake, as long as you enlist professional guidance, this form of advertising can provide an attractive ROI for a budget of almost any size.

The second big misconception is you have to choose either PPC or SEO. In reality, these two methods can complement each other really well. Whether you’ve got a new site or have just now decided to start investing in SEO, organic traffic takes time to build. So instead of getting impatient, you can use PPC to start getting traffic now. And even once the organic traffic does start flowing, you can continue using PPC for things like deciding which terms are worth investing in with SEO. Continue Reading...

5 Ways to Grow Your Pet Business With Social Media

It’s estimated that pet owners spent just under $70 billion in 2018. Although people outside the industry might assume that was a typo, any business owner who serves this industry understands that pet parents are more than willing to spend plenty of money on goods and services for their animals.

While the pet industry presents a lot of opportunities, there’s also no shortage of competition. The good news is there are still lots of ways to make your pet business stand out. If you want to make 2019 your best year yet, here are the five best ways to market your business: Continue Reading...

How to Make SEO and UX Design a Winning Combination

The goal of search engine optimization is to bring targeted visitors to your website. When SEO is done correctly, your website will rank at the top of Google for a variety of highly relevant searches. However, it’s important to understand that SEO is just part of the equation for online business success. Once those targeted visitors arrive, they need to have a great experience on your website. If your SEO is strong but your focus on user experience is weak, the traffic you work so hard to attract is going to leave your site and never return.

Another reason that UX design is something that should be thought about under the same umbrella as SEO is Google continues to place more emphasis on user actions when calculating its search engine rankings. That means regardless of how many quality links you build, if your site has serious problems like the majority of visitors clicking the back button shortly after arriving, it’s going to be very difficult for your site to achieve the best possible rankings. Continue Reading...

Top 5 Ways to Get More Views, Engagement and Shares for Your Facebook Videos

If you heard someone talking about an online platform where over one hundred million hours of videos are watched every day, there’s a good chance you would assume they were talking about YouTube. While that’s a completely reasonable guess, it’s surprisingly not the answer. Thanks to Facebook’s focus on video over the last couple of years, they’re now a platform that’s responsible for all that video consumption every single day.

Given that people are already watching so much video on Facebook, it makes sense to use this specific type of content to promote your business. So whether you’ve already tried publishing some videos on Facebook or are interested in adding this type of content to your strategy throughout the rest of the year, we have five proven tips that will help you get more views, engagement, and shares on every Facebook video you publish: Continue Reading...

How to Produce High Quality Content People Will Share

Are you looking to create high quality content people will share? Ask yourself, would I share this? Better yet, you can ask someone in your target audience what they’re interested in learning more about. If your content is deemed useful, inspirational or entertaining it’s going to get shared - and if it’s really good, it can spread like wildfire. Be sure you define a clear purpose for each piece of content you produce and stay focused. Continue Reading...

5 Tips for Social Media Content Creation

Here we have listed the top 5 tips for social media content creation; such as - be relevant, be different, be careful with your posting strategy, be current, and be grateful.

1) Be relevant. Make sure you have a good mix of content types. For example, call-to-actions with non commercial posts, contests, industry news etc. 80% of your content has to focus on your fans’ needs and interests and 20% should promote your brand. Continue Reading...

5 Common Misconceptions About SEO

In today’s world of digital marketing, SEO plays a vital role in helping you reach your target audiences and build a strong online presence. Keeping up to date with the latest SEO practices and information is vital to the success of your online campaigns, but with so much material available it’s easy for misconceptions to be passed off as “expert advice.”

1. You Don’t Have to Worry About Keyword Research

Keyword research is still a vital part of digital marketing, and ignoring the importance of keywords can be dangerous. So can keyword stuffing. Continue Reading...