When you are in charge of a small business, you wear many hats.
Among those hats can be overseeing your company’s website. If that fits your bill, are you doing a good job of making sure your site is always growing, both in traffic and revenue?
In the event you have been a little slow to focus on your brand’s website, there is still time to change that way of thinking moving forward.
For starters, make the time to sit down and do a review of your site, listing the positive and negative features it offers. By doing so, you might be surprised where you have to some degree dropped the ball over time.
As you finish up your periodic reviews, make sure you organize your website time and time again for maximum impact.
Get the Most Bang for Your Buck
Given that you have likely spent some money starting and then maintaining your website, you should make sure you get the most bang for your buck.
If you’re not sure what you need to be doing, keep these tips in mind moving ahead:
- Know your audience – What small business owner would not want to know who his or her audience was? Unfortunately, some running smaller companies are at times out of touch with their intended audiences. One way to lessen that problem is by doing the research necessary to get to know one’s audience better. You can do this in several ways. First, encourage feedback from consumers. Whether they are coming to your site for medical information, tips on remodeling their homes, a license plate look up, financial tips etc. they should leave your site feeling like you met their needs. If you haven’t, you may not get them back for a second or third visit. If that is the case, they may very well be visiting your competition next. You can also get a better feel for your audience by running occasional poll questions and surveys. Anything you can do to show consumers that you are interested in meeting their needs, that is something that can go a long way in making them long-term customers;
- Make your site viewer-friendly – Stop for a moment and think about the sites you view as a consumer. Do some of them seem inviting, while others would never get a second look from you? Given that is likely the case, use that same line of rationale when it comes to consumers and your small business website. If your site is hard to navigate, has irrelevant or stale blog copy, is not appealing from a design point of view, these are all reasons for consumers not to make a return visit or two. If you are limited financially in terms of your website and/or do not have the time or expertise to work on it yourself, there are web programmers out there who will not charge you an arm and a leg. Finding one of them could mean the difference between a stagnant website and one that takes off rather quickly;
- Don’t become predictable – Finally, your website can’t become one that is overly predictable. While this does not mean that you need to be changing the look and feel 24/7, some enhancements from time to time certainly do not hurt. Again, if this is not quite your area of expertise, having someone who is a whiz with website design and content is the way to go. Let he or she do their magic, allowing you to more squarely focus on running your small business. While some small business owners actually can get away without investing in a quality website, the bulk of them know that the website is their online calling card. Without a relevant one, they stand little chance of attracting business, especially as more and more consumers go online for their shopping and buying needs.
If you opened a small business years before the Internet even was a thing and eventually caught on, you may be stuck in a certain mindset.
That mindset; not feeling like you really need that much of an online presence or one altogether can be quite dangerous as a business owner.
Millions and millions of consumers spend ample amounts of time on websites daily.
Make sure one of them turns out to be yours.
About the Author: Dave Thomas covers small business topics on the web.