For small business owners, a website should have one supreme purpose — increasing their revenue. This increase comes in the form of new customers and increasing the value of existing customers — getting them to spend more, and more often. With that purpose in mind, let’s examine some of the more glaring (yet all too common) mistakes made by small business owners.

1. Not having a website at all.

It’s astounding to me how many businesses still don’t have a website! If YOU don’t have a website, then at LEAST go claim your business listing at Google — this will give you some exposure when you need it most — when people are looking for your type of business. While you’re at it, go make yourself a basic Facebook business (fan) page . . . it’s free, so there’s no excuse not to.

2. Not building your list.

With all the static out there, the chances of someone coming back to your site after an initial visit are slim. So rather than waiting for them to come back of their own accord, give them a reason to. And to do that, you need a way to get hold of them.

For the first ten years of the commercial internet, the main way of doing this was email. It’s still a good way. Get a subscription form on your site, and give people a compelling reason to sign up!

Getting people to “Like” you on Facebook gives you another way to get your message to them on a regular basis. As with the email list, you can “bribe” them with some downloadable content, a coupon code, and so on. They’re not going to do it for the honor of being on your list!

Another way is to use a text messaging service and get them to subscribe to your text message updates. Again, give them a good reason to do it.

3. No call to action

If you want people to DO something, you have to TELL them.  If you’re site is just pretty, they may “ooh and aah”, but they won’t do anything. Command them . . . use phrases like “click here”, “Join Now”, “call 555-8888 now” — you’re goal when designing your site should be to get people MOVING where you want them to go.

4. Poor on-site search engine optimization.

On-site optimization should be a significant part of your ranking strategy. At the very least make sure your keywords and description tags have been updated and keep optimization in mind when setting your page names, titles and headlines. This will help the placement of your “Google Places” link as well. And if your home page is done entirely in Flash, you should reconsider — unless being found on Google is of no concern to you.

5. Sloooooow loading pages

If your website page loads slowly, people will leave. It’s as simple as that. When I’m browsing, it’s very common to see pages that take 10 seconds or more before I see any of the content — that’s far too long. Optimize your images and check your site frequently. Often the culprit is tracking or ad-serving javascript code. If you have code like that slowing down your page, find an alternative or see if it’s feasible to delay the loading of that code until after the rest of the page has loaded.

 

Filed under: Website Design

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