Top 5 Most Common Small Business Website Mistakes

You own a a business or want to setup a small business website.  You are doing this in the hopes of getting more customers and making more money.  Many people have amassed small fortunes from their websites, but the truth is that 90% of small business websites are making their owners little to no money.  This sounds like bad news, but it's also an opportunity.  Most small business websites make the same mistakes.  By avoiding these mistakes, you can take yourself outside of the 90% category, leaving you to compete with only 10% of small business websites.  Building a successful website will take time, specific knowledge of Internet Marketing and Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and effort.  Lack of any of these three will make it unlikely your site will be as successful as you'd wish.  It is also the reason so many small business websites are not making money.  By following the this advice and avoiding these 5 common mistakes, you will see more free traffic, more customers and an increase in revenue

Lack of research before building a website. It does not require any more effort to build a site based upon well researched keywords and keyword phrases, but it can make a tremendous difference in the success of a small business site. Let’s say you own a site selling survival backpacks. You could begin to build a site right away based on survival backpacks and hope it does well. The alternative is to conduct a little research first.

By researching keywords and competition you determine the number of monthly searches for the term “Survival Backpack” is minimal and the competition is very strong. You would have had virtually little chance to garner any significant traffic for this term. It would take months to years of focused Internet marketing efforts to really start seeing traffic on that term. On the other hand, the term “72 hour Survival Kits” is searched much more, and the competition is weak. This is a much better keyword phrase.

You continue with your research until you come up with 3-5 keyword phrases on which to focus. This kind of prior planning will bring you much higher traffic and in turn revenue. In order to do this, you need a capable keyword research tool. Over the years I have used several. The best one I have found yet is also one of the least expensive ones, it’s called Market Samurai. You can even try it free for 30 days, that’ plenty of time to get your keyword research done.

Focusing on yourself and your company.  Do not use your site to promote your business.  I know this sounds like a strange thing to say, you might say to yourself “Isn’t the whole reason for creating a site?”   It’s not; the mission of your site should be to meet your customers need.  People on the Internet are looking for something.  They are looking for an answer to some unmet need.  It may be information, a service or a product.  Your site should focus on addressing that need and demonstrating why they should choose you.  Visitors are not as interested in when you were founded, or the funny story about how you came up with the idea of going into business.  You put a lot of work into researching what people are searching for on the Internet, use that knowledge to create a site that answers your visitor’s needs.

Site is too pretty or too ugly.  You want a site that looks professional and reassures visitors that they are dealing with a real business.  The flip side is a site that has a beautiful fonts, graphics, entertaining flash animations, you can chat with other visitors, read downloadable brochures, watch video clips, and browse through slideshows.  The problem is that with all these option, the visitor will either be too distracted to get the message about  how you can meet the need that brought him to your site in the first place, or go off on a tangent and surf on through to another site.  A effective small business site is clean, simple and looks professional.  Added features are perfectly fine as long as they are there to guide your visitor towards becoming a customer and not distracting him instead.

Using sound.  Do not use sound on your site, unless it is set up in such a way that the visitor must deliberately request it, and it guides them towards becoming a customer.  You will find that a very large portion of your visitors during the day are visiting your site from a work computer.  It is embarrassing to pull up a website that begins to blast music or goes straight into a spoken narrative.  This is one sure way to make sure your site is not bookmarked and never visited again.

Lack of Marketing.  Most small businesses will budget and pay for a good web designer to create a good clean, professional website, and don’t budget any money to market the site once it’s been published.  Even a poorly designed site will return a much greater revenue and provide many more new customers than a well crafted website, if it ranks at the top of Google listings for a popular keyword phrase and in turn gets tons of traffic.  Good keyword research is a first and very important step in ensuring the success of your small business web site.  A deliberate and focused Internet marketing campaign will make sure your site stays at the top of the search engine rankings and is bringing in the right kind of traffic.

When choosing for a web designer, you should also look for an Internet marketing expert or organic SEO expert.  By combining good site design with a well planned Internet marketing strategy you can take your business to another level and significantly increase your revenue.

After years as working  in Atlanta Web Design, I was dismayed to see so many business owners failing to follow through with the important task of Internet marketing, that I began incorporate an initial marketing plan into all our site designs.  As far as I know we are the only company that goes this extra step.  If you buy a car, you don't just want it to look nice in your driveway; you want it to take you places.  Why should web development be any different?