If you run a small business, establishing a strong web presence should be one of your top priorities to help create trust and credibility with your target audience. Smart small business web design will be carefully thought through and tailored to your ideal customer, to enhance the power of your brand, build strong customer loyalty and relationships, and establish your authority as a leader in your field. However, as with most things in life, first impressions are key when it comes to website creation for small business. Poorly presented and performing small business websites may negatively impact how potential customers perceive your brand and whether they choose to do business with you.
Read on to find out some of the most common web design mistakes small businesses make when it comes to creating and maintaining their websites, and the actionable strategies top website builders for small business recommend you take to ensure that your website is optimised to consistently deliver strong results.
1. Keep Your Small Business Web Design Fresh, Engaging and Relevant
Many consumers are passionate about meaningful, strong brand interactions. Ensure that your small business web design includes quality content. Information that understands and responds to user values, motivations, wants and needs – presented in a logical and streamlined way that is updated regularly – will perform best and encourage visitors to come back time and again.
Conversely, neglecting to update your website’s content may send the wrong signals and give the impression that your business is no longer active or not committed to providing up-to-date information, resulting in lost credibility and reduced audience engagement. To keep your content relevant, it can be helpful to develop a content maintenance plan to ensure your website stays current, particularly for time-sensitive information such as product or service details, pricing and upcoming event schedules.
You can consider creating a blog or news section on your website to publish fresh content regularly. Committing to a blog can be valuable for a number of reasons, including:
- keeping your website dynamic and engaging
- demonstrating that your business is active and responsive
- increasing your credibility and authority as a thought leader in your field or industry
- giving your target audience a reason to keep coming back to your website, and
- helping with your website SEO by attracting more organic traffic.
Remember that small business owners have a unique advantage to connect with their audience on a more personal level than large brands and leverage that know, like and trust factor which will drive conversions. Find out more on how you can nurture and engage your dream customers here.
2. Establish a Cohesive Online Identity For Your Small Business
Your website serves as the digital storefront for your business and your online branding plays a vital role in shaping your customers’ perception of your business. As such, consistency in your business branding is integral to good small business web design and helps build recognition, credibility and trust among your target audience. Inconsistencies in branding are not only visually unappealing but results in poor recognition and trust for a business.
Implement a winning approach to branding by developing a style guide that outlines your brand’s visual and verbal elements to help maintain a strong and unified brand presence, including:
- consistent logo usage
- preferred typography and colour schemes
- approved imagery and icons, and
- your business tone of voice.
Need some inspiration? Find further ideas for how to create a unified brand guide here. Implement your guidelines consistently across your website and all other digital and physical assets to establish a cohesive and recognisable online presence that uniquely identifies your brand and resonates with your ideal customers.
3. Encourage Conversions with Compelling CTAs and Easy Ways to Connect
When creating your small business web design, remember that compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) are like a signpost that directs visitors on the next steps to engage with your business, whether that means scheduling a consultation or discovery call, making a purchase or signing up for your newsletter. Without clear and persuasive CTAs, visitors may leave your website without taking the desired actions to connect with you, whether that is making an online purchase or contacting your business to discuss your services.
Experts in small business web design recommend that a website incorporates well-crafted CTAs throughout to significantly increase engagement and conversions. Some actionable strategies to implement when incorporating CTAs in your website include:
- ensuring that your CTAs stand out by using contrasting colours and eye-catching designs
- using persuasive language that emphasises the benefits of taking action and instils a sense of urgency or excitement, and
- placing CTAs strategically throughout your website, including on your homepage, product pages, and blog posts.
Make sure to regularly test different CTAs to see which ones perform best and make adjustments to optimise your website’s conversion rates.
It is also important that potential customers can easily find ways to connect with you should they have questions about your offerings. Check that your preferred contact details can be easily found throughout your website, including in your header and footer.
4. Enhance Visitor Engagement and Conversions Through Tailored and Clear Small Business Web Design
Websites that bombard visitors with excessive information, are difficult to navigate, or have too many distracting elements can drive potential customers away before they even have a chance to explore your offerings.
Accordingly, when thinking about developing effective websites, it is important to ensure that good user experience informs all aspects of design, so you can create a striking and memorable website that engages users and avoids pitfalls that can drive people away.
So what are some practical steps that you can take? Streamline your website’s design by focusing on a clean and modern aesthetic, with an intuitive layout and simple navigation, to enhance user engagement and improve overall conversion rates. Use ample white space to create a sense of balance, and employ a consistent colour scheme and typography that aligns with your brand identity.
It is also important to optimise navigation by ensuring that your visitors can find their way around your site and access all of the information they require by creating a menu that allows visitors to find what they need with ease. Implement a logical hierarchy to your website with clear categories and subcategories, as well as a search function, to help users find specific content they need quickly.
5. Incorporate SEO Principles into Your Small Business Web Design
Neglecting search engine optimisation (SEO) is a common mistake that can prevent small business websites from ranking well on search engine results pages, reducing organic traffic and potential leads. Even with a visually stunning website, if your site does not appear on the first page of search engine results, your target audience will not find you.
For this reason, it is important to incorporate best practice SEO into the fabric of your small business web design, to attract potential customers to your website through organic search traffic. Good SEO for small business websites usually focuses on local searches and is built on the three key pillars of keyword research, offering engaging and helpful content, and link building to improve your website’s visibility and reach. So what does this look like in practice, you ask? Leading website builders for small businesses typically advise that you focus on the following steps:
- Undertaking in-depth keyword research when building and updating your website will help identify relevant terms and phrases your audience uses when searching for products or services like yours. Once you have identified your keywords and phrases, incorporate these into your website’s content, meta tags and URLs to help your ideal customer find you.
- Focusing on creating high-quality content that addresses your audience’s pain points, interests and potential objections will also pay dividends when it comes to helping your customers and optimising SEO. Small business websites that do well in search engine rankings post valuable content on their website regularly to keep things fresh and interesting for your audience.
- Building internal and external links to establish the trust, authority and credibility of your small business website. Internal links between different pages on your website help search engines such as Google to better understand your website’s structure and keeps users engaged for longer. External backlinks from other reputable websites are an excellent way to boost your website’s authority and search engine rankings. Keeping your website content up-to-date is a valuable strategy to help attract external links, so this is not a set-and-forget situation!
By implementing these SEO strategies as part of your small business web design can typically rank well for local searches based around a physical location or service area quite quickly. For more SEO ideas, check out this in-depth guide on SEO strategies to take your online presence to the next level. Or if you’d like to arrange a website audit and options to get some help to elevate your SEO game, connect with Summer Days Digital.
6. Ensure Inclusivity for All Users in Your Website Design
Welcome to 2024: neglecting website accessibility can alienate potential customers and prevent them from accessing your content. To make your website more accessible, consider implementing features such as alternative text (alt text) for images, which helps screen readers describe visual content to visually impaired users. Ensure that all interactive elements, including buttons and forms, are navigable using a keyboard rather than a mouse.
Remember to pay attention to colour contrast to make sure that text and website elements are readable for people with visual impairments. Other features to consider for accessibility include providing captioning for videos and transcripts for audio content to accommodate users with hearing impairments. By incorporating important accessibility features into your small business web design, you will not only demonstrate your commitment to inclusivity but also open your business to a broader audience.
7. Protect Your Business and Users By Implementing Strong Website Security
Overlooking website security is a common mistake that small businesses can make. Yet, as cyber threats become more sophisticated, protecting your website from security threats has become increasingly important. This is because a lack of robust website security exposes your business and customers to potential cyber threats and data breaches that can be very costly and time-consuming to fix.
Small businesses can improve website security by implementing SSL certificates to encrypt data transmitted between your website and users, utilising strong passwords and keeping all software up-to-date. It is also important to regularly update your website’s content management system (CMS) and plugins to patch any known vulnerabilities. Remember to schedule frequent security audits and consider implementing a website firewall for an added layer of protection to safeguard your business.
As security is potentially quite a technical area of good website maintenance, you may wish to consider discussing your options with an expert to ensure you are getting the best possible protection from outside threats.
8. Embrace a Mobile-Friendly Small Business Web Design
Attention small business owners: mobile responsiveness is a really important, but often overlooked, aspect of good small business web design. With an increasing number of people accessing websites on the go through mobile phones and tablets, it is essential to make sure that your website looks good on all devices for a seamless user experience.
So what does this mean? Responsiveness means making sure that your text is easy to read on a phone, images are of an appropriate size for a smaller screen, and navigation buttons are large enough to press with a finger on a touch screen rather than the click of a mouse. Failing to make these changes can result in a frustrating user experience, causing potential customers to leave your site before they can understand the value you offer, and take their business to your competitor.
It is therefore important to prioritise responsive small business web design that adjusts automatically to different screen sizes and resolutions. Taking the time to get this important detail right ensures that your website consistently looks great and functions smoothly, regardless of the device your visitors use to access your website.
9. Optimise Your Small Business Web Design for Speed and User Experience
We’re all busy: time is precious and customers expect instant results. Small business websites with slow loading times will drive visitors away, leading to lost business opportunities. A sluggish website can not only discourage potential customers from engaging with your content and connecting with your business, but it can also result in decreased search engine rankings if visitors spend less time on your website compared to other similar sites that offer a better user experience.
Overcome this issue by regularly assessing your website’s speed and make improvements where necessary. Prioritising speed will not only send the right signals about your business and keep visitors on your site longer but will also improve your search engine rankings, making sure that more of your ideal customers can find you.
10. Act on Trends and Insights for Continuous Small Business Web Design Improvements
The best website builders for small businesses deliver results for their clients by keeping on top of website performance data, and this is something you can do for yourself too. Data-driven decision-making is essential for improving your small business website’s effectiveness and understanding what resonates with your target audience. Overlooking website analytics can prevent you from understanding your visitors’ actions and preferences, leaving you in the dark as to what you are doing well or where you may need to improve your performance.
Tap into the power of free resources like Google Analytics to track important metrics such as your small business website traffic, time spent on specific pages, click-through and conversion rates. You can leverage this valuable tool to gain important insights about user behaviour, identify areas for improvement and optimise your website’s performance for greater engagement and conversions.
Regularly review this information so you can take steps to optimise your website’s content, navigation and calls-to-action. It can be helpful to test different elements on your website to determine what performs best and drives more conversions. By harnessing the power of data analytics, you can make informed decisions, enhance user experiences for visitors and continuously improve your website’s performance to better serve your customers.
Final Reflections
Your small business website can (and should!) be an incredibly valuable tool to help attract, engage and convert potential customers for your business. Ensure your business stands out and shines among your competition by implementing the above strategies for clever small business website design and avoid some common website mistakes. As an important reflection of your brand, it is well-worth investing the time and effort to make your website a powerful digital asset that not only makes you feel proud but also drives business growth and success.
Summer Days Digital offers boutique small business web design services across Australia. If you would like to speak to a web design and SEO expert to help you implement these and other smart website design and SEO strategies to get your website working effectively for you, find out about our small business web design services or reach out here. Investing in a quality website is a significant commitment for small business owners. With this in mind, we keep the average cost of website design for small businesses competitive by offering a range of custom WordPress web design packages available to suit your specific needs.