Planning Your First Small Business Website

When planning your first small business website, you should ask yourself the following questions:

1. Who is your target audience?
2. How will your target audience find you?
3. How will you convert your visitors into sales?

These questions might sound obvious. But, you might be surprised to know that many people do NOT know the answers to the above questions.

They have not clearly identified their target audience. This is the very first step any small business NEEDS to be able to identify the right audience and grow their business.

1) Who is Your Target Audience?

Think about EXACTLY who you want to attract to your small business website and why.

The answer to that is if you don’t know who your target is, how can you expect to attract them to your website? And how can you expect to SELL them something?

When your target market is TOO large or not clearly identified, your website will lack focus.

And, you will fail to maximize its potential. Ideally you should be aiming to create a niche.

2) How Will They Find You?

Creating a niche will also help you with the search engines, and drive hot leads to your small business website.

Think about what what keywords you would use if you were doing a search for your own product or service.

Then do a search and see what companies come up on the first page because that is where you want to be!

If you see your competitors there, take a look at their websites.

See what they are doing and what they are not doing and what you think could be done better.

Identify something unique about your business that sets it apart from the rest.

The words that you identified as the right keywords/keyword phrases to find your target market, need to be more accurate.

They should be incorporated into your pages of your site – in the page titles, in the headings, and in the internal links.

Choose Your Keywords Wisely When Creating Your Small Business Website

Use Google’s keyword tool called the Keyword Planner.  You can and should use this tool to get the MOST accurate keyword phrases to drive the most traffic to your site.

According to Google, “If you want your website to attract searchers, you need to use strong keywords in your website titles and website text . These brief words should realistically identify and describe your site.”

The more specific you are with your keywords or key phrases, the better your chances of being found in search by your target market.

They will be less competitive than the more general single word searches, and will more accurately target your market.

You should use local search terms if you are a local small business to help get you to the top of the search engines.

The higher you are in search, the more likely you will be found by your target.

Think about it this way, when YOU are doing a search, how often do you get to the second of third page or beyond?

If you are like me, after the first page and sometimes the second page, you are off trying another search phrase, right?

If you are a local business, DO use geographical keywords!

Your ultimate to have many inbound links to your website to get higher search engine ranking.

Remember, this does not happen overnight but rather is a gradual process that takes place over time.

These pages that link back to your small business website need to be relevant, on-topic and ideally contain the same keywords, especially in the linking text.

Search engines rank pages based upon their reputation. Your ranking will be determined by what other (preferably high ranking) pages say about your page.

3) How To Convert Your Visitors Into Sales on Your Small Business Website?

Remember, you have just a few seconds to grab the attention of your website visitors.

Don’t tell them what you do, tell them why they should care.

In other words, tell them:

• How you can help them
• What’s in it for them
• How you can solve their problems

Some website builders convert better than others. Some website builders convert better than others.

For example, if you start an eCommerce store, you want a site that handles selling products well like BigCommerce or Shopify.

It also helps to give away something your audience needs or wants, such as an incentive, a freebie, or a discount.

It has been said that you have 7 seconds to catch a website visitor’s attention but I really believe it is more like 2-3 seconds.

This doesn’t leave you very much time in which to make an impression and grab “their” attention. So be sure to use that valuable web page real estate wisely.

Use Funnels on Your Small Business Website

Lastly, make sure that your site has a funnel-like structure. Identify your important pages.

These pages are usually the “call to action” or purchase pages. Make sure all roads lead to those pages.

Your internal links – like their external equivalents – should describe the target page.

If you sell red widgets, don’t call your products page “Products”, call it “red widgets.”

And make sure that the links pointing at this page also say “red widgets”.

This will not only help the search engines identify and rank the most important pages in your site, but it will also lead your visitor to that all-important conversion.

Originally published 09/01/2019; updated 03/15/2021 to update content.