Every business needs a marketing strategy and a website should be the central focus point of an online brand. Small business websites don’t need to be expensive to make a huge positive impact on your business. Fancy video production, graphics and animations can add flair and excitement to your website, however, these are often expensive to produce. I’m going to go through a few basics in this guide to make sure that, even on a tight budget, you can create a website that is effective and has great reach.
Building great websites takes patience and experience
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Quality Products and Services
The products and services a business offers its customers are the main ingredients of a website. You aspire to have as much useful content as you can about what your business offers. Try to incorporate a good mix of images and text, making sure that you are utilising at least 600 words to describe each page. You want your product/service pages to be considered by a search engine to be the most critical pages on your website, so you want to spend the most time filling them with complete details and examples you have about them. Make sure that you are using high-quality images on your website. Images that are appropriately sized for both desktop and mobile, that are in clear focus with the correct aspect ratio. When we’ve built websites for RG Carpentry and Combined Trade Services, we spent a lot of time making sure we filled the services pages with rich content.
Basic SEO Tips
Everyone wants to be at the top of the search engine list, the hard part is getting there. There are no magic bullets to achieve this, but you can make sure you give yourself the best chances by doing some basics correctly. A search engine is trying to find the most relevant content for its users, so you need to help the search engine understand your content. Websites that the search engine isn’t sure of the content type won’t feature highly in the list. Make sure that you have descriptive page titles and meta tags, which describe what the page is about. Include alt tags on images, to help the search engine understand your image content. Finally, make sure you have sufficient internal links between your pages and a few external links to other pages too. By doing the basics of SEO correctly, you maximise the effectiveness of your business’s website by spreading its reach. If you need help with optimising your website’s SEO performance, check out our web development services.
Cost-effective websites can be simple and effective, like B2B RV
Business Associate Pages
I would recommend having a Facebook, Twitter (or X) and Instagram account for your business. You may not regularly post content on those platforms, but having the ability to connect your small business website to legitimate social media accounts does provide value to your website. Another, commonly overlooked, step that you can take to promote your website is to add your business to as many business directories as you can find. Most of them are free, with the ability to pay for more viewership on those platforms. The associated pages will link to your website and help you build backlinks, improving your site’s page ranking. Here are a couple of directories I’ve used with some success:
- Yellow Pages – NZ’s original phone book
- Neighbourly – A local area social media network
- Small Business Directory NZ – A small business directory
- Hotfrog – A NZ business directory
- Yelp – Worldwide directory
- Finda – A NZ business directory
- Brownbooks – A worldwide business database
- Cylex – A local business search engine
- Fyple – To find businesses and services in NZ
- Tuugo – Free company search engine
- Love NZ – NZ promotion page
- Infobel – International company search
Love NZ is a great way to get your website associated with an established webpage
Building an effective small business website doesn’t have to break the bank. While flashy graphics and animations can be enticing, it’s the content and optimization that truly matter. Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in helping your website get noticed. Be sure to focus on descriptive page titles, meta tags, alt tags for images, and effective internal and external linking. Connecting your website to social media accounts and leveraging online business directories can extend your reach and improve your website’s visibility. Ultimately, with the right implementation, even on a tight budget, your website can be a powerful tool to enhance your brand’s online presence and connect with potential customers.