Small Business Website: What All Business Owners Must Know

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You have an offline business selling products or services to your local community, and there is a need for your product or services. Now that you want to setup a website to further expand your business and to reach to more customers. BUT you have no experience in creating a website that your local communities will find you. What can you do?

Plan What Customers Will Be Looking For

First of all for creating websites, we must always do keyword research first to determine whether will there be any search results in your local communities. Using Google Keyword Tool will be a great way to start, as it can drill down to finding the search volume in a particular country, which is more than enough for you to find out the search volume for your business.

There are a lot of keyword research tools out there, and I have one that has gotten my likings and I have done a review on the keyword research tool which will help you understand what you will be getting once you own it.

Knowing what your targeted customers are typing in the search engines are like winning half battle. After you have done the keyword research, determine the keywords that will appear in the web page. Placing keywords onto your web page requires some basic on-page search engine optimization, to make sure your website is relevant to what the searchers are looking for.

Check Out Your Competitors

Next on line is to find out your competitors that have website, which are also targeting in your area. This is very important as you can take reference from them if they are there for a long time. Copy what you competitors are doing, and adding better services or making your website more user friendly, can help increase your customer’s experience, which will in turn increase your chances of getting a sale.

You will also need to find out if your competitors are ranking good in the search engines, using the keyword research done previously. You will need to find out how strong are your competitors on the search engines, so that you know what you are facing. There is a Chinese proverb “Knowing your enemy is equal to winning all wars“.

Find out how much inbound links and pages your competitors have. This can be done by using Yahoo Site Explorer. All you need to do is to key in your competitor’s URL and click ‘Explore Site’, and you can find out how many web pages and in bound links the website have.

You may also want to find out is there any PPC advertising in your local market. So that you can cover the search engines area of advertising using paid or free.

DIY or Outsource Website Creation

I do not have a preferences of DIY or outsource for a website designer. It will depend on you and your budget. If you have budget and feel that website creation is not your cup of tea, go outsource it. If you do not have enough budget to outsource, you might want to Do-It-Yourself instead. I must warn you that creating your own website when you are new can mean trouble. But if you insist of doing it, then you will need a website building software that is easy to use, easy to set up, SEO user friendly.

If you want to outsource instead, you will need to find one that is good and reliable. You can go to Elance.com or WarriorForum.com to outsource for a website designer. Do note that you will need to find out how many web pages you want for your website. A good ten page website will be a good way, and it will range from USD $300 ~ $1,000, depending on how complicated your website will be.

Putting It All Together

Now that you have done the above, what now? It’s time to pierce together all that you have completed. You will need to add in content to your website and some photos that are related to your products or services. Make sure you research what is in your content first before anything. A tip for small offline business, you do not need to have long content, but instead a short one will work fine for offline business.

You may want to add in Google Analytics into your website to track and find out what are the search terms, where they came from etc…

Remember that your small business will always require a website, and you will find that if you do it correct, your online business can be more than your offline customers. I will hear from you soon.

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