small business website

5 Secrets to Designing a Killer Small Business Website

According to forecasts, there will be over 230 million online shoppers in the United States in 2021. The popularity of online shopping has made having a website a requirement for any business. However, with so many websites in existence, it is harder than ever to make yours stand out. These secrets can help you design a business website that will get the attention of customers.

Optimize for Search Engines

The majority of your website traffic is likely to come from search engines. The best way to increase the number of customers who find their way to your site is to improve your ranking for relevant keywords in popular search engines. This process is called search engine optimization. It works on the principle that the closer your site is listed to the top of a results page, the more likely customers are to click on your link.

Design for Your Customer

SEO is important, but a high-ranking page isn’t very valuable if people don’t stick around to buy anything from you. This is why it is important not to get so wrapped up designing your site to do well in search engines that you forget about your customer. Your site should include a variety of interesting and engaging content that encourages visitors to spend time browsing your site. Victoria Web Solutions can help.

If you don’t have the time to produce content yourself, consider hiring a freelance writer to do it for you. Make sure that your content is useful to your customers. It should answer a question or explain how your products and services can help solve a problem.

Avoid Slow Load Times

Slow load times are bad for two reasons. One, search engines penalize pages that take a long time to load, which means less traffic. Two, customers often leave before they view anything on a site if it takes too long to load. Reduce your load times by compressing images and other large files, eliminating unnecessary scripts and plug-ins, and avoiding clutter on your pages.

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

Almost 60% of all online searches are conducted on a mobile device. If your site doesn’t look good or function well on a mobile phone, then you are probably going to lose a lot of potential business. You can use the Google Search Console to test how easy your site is to navigate on a mobile device. If you aren’t getting a good score, you need to make some design changes.

Create Content Easy to Skim

Web browsing is called web browsing for a reason. It implies that users are casually looking through content. Most users don’t want to dedicate a lot of time to read a wall of text. Your site needs to be organized in such a way that users can easily skim it for the information that is relevant to them.

Make good use of headers, typography, and white space to draw attention to the most important parts of your site. Make sure your site has a navigation bar and search feature that makes it easy for users to skip right to whatever part of your site is most useful to them.

Online competition is fierce, but by utilizing these techniques you can stand out from the pack. Best of all, the same tricks that help get your site noticed also make it a more useful resource for your customers.

Image via Pexels

Posted in Design, Guest, Technology Blog, Tutorials, Websites and tagged , .

Patrick O'Keeffe

Patrick is the founder, developer and chief blogger of Victoria Web Solutions. Passionate about technology, design and customer satisfaction. Read more about Patrick on his Team page.

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