A fully optimized local business website is the cornerstone to your Local SEO ranking strategy and is ESSENTIAL to your online success.
First Impressions Count!
Begin with a clear and concise landing page that accomplishes three goals very quickly:
- Business Name & product/service niche.
- What products and/or services you offer.
- How to contact.
You only have a few short seconds to get this very basic information across to a visitor. If they don’t see what they are looking for, they’re gone (in just a few seconds) and off to a competitor’s site to spend their money.
We really like the “lead generation” structure for local business websites. The front page incorporates a contact form with a call to action to get the viewer to do something. Often an offer for a free consultation, or click HERE to make an appointment can be great calls to action for a local business.
Ultimately, the goal of ANY business website is to get the viewer to DO SOMETHING. Call, email, click a link – all of these actions are great and can lead to sales – and more traffic.
Simplicity of design and solve the visitor’s problem.
Beauty does not equal success. Don’t confuse a beautiful website with a successful website. Let me break some bad news to you right now: Your visitors don’t really give a damn WHAT your website looks like (unless it’s so awful that a viewer can’t tell what you offer, that’s another story). All they care about is your ability to solve their problem – fast!
Crisp, professional and simple will win the sales game every time. Beautiful, hard to navigate and confusing will put you out of business faster that bad breath. Concentrate on giving your visitors exactly what they want – and making sales will be duck soup if you can get this basic quality right.
Don’t forget some basic must-do parts of your business website.
N.A.P. Name address and phone number. You NEED to show your name, address and phone number on practically every page of your website. This would be the IDENTICAL N.A.P. that you use everywhere else on the internet. If your business has several different addresses and phone numbers around the internet, that alone is almost a guarantee you will NEVER rank on the front page of Google.
Keywords that describe EXCATLY what you offer. You should have a list of 10 – 20 keywords that best describe your business services and products. Use the appropriate keywords on each page. Don’t use “keyword stuffing.” Keyword stuffing means overusing your keywords to excess. Write for your customers – NOT search engines. Don’t be overly concerned with keywords – use the best wording to accurately describe what you do and, more importantly, what you can do (how you can help) your customers. In the end, isn’t this is what you’re in business for?
Meta description. The meta description is a short, 160 character long string that appears in search engines that should describe each page on your website. There are plugins that can easily add a meta description to each page, and if no meta description is specified, then Google will insert some text as it sees fit. It’s best for you to control the meta tags – add the words that best describe the page so you can “hook” the reader into clicking on your site.
Page load speed. One of the worst transgressions I see are websites that are PITIFULLY slow to load. Why is this bad? If a page takes too long to load, the visitor becomes impatient and will leave your page and click on a competitor’s site. Go to http://www.gtmetrix.com and find out how long your site takes to load. If it’s much beyond 2 seconds – you may have a problem.
Easy and familiar navigation. Let’s face it – people are creatures of habit. Whether or not you like to admit this about yourself is one thing, but th basic fact remains. And it applies to websites as well. Simple navigation with time-tested page names will engender familiarity and will help keep your visitors on the site longer. For example, people are used to seeing page names like “About,” “Services,” and “Contact.” They’ve seen these pages a million times before and they know what to expect. If you get creative and name pages that don’t make sense to the majority of your viewers you increase the chance of sending them to a competitor’s website with more familiar settings.
Of course, these are just a few of the thing that you need to consider to help make your business website a searchable, usable sales tool. We have experience repairing websites to make sure they are a robust “leg” of your online marketing system that will more than pay for itself in increased  visits and sales.
Want us to take a look at your website and let you know why it’s not dominating the search engines and pulling customers through your doors?
Click HERE for a no-obligation Local SEO Snapshot and we’ll let you what we think will turn your business website into a local sales machine.