As a small business owner, your website is one of the essential tools you can use to promote and showcase your products. It is an effective way of engaging your clients through the content you post in its pages. You can use it to tell your story and what your company is all about. Ultimately, it helps build and strengthen connections between you and current and future clients. More often than not though, small business owners tend to fail at managing and maintaining their websites. These can have a negative impact on your brand and could lead to you losing customers instead.
In this post, we will talk about some common small business website problems and how you can fix them.
1. Outdated and Poor Design
Website design has been constantly evolving since internet use boomed in the 90s. The introduction of mobile internet devices such as internet capable feature phones, smartphones, and tablets have changed the way sites are structured too. While most small business owners realise the importance of investing in a website to establish a web presence, design maintenance isn’t one of their priorities. Some websites are not optimised to be viewed in different devices. Keep in mind, a website viewed on a desktop or a laptop may look completely wrong on mobile. Consequently, old websites that have not been updated in ages will start to look clunky when compared to updated sites with modern designs. These will not only look bad but will be full or problems due to incompatibilities too.
Having an outdated website design or an unresponsive site doesn’t build confidence. In fact, it ruins your chances of converting your leads into sales.
Fix:
If your website has not had a change in more than a few years, you’re probably due for a design update. Customers need a mobile site that is as easy to use as the desktop version. Google search prefers websites that are mobile-friendly and the tech giant considers it a requirement if you want your site to come in search results.
A simple, clean responsive design that looks great on different devices is required. This needn’t be expensive and in the age of mobile, simple designs are preferred.
2. Forms That Don’t Work
So, you have a good design and everything looks cool on a PC and a smartphone. Someone wants to enquire about your products and services but your contact form just refuses to work. What happens now? Obviously, your potential customers might just go away.
Having fully functional forms provide your site visitors the opportunity to fulfil their own needs. Are they curious? Are they making a purchase? Forms help the client interact with your site and your business. At this stage, you’ve already hooked them in. The only thing left to do is for you to give stellar support. Go the extra mile by making sure your forms are working and they are safe.
Fix:
Forms that don’t work may be due to many things. Some parts of the code might have been edited or deleted altogether. It might be a server issue. Or, something just changed and updated and it messed up your set-up. If you’re using a plug-in, this might be the case. An update could generate compatibility issues and render the forms useless. If you don’t have the confidence or the skill to go look into it yourself, you can have an expert investigate. Always consult with someone who has knowledge in these things. You might do more harm than good if you try to fix it yourself.
Another tip is to always make sure that the forms you use are secure if you plan to get information through fields that people can fill in with their information. Having a secure connection for financial transactions and a confidentiality clause or terms of agreement can make your site visitors feel at ease.
3. Poor SEO
Who wouldn’t want more visitors to their websites? Many small business website owners complain about their site not attracting enough visitors. The question is whether they’ve made efforts to make their website discoverable on the internet.
An effective marketing campaign might be able to boost visits to a page but it can cost more in the long term. The quickest way to find things in the web is to use Google or a search engine. For this to work, websites should be structured specifically for search engines to recognise and recommend. This is what Search Engine Optimisation is all about. Sadly, website owners fail to do this and their sites fail to appear in web searches.
There are factors that affect SEO and these can the focus for development to improve visibility.
Fix:
Have an SEO campaign that improves your search visibility. This means using all the right keywords, having updated quality content, a responsive and secure website, among other things. There are tons of benefits of having a secure website. Developing your website around the elements that affect SEO generally improve overall website performance.
4. No Social Media Presence
Another problem that small businesses have a hard time trying to solve is their social media presence. Business accounts are created but they are not being updated regularly or they are not being utilised to their full potential.
Social Media can be a powerful tool in digital marketing and it provides another channel for interacting with potential and current customers or clients. This also makes the business ‘more human’ as lighter topics, conversations, and stories can be utilised to spark interest. Social media can give a business the face and the soul that it often needs.
Fix:
Link your website with all of your social media accounts and do the same for each platform you use. Create a social media strategy document. It doesn’t need to be a formal and final word file but it can be a work in progress until you develop clear goals and objectives. This is where the use of all of your social media accounts will revolve. Share articles and stories that are relevant to your business and add a personal spin to it. Just be creative and update regularly. Interact with clients and those who post questions. Being a responsive business owner pays in the end.
Your business may be unique. Your small business website problems are not.
While no 2 businesses are the same, website challenges are common. With the right resources and the expertise required to solve the more technical bits of owning a website, management and maintenance shouldn’t be a headache. We have years of experience managing websites for businesses and have a range of support packages to help remove the headache.
If you have any questions or are interested to find out we can help improve your small business website, feel free to contact us.