10 Ways to Make Your Small Business Website Successful

A successful website is one of the most important assets for a small business. A successful small business website will help to promote your small business, create brand exposure, build credibility and increase profits.

However, simply having a website is not enough. To get noticeable benefits from the website, you need to be able to promote the website successfully and use it as a tool to grow your business and attract consumers.

This article discusses effective techniques that will help make your small business website a success.

Here are 10 ways to make your small business website successful:

1. Research Your Completion

One of the best ways to beat your competition is to know what they are doing and find ways to make your website better. A simple look at the websites of your leading competitors can be a great help. You can also use competitive analysis and SEO tools to get an insight into the link profile and marketing practices of the highest ranking websites in your niche. You can then find ways to outperform these tactics and achieve a similar online visibility. This is a well known SEO strategy that has worked for many businesses.

2. Don’t Underestimate The Importance Of Keyword Research

Keyword research is an integral part of marketing a website. It is vital to the success of your business on the Internet. Identifying the right keywords to target is one of the first steps in any successfully marketing the start. Google’s Keyword Tool that is free to use is usually sufficient for basic keyword research and analysis. It provides you with data on the popularity and competition of any given search term. It also offers keyword suggestions and lists alternative search terms that your website can target.

3. Provide Quality Content On Your Website

Gone are the days when a website can be successful by simply offering information about the company’s products and services. For a business to be successful online today, it needs to offer a wide range of information on its website that consumers will find useful.

Good content has become the key to the success of any website today. Offering quality resources aimed at your intended audience is one of the best ways to build your business online and attract customers towards your website. It also establishes trust and makes your business trustworthy.

Publishing quality content on your website has a viral effect. Online marketing strategy has become largely content driven today. Producing quality content consistently is one of the best things you can do to market your website.

4. Start Building Your Email List From Day One

Most businesses realize the importance of email marketing. However, to get the desired results, you need an extensive email list. Very few businesses have a strategy in place to build an email list of prospects. Letting users subscribe to content updates, offering email tutorial series, or starting a newsletter are just some ways that can help you to build your list fast.

Some businesses also offer incentives to encourage users to sign-up e.g. free eBook, free trial or other resources that users find useful. Well designed email sign up forms placed prominently on the website is also very effective to boost conversions. You can also use social media to promote your list and attract subscribers.

5. Follow Good Optimisation Techniques

Search engines still remain one of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your website. Good optimisation is essential to rank favourably on search engines. It forms the basis for your SEO efforts. For best results, optimise each page independently rather than your website as a whole. Target only a couple of keywords on each page. Place your keywords strategically on the page e.g. in Meta title, headings, alternate text descriptions of images, bold text, and in the anchor text of hyperlinks.

6. Focus on Content Marketing Instead of Aggressive Link Building

Inbound links to a website plays a very important role in determining a website’s rank on search engines like Google. Businesses that rank high on search engines often adopt a number of techniques to attract inbound links to their website. However, how we go about building links and attracting traffic to website has changed in recent years and it is important to keep up to date with the new methods.

Today, rather than focus on aggressive link building schemes, it is far more effective to use content marketing to attract customers as well as links naturally over a period of time.

Successful link building today focuses largely on publishing high quality resources on the website and using it as bait to attract links in a natural manner based solely on the value it offers. Such resources can continue to attract back-links for many years to come. This is much better way to build links and improve your search engine rank. This form of marketing that uses content to attract customers is also known as inbound marketing.

7. Incorporate Social Media Into Your Day to Day Marketing

Social networks offer an ideal platform for promoting your small business website. However in order to succeed, you need to look beyond simply creating a Facebook and Twitter page. Active participation by both your business and your customers is essential. Use social media to build your network rather than focus on short term gain. This is the way social media works for businesses. You first need to build your network by providing information that is valuable for your intended audience. Only then will you start to see noticeable benefits for your business.

Here are some tips:

Every time you add or update your website, make sure to share it on social media Use social media tools like HootSuite or Buffer

Use services like Twitterfeed to automatically post new content from your website or blog

Try to post daily

Use several social media sites including Google Plus, Pinterest

Schedule your posts at optimal times

Make it easy for website visitors to share your content

Use the right social media features on your website e.g. social login, Twitter or Facebook Widgets, etc.

8. Promote Your Website Actively

How effectively you promote your small business website will play a significant role in your online success. If you have the budget, you can hire a professional to promote your website. You can just as effectively manage this process yourself by setting aside one or two hours per day towards promoting your website.

Here are some tips:

Include your website link in your email signature Include website link in all promotional material such as brochures, flyers, business cards

Make sure to include your website link in all social media profiles

Participate and promote your site on blogs and forums relevant to your niche

Distribute Press Releases

9. Learn To ReUse Content

The ability to reuse content can provide a boost to your Internet marketing efforts. This is commonly referred to as repurposing content. It involves taking an existing piece of your content and creating it into several popular formats and distributing them through multiple channels.

This is a great way to increase your reach, attract more consumers and get more exposure for your business. This will also save you time and reduce the pressure of coming up with new content constantly. It also provides additional back-link opportunities for your website.

A perfect example of this is writing an article, creating a blog post from it, turning it into a podcast and also into presentation. The article can be promoted on the leading article directories like EzineArticles, the blog post can be published on your blog as well as syndicated on other external blogs, links shared on your social network profiles, and the presentation can be shared on sites like SlideShare and Scribd.

10. Look At Your Stats and Refine Your Strategy

Google Analytics is a great way to see who is visiting your website and how. In addition to total hits, it provides a valuable insight into referral sources and search queries that are driving traffic. You can use this information to find out you’re your promotional tactics are performing. But what you do with this information is even more important. Businesses with a successful website marketing strategy are constantly monitoring their statistics and refining their strategy.

What About You?

Do you have a small business website or thinking of starting one? How does it benefit your business? What is your strategy?

Please add your response by leaving a comment below.

Author K.Singh is the Director of Website Design Agency based in London and the Editor-in-Chief of Internet Marketing & Web design Blog.