8 Tips for Small Business Web Development | Strategic Brand Management

Small business accountants, lawyers, and brick-and-mortar shops don’t need 5,000 Facebook fans, Instagram followers, or blogs that are updated daily. They need business. They need clients, customers, shoppers, and other forms of customer inflow that will convert into transactions that will therefore transfer to increased revenue and profit. So how can small businesses use their websites and online presence to get more clients and customers?

As an award-winning digital marketing agency and web design studio, we analyzed our 10 most successful small business clients and accumulated these 8 best practices for small business websites to improve the web development of small business ventures. Having a great website is the first part in strategic brand management. The best part is that you can implement most of these tips very quickly and will still get great results! Now, let’s dive in.

1. Show Brand Personality with Video

When you’re a small and/or a local company, your main strength is your brand personality. To transfer your personality into your website, you can create videos for your customers to see so they can ‘meet’ and become familiarized with you before they hire or buy something from you. From our experience, small businesses with 3 or more videos on their website reported having greater success with their online marketing efforts.

If you don’t want to create instructional videos, you can also create testimonial videos for your company. If you made one of your customers extremely happy, encourage them to film a quick testimonial video that you can show other potential customers.

You don’t need a high-tech, expensive video camera. Most of our clients used their iPhone camera or the equivalent to film their videos and will still get good quality content. It may not look like the next Academy Award-Winning Oscar movie, but it gets the job done just fine.

2. Promote Your Phone Number and Email Everywhere

Make it easy for clients to contact you by placing your company contact information in the form of your phone number, email address, as well as your social links (if applicable) in the header, footer, and sidebar of your website. One of our international tax attorney clients put his phone number at the end of almost everything he writes online, and he shared with us “I get a lot of calls and it often turns into good business”.

3. Use WordPress Sticky Posts Plugin for your Homepage

As the hub of your website, users who visit your company website for the first time often land on your homepage first. Additionally, your loyal customers will often visit your home page as well. The question is, how should you design your homepage? From reviewing our clients’ sites, small businesses that did the best used a homepage design that sells.

For small businesses, you’ll want your homepage to tell people what you’re about and what they can buy from you because that’s your core business. For example, one of our clients started using the WordPress sticky posts plugin to display his work to people before they saw his website design and the number of calls he got went up dramatically. While the traditional website design is great for some businesses (e.g. the blog format for news websites), you’ll want a homepage that quickly shows potential customers what your business is all about.

4. Publish Good Quality Content

While content marketing takes into account the quantity and the frequency that you post, it is more important to control the quality of your content. In fact, some of our most successful small business clients only created around 24 pages or posts a year (2 per month). 

Think about it. Do you care if your accountant uses Twitter or blogs 3 times per day? Probably not. You want them to do your taxes. So, the key takeaway is to publish less often for the sake of content management by creating and posting only good quality content.

5. Create a Easy Navigation System that is Predictable

For your website’s navigation system, you should implement a predictable and easy-to-use design to make navigation easier for the user to improve user experience.

How can you make an easy navigation that is predictable and user-friendly? Follow the steps below:

• Place it where people expect to find it: At the top of the page or in the left sidebar.
• Use the words people are accustomed to seeing: If people want to reach you, they’ll look for “Contact” or “Contact Us”. If you use something quirky and niche like “Holla at me”, you may lose potential customers as this might make your website seem unprofessional and might make the user confused. For more examples on what language is used in website navigation systems, look at your favorite websites to see how they do it!

6. Publicize Other Small Businesses in the Local Community

Have you ever walked into a local business and noticed a table with business cards from other local businesses? Of course. It happens everywhere. Shoppers want to know about other businesses within the local community. This concept is no different online. People who shop locally want to discover other similar stores, so help them do that by sharing links to others in the community. This will also help you become a company with a good reputation in the perspective of the customers, as well as for other businesses in the area! You don’t want to become one of those companies with bad reputations that people don’t want to do business with.

From our client’s feedback, local businesses that shared more links to similar companies received more links from others as well. This helped their company and business activities as it linked them to the pillars of the community, making locals think that you’re a pillar as well, consequently linking you to the circle of the area.

7. Include Several Calls To Action On Your Website

If you’re creating a company website to gather leads or to interact with potential customers, make sure you’re clear on what you want those prospective clients to do. Want your customers to buy your product? Ask them. Want them to contact you? Show them where they can do it.

Overall, having explicit call to action buttons inviting people to call or buy your product and/or service is important. Some people may not even realize it’s an option unless you specifically tell them that it is an option. Make this conversion easy and thoughtless for them by clearly providing these call to action buttons in multiple places of your website.

8. Establish Credibility and Reliability

For all types of businesses, establishing credibility and trust from my customers is vital for successful business. Clients need to trust you before trusting you with their money. In fact, you don’t even need that much content on your website. All you have to do is look credible and show your customers that you have their back.

Some ways you can establish website reliability and credibility include client testimonials, showcasing previous clients you have worked with, having detailed product information, etc. Sometimes a free ebook helps gather leads if it’s about the right topic. For example, if you’re a plumber, an ebook that explains the differences between a good plumber and a bad plumber would be great in positioning yourself as a good and knowledgeable plumber. Show clients that you are an expert in your craft and provide them with a reason for why they should trust in you and your services. Read more on how to achieve credibility in this article by Userlike. 

Make sure to do a website credibility check by ensuring that your website is updated and consistent in content! Website maintenance for small business ventures is highly important.

The Bottom Line

From analyzing our most successful small business clients and their company websites, these 8 best practices were all implemented and helped to drive success. The funny thing to take note of is that the popular phrase “have a blog, post often, and get massive traffic” isn’t true in most cases. Ensure to follow these best practices for the web development and design of your small business to ensure strategic brand management and business success!

Are you a small business looking to make your website? Contact Us at WittyCookie today to get award-winning web design and development services.