How Not to Make These 3 Small Business Website Mistakes

<p>If you have a small business website it should serve one purpose - generating sales.</p><p>Sure, it should inform your visitors of your offers and give them social proof of your abilities through testimonials. Without a doubt, your website should generate and capture leads. And most importantly your business website should move your visitors toward buying your offers.</p><p>Yet, to make sales, your website needs a few, basic elements. These elements are so fundamental that you want to be sure you're not missing them on your website.</p><p>1. Ineffective use of Page Titles</p><p>Page titles are part of the HTML code on your website. Usually you'll see the page title in the top bar of your web browser window.</p><p>While it serves a number of purposes, it has two very primary, and important, functions. First, it is an important piece in keyword optimization for SEO. No effective SEO strategy is complete without including keywords in the page titles. For effective SEO, each of your business website pages should have unique page titles. These page titles should include the keywords that you've optimized for each, specific page.</p><p>Secondly, and perhaps even more important, your page titles are used as the main, linked text in search engine results.</p><p>Effective page titles tell people what they'll find when they click through the search results into your website page. Ideally, your page title will show a benefit the searcher can gain from visiting that page. The best page titles will increase click-through rates from search results, increasing your visitors, your leads and potentially your revenue. Spending any time SEO without optimizing your page titles for conversion is a poor idea.</p><p>2. No Clear Business Objectives</p><p>Your small business website is nothing more than a marketing tool. On its own, there's nothing magical it can do. It's merely a servant to how you want to use it to market and promote your business.</p><p>As a marketing tool, your business website needs to be considered as part of your marketing plan. When you create a marketing plan you identify objectives - the things you want to accomplish through your marketing efforts. Then you set out to do the tasks that will accomplish the objectives.</p><p>Your business website, as a marketing tool, needs to also have clearly identified business objectives. In other words, you want to be absolutely clear what your goals are with your website. Sure, it could be getting more clients. But there's a process involved in getting more clients. And your website is a place to implement that process.</p><p>But to go a step further, it's not just enough to state your business objectives and then go about using your business website to accomplish them. You need to prioritize your business objectives. You need to decide that this one objective is the primary mission of my website. Then do everything you can think of to get your primary objective in front of your website visitors, blog post readers and anyone else who will see your website.</p><p>After you identify your primary business objective then decide on the second and third most important things you want people to accomplish on your website. Make each of those visible at the most opportune time in your business website. Just make sure they don't trump the primary objective.</p><p>3. Few or No Enticing Action Steps for Visitors to Take</p><p>Often, the websites I see have few, if any, direct action steps. Action steps, I define, as what you want your visitors to do when they arrive a to a certain point on your website page. Every page of your website needs to have clear, easy-to-do action steps - even your bio page. Actually, especially your bio page.</p><p>To have easy-to-do action steps it helps to have clear business objectives. If you know the objectievs of your website, the action steps you want your visitors to take simply become an extension of your primary, secondary and tertiary objectives.</p><p>The key here is that the action steps are easy for your visitors to complete. Remember, this is the point of conversion. The action you're asking your visitor to take will directly engage them in your business. So this isn't the time to get cute with language or too wordy. It's not the time to explain a bunch of things about what you can do for them. Simple, easy-to-understand, to-the-point content is what you want here.</p><p>The best action steps are the ones that combine your business objectives with the wants of your visitor at the moment. When their wants meet your objectives, you've got a conversion - a list signup, a consult inquiry, a seminar registration, a product sale, etc. Ultimately, your website's copy should almost always be about moving people toward an easy-to-do action step.</p><p>Make sure your website has these three elements and you'll be avoiding some of the most common mistakes I see on small business websites.</p><p>Dawud Miracle is a business coach, marketing advisor and web design who specializes in helping service-based business owners find more clients through the web. By focusing first on his client's business goals, he's able to show them how they can use their web presence to effectively market and promote their businesses. He works with coaches, consultants, alternative health practitioners, virtual assistants and many other service professionals.</p>