Improving your local business website

As a local business owner, you might be tempted to rely on word-of-mouth in your area (online and offline) and skip a website altogether. After all, it costs to build and maintain. Not to mention, driving traffic takes effort and winning conversions is always a gamble. But if you want your local business to thrive, you need a thriving site, too.

Design it with best practices

Give your website the best possible base. If you can afford to, opt for a professional build over a DIY. A pro website designer can make all the difference long-term. This is especially important for attracting business post-COVID, since everything is migrating to the digital market now.

You might also set up your own and hire a pro to upgrade it later. Either way, stick to web design best practices to get the most out of your platform. These include user-friendliness, effective white space application, and streamlined interface.

User-friendliness means that visitors have an easy time finding what they want on your site. Make it visually attractive, make it simple to navigate between pages, keep important information easy to reach, and keep the text easy to read and understand. This is called “intuitive design”. Visitors should instinctively understand where to click to get what they need, and they should find what they expect to find in each website section.

White spaces are basically the “empty space” between website elements. Their purpose is to fight clutter. Use them to break up walls of text or clusters of visuals. It’s essential for content on your pages to flow naturally. Cluttered sites make visitors’ eyes tired, disrupt their focus, and make them navigate away and never come back.

A streamlined interface relates to white spaces. It basically means a clutter-free website. Get rid of intrusive ads that cover content, popup messages, and irrelevant, unrelated visuals. Keep things organised, clean, and straightforward. It makes for a more comfortable user experience, and gives you an air of effectiveness and trustworthiness.

Prioritise local SEO

Proper SEO takes time and effort to implement correctly, and the payoff isn’t always immediately obvious. That’s why many smaller businesses skip it or do a shoddy job of it. They think it isn’t essential on a local scale. That’s entirely wrong.

If you want your business to thrive, you have to rank in searches. You want good responsiveness scores, and you want lots of other pages to lead back to your site. Consider looking up reliable link building services to help you achieve that. Include area-specific keywords in your content, and consider partnering with other local entities to have them host some of your links on their own websites.

As far as responsiveness goes, optimise your site for mobile browsers. Mobile-first indexing is a giant factor in ranking your pages since 2016. Moreover, since 2020, site speed is an essential metric in website rankings.

Clarify your call to action

Every website encourages its visitors to perform a certain action: buy something, share something, donate to a cause etc. The trick is making the call as clear as possible, without being pushy or obnoxious.

Take advantage of the site layout and design to guide your customers’ attention to the action button or link. One effective solution is giving it a colour that contrasts the overall palette, so that it will stand out. Try to phrase it in a unique way to reduce the chance of it being ignored, misunderstood, or overlooked.

Have a quality content strategy

Even the best-designed website is useless without content, so pay special attention to it. Take the time to devise the optimal content strategy that will let your business reach your target audience in the best way. While you’re doing that, take care to adapt your strategy to the post-pandemic business marketing landscape.

The content on your website should be of varying types to keep your visitors’ interest. It should make it clear what you do, what value you bring, and you’re the best choice for the job. In other words, you want to promote your business, educate your visitors about your activities, and build a community around your brand.

While sharing somebody else’s things is okay in moderation, you want most of your content to be original. Uniqueness drives growth. Some content formats that you might want to consider include blog posts, case studies, whitepapers, buying guides and product guides, and infographics.

Wrapping up

A standout business site is your most important marketing tool. It gives you precious credibility, attracts new clients, and lets you stand out from local competition and take the top spot in your area. It also enables you to reach customers around the world who don’t mind supporting an area-specific business.