Your website is a tool. In fact, think of your website as a your most underutilized employee that can take care of your customers when you’re not available.
Make things easy for customers
Here are some easy things you can add to your website to help customers:
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): Answer common customer questions here. If you don’t answer their questions on your site they might go to a competitor that does.
- Product & Service Details: Tell customers about your products and services.
- Portfolio/Work Examples: Show off your work.
- Quote Request Form: Let customers easily request quotes through your website.
- Testimonials: Let your best customers brag about you to tell prospective customers why they should work with you.
- Contact Information: Tell prospective customers how to reach you and where to find you.
- Company Information: Tell customers about your company, your history, and why you’re the best choice for them.
Adding these to your website will help your customers buy your products and use your services. What do you do when you’re on a website and can’t find what you’re looking for or get frustrated? You leave! Your customers are no different.
Read more about how your small business website can help with customer support.
Help customers find you
We know how important search engine rankings are, but few businesses are taking advantage of local SEO and video SEO. Local SEO is particularly important for businesses with a physical storefront that serve mostly local customers.
Local SEO entails using local schema markup to tell search engines where you are and help local customers find you. When done right, you’ll also get special search results that show your location and contact information to make it even easier for customers to contact you.
Here’s an example of local SEO at work in Google search results:
There are multiple ways to take advantage of local SEO on your website. How you do it all depends on how your website is built. For example, all of our customers’ websites have local SEO done automatically for them so they don’t have to worry about it.
Along with local SEO there’s also video SEO. Taking advantage of video SEO will make it easier for search engines to find and index your videos, thus making it easier for customers to find you. It will also add a thumbnail (small picture) of your video next to the search result for those pages. This increases clicks and drive more traffic because you’ll stand out from the rest.
Here’s an example of video SEO at work in Google search results:
Just like for local SEO, there are multiple ways to add video SEO to your website. How you do it depends on how your website is built. For example, we do video SEO automatically on our customers’ websites so they don’t have to worry about it. To learn more about what we do, check out our features page.
Any device, anytime, anywhere
These days more and more people are using mobile devices to search and shop online. In fact, around ¼ of all traffic comes from mobile devices and it’s growing every day.
Unfortunately most small business websites aren’t optimized for mobile devices. Whether it’s slow loading pages or a bad user experience, if customers aren’t happy they’ll leave. There are different ways to make your website mobile friendly, but they can be expensive. How to optimize your website for mobile devices is beyond the scope of this course, but just know that it’s critical.
If you’d like to see examples of mobile friendly websites, check out any of our website designs on a phone or tablet. All of the websites we build for our customers include a built-in mobile website for free.
Make it easy to buy from you
You’ll notice a trend here. We’re trying to make it easy for customers to buy from us. Whether it’s making it easier for them to find us in the search results or use our website on a phone, we’re making it as easy as possible. Simplicity is the name of the game.
To go even further, make sure your website is easy to navigate: everything should make sense. Don’t get too cute with naming things, just stick to the basics. If you want people to call you make your phone number obvious. If you want them to get a quote make it obvious. Help customers buy from you.
Just like water, prospective customers follow the path of least resistance. If they hit a roadblock they’ll just flow around it…and to one of your competitors.