Top 10 Mistakes Small Businesses Make with Website Design

1 Not having a mobile friendly website:: Google recently announced that mobile devices now account for over 50% of all searches. On top of this, Google has changed its algorithms to favor mobile-friendly websites in its search rankings. Not having a mobile-friendly website could cost you potential customers who have trouble finding you while searching for your service. Becoming mobile friendly is something that must be done if you expect to keep up with your competition in the online.
2 Choosing looks over functionality:: Having a visually appealing website is a good idea, but it must not take away from the main goal of the site – to convert that visitor into a lead. We often see websites that are great visually, but extremely confusing to navigate. Make sure your website is built to convert traffic into paying customers.
3 Opting for a template over a custom website designed to convert:: A big mistake we see with a lot of small businesses is that they view their website as an expense instead of an investment. They choose to proceed with template that saves money instead of getting a custom website that matches their brand and is designed to accomplish their goals. A template website will always be less effective than a custom, tailored product that is built by a company that takes your goals, target demographic, and industry into account. This means that over an extended period, a template website will cost your business many valuable customers.
4 Having a website that isn’t optimized for Search Engine Rankings:: Google and the other major search engines compose their own list of best practices that they expect a quality website to follow. Unfortunately, if the company that built your website doesn’t also specialize in search engine optimization (SEO), they probably didn’t follow these guidelines. The result: a great looking website that never ranks well in Google.
5 Having multiple websites for one business:: A lot of businesses think they can trick Google and get multiple rankings by having more than one website. This practice goes against Google guidelines and the business ends up getting penalized by being not ranked at all. Instead of trying toamplify the results, focus on making one really good website that follows Google’s procedures.
6 Having duplicate or poor website content:: A lot of small business owners don’t have the time to write multiple pages of unique content explaining their business, services, products and pitching their site visitors. Instead they create a website with only a few sentences about their business or even worse they “borrow” from competitors.Both of these tactics result in disaster — Google and your customers are looking for websites that clearly explain (in detail) what your business does and what services you offer.
7 Not making contact information the biggest focus on the website:: The most frustrating thing for a potential customer is to be interested in your business, but not able to quickly find your address or phone number. This is the most common mistake that we see on most websites. Fortunately, it is also the easiest to fix. When local customers are searching for your product or service they want to be able to easily contact you.Not having your business name, address, and phone number easily visible on your website will hurt your search rankings and guarantee you lose potential customers.
8 Using too much industry lingo:: Sometimes it’s easy to forget customers don’t know as much about your industry and business as you do. This can make it easy to use terminology that goes over their head or to explain your business in too much detail. Make sure to use layman’s terms when describing your business and offerings.
9 Having no clear call to action (CTA):: Many businesses make the mistake of publishing information that will overwhelm or confuse the consumer, which in turn has no clear Call-To-Action. It’s fantastic that you have brought traffic to your website– but without a convincing CTA that is all for naught. If you want to increase the conversion rate of your traffic you must have a persuasive CTA that is a major focus of your site!
10 Believing that a website is an expense and not an investment:: This was mentioned earlier, but it begs to be brought up again.The internet isn’t going anywhere. More and more people are going online every day before considering using a product or service.If you don’t blow away your potential customers online, then your competitors will (ultimately winning the business.)With a custom conversion based website paired a great marketing strategy, you will begin to see your website as a revenue stream — not just a monthly bill.

Top 10 Mistakes Small Businesses Make with Website Design

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